Talabot

 

Amongst the "hidden people" of the dead, Che Guevara is a Captain with feathers in his hat and resembling Cyrano de Bergerac. Light bones tinkle with a silver laughter. A baby is suckled with sand. A mound of refuse. And the true story, with a happy ending, of a living forty year-old Danish anthropologist with many children. After the performance, on the way out, a postcard is handed to each of the spectators in a sealed envelope. It shows an image from the performance: the Trickster, a strange elf with wings and a feline face, dancing around the mound of refuse from the performance which is piled up around a tree whose branches are tangled up in burnt barbed wire. On the other side of the postcard there is a quotation by Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History:

"His face is turned towards the past. There where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which piles up wreckage upon wreckage throwing it at his feet. He would prefer to remain, awaken the dead and put back together what has been laid waste. But from paradise a storm blows, so violent that his wings become entangled and the Angel can no longer fold them together. The storm pushes him irresistibly towards the future on which he turns his back, while in front of him the mountain of wreckage rises towards the sky. This storm is what we call progress."

Created in Chicxulub (Yucatan, Mexico) and then in Holstebro in the "blue room", the smallest of Odin Teatret's working spaces. The performance retains the restricted dimensions of the small room in Yucatan where rehearsals started. All the scenes derive from mise-en-scène proposals by the actors and the theatre's collaborators.

 

Actors

César Brie (later replaced by Falk Heinrich), Jan Ferslev, Richard Fowler, Naira Gonzalez (later replaced by Isabel Ubeda), Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Julia Varley, Torgeir Wethal

 

Scenic space: Odin Teatret

Costumes: Lena Bjerregaard / Odin Teatret

Text and directing: Eugenio Barba (text partly based on autobiographical material specially written by Kirsten Hastrup). Barba finalizes the dramaturgy of the historical and biographical episodes chosen by the actors and the theatre's collaborators.

Assistant director: César Brie

Advisor: Ferdinando Taviani

Language: Some of the text is spoken by the actors in their own language and some in the language spoken in the country where the performance takes place.

Number of spectators per performance: 104.

279 performances from August 1988 to October 1991