Qualla: Odin Teatret

Odin Teatret: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every one of them had been turned down. In the autumn of 1964, a group of young people who had failed the entrance examination for the State Theatre School in Oslo were gathered together by an Italian in his late twenties who could not get directing work in Norway either, and they started rehearsing in an air-raid shelter. The Italian was Eugenio Barba. The company he formed with them, on 1 October 1964, was called Odin Teatret. Six decades on it is among the most closely studied theatre companies in the world, and it works out of a converted farm in a Danish town of 37,000 people.

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Odin Teatret: Warsaw, Opole, Kerala

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Barba was born on 29 October 1936 in Brindisi and grew up in Gallipoli, in the far south of Italy. He left the Nunziatella military academy in Naples in 1954 and emigrated to Norway, where he worked as a welder and a sailor while taking degrees in French, Norwegian literature and...

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Odin Teatret: An Old Farm and a Small Sum

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1966 the Danish municipality of Holstebro invited Odin Teatret to create a theatre laboratory in the town, offering an old farm and a modest amount of money. Holstebro was in the middle of a deliberate campaign to make itself culturally significant, and this was one of its bet...

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Odin Teatret: The Word for What They Do

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Theatre anthropology is Barba's term, and it names the company's real subject: the comparative study of what performers do with balance, tension and energy before any question of style, character or meaning arises. What an Odin actor, a Kathakali dancer and a Balinese performer h...

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Odin Teatret: Printed in Holstebro

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The publishing arm began in the 1960s with the magazine T.T.T. — Teatrets Teori og Teknikk — and with a book that mattered rather more: Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre, which Odin published and which has since been translated into more than fifteen languages. One of the ...

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Odin Teatret: The Family Grave

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Founding member Torgeir Wethal died in June 2010 and became the first Odin member to be buried in what the company calls its family grave in Holstebro — an actual plot, for a company that has always described itself in kinship terms rather than employment ones. Others stayed for ...

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