 Welcome everybody to the Martini Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY, my name is Frank Henschkodam, the director here of the program. And today we have the great honor and pleasure to have with us masters, grandmasters of the theater. We have the great Oginio Barba here with us together with Julia Valle to great workers icons or Titans in the world of theater. So welcome, both of you here to Zoom at the Martin's Theatre Theatre Center. It's a beautiful day in New York. It's sunshine and the trees and flowers are out and luckily it's not hot right away. Where are you guys right now? In the same context, in summertime in Denmark with a lot of green flowers and sun also. Fantastic. So you are in Denmark at your own theater. Yes, we just come back from two weeks long sessions of the ISTA, the International School of Theater Anthropology which was organized within the theater Olympics in Hungary. And there Julia and I directed also a performance called Anastasis Resurrection with all the teachers and the artists of the International School of Theater Anthropology from Japan, Bali, India, Latin America and 60 actors, participants. So it was a huge, huge collective performance very, very different from the small ones in the intimate one, which we used to do with all the teachers. Amazing. Was it inside or outside? No, it was in the National Theater. Our inside theater is like the Red Square in Moscow and normal. I must say they're enjoying to see this amplitude that the stage was giving. There is something which is fascinating with the Italian style theater, you know, the proscenium theater. I find when they are well built a heavy history, they really emanate a strong energy and associative powers. So it was a really pleasure to work there and the staff was very, very competent and friendly. Fantastic. This is great. So, and Julia, you went with it? You co-directed or? No, I was assistant director, but I was also on stage. So I was on stage with Mr. Kinat, that is this collector with the skull head. And I was changing from red to black to white. So I was quite busy also backstage. Amazing. The stage in Budapest also gives possibilities of stage pieces going down and coming up. And so we really had a lot of fun in this stage with all these possibilities. Only that we had just two days to put on stage what we had done in another town in a smaller town with the closed Easter session. And we had two days to adapt it over to this big theater stage in Budapest. Amazing. Julia joined the Odin Theater in 76. She's an actor, a director, she has teaching, of course, and writing, so this is just fantastic and a bit connected to the world of universities and philosophy, which of course we at the Segal alike. Julia Ingenio is the artistic director, as everybody knows, of the significant, influential Odin theater. Teatrat, if I say it right, which is based in Denmark. We did a Segal talk during the time of Corona, which was a stunning, I think, conversation listening to him. He has directed over 70 or 80 pieces in the world. And he founded ISTA, the International School of Theater Anthropology. And he worked closely with Kortalski, he worked closely. Also with Richard Schachner and so many, many others. And the idea of exchanging cultural ideas, expressions, identities in a global way is what has always been at the center of his work next to the fact, which I think is so, if I may say so right, amazing. He and his friend got rejected from the big state school. So they stuck together. So we do our own theater company a long time ago, went to a small place in Denmark, instead of going to the golden cathedrals of the Rome in the speaking, in the terms of the churches. And they built a small, beautiful chapel in the landscapes of Denmark and created a work that has had a global significance and impact, a great archive. And he's also an author of many of the 2030 publications. So it's a really great honor to be here in his presence and to have you with us. So what we talk about today is the ongoing activities and what I like about the work that, of course, it's focused on the body, on theater, on training, on performances, on space, but also it always had a larger context. And there's something that exists now. It's called the Fundazione Barba Valley, the most of your last names. So I didn't know about it, to be honest. So tell me a bit, what is this foundation about? There is one question one should ask oneself when one has been working in theater for more than 50 years as Julie and I have been doing now. How can you use this small prestige you have achieved? You can use it for yourself to continue your activity and show that your creative vitality is not decreasing amazingly, but it's very loaded possibility. If theater is not only entertainment, but tries to go beyond the entertainment, level, so can we say that our profession, our craft can go beyond the performance and in which way could it continue in time? How all this knowledge, all this experience can be not only passed on, but also be made accessible because much of the difficulty I had when I was young and was trying to learn was to find places, books, people who were willing to open and share with me on this. And this is the reason why, well, I can continue, we can continue with all the entertainment, we continue with our activities, but what if we could create something which is independent of us so that even when we disappear, it can continue what we have personal motivations. And I think that what makes the collaboration with Julia so fertile and interesting for me is that we both are very political on our view on our profession and by politics, I mean a nostalgia, a longing for change. I don't think of left or right, I don't think of Marxism or fascism. I think a longing for changing something here in this plant we are living. Therefore, for us theater was always a politics with other means, which means not the criteria, not the norms, not the discourse of the parties or the ideological politics, but a completely different means instruments which have to do with the sense of reality with the senses, with the memory and the experience which are rooted in our biography, which is our body. So through the body goes the message or the communication and therefore theater will be fine. But once the body is no longer there, when all our experiences become papers, documents, films, photographs, posters, then these, all these experience be transformed and injected in the present as what? As a living archive and this is one of the reasons why we decided at the end of our life. I mean, I am rather old, but it's possible to create an archive which is not only the refuge for those who want to know exactly for the searchers, for scholars, but an archive which is also leading transmission where there is possible to have activities to take all this documentation and transpose it into something which can be films, new films, which you can, you can download, technology helps and purposely to be open access and publish materials in a magazine that was the first thing we did was this magazine on theater anthropology, which is part of the rich documentation we have of this technical, competitive sciences we had in the Eastern International School of the Anthropology. So this was the reason why we started, but not only. This was my personal motivation, but Julia is completely different motivation because she's a woman and she will be speaking about this or being a woman in our profession. Julia. Yes, well, before I go over to saying what my motivation was for the fundazione, while Virginia was talking, I was thinking of once we were in Buenos Aires in Argentina and we had presented performances and had done like a public program, but then we traveled in a small minibus of a small theater group from the north of Uruguay who came to get us. And that was all because they had written to us wanting contact and said, how can they come in contact? And we had answered saying, well, we can come and visit you. And it's as if our activity has often been on two levels that one time at one place we are like in the public eye and we are recognized and known and also paid money to present performances, they give classes. But then a lot of our activity is with theater groups, with those that we also call the Nameless in the Fundazione de la Valencia. People which are not known, but that do theater in their own communities, in their own countries, villages and who have this necessity to learn. So often we are trying to find possibilities where we can meet with them, talk with them, be present and visit them in their own places. It has happened also that we've gone to a very small village in the south of Chile where we work with the theater group where there were five actors and all the people from theater that were in Santiago and the capital couldn't believe that Eugenia Barba and Julia Valle were in Chile. And so we pretended to be the cousins of the brothers. But it has always been fundamental for us to be in contact with these realities. And when we give lectures also it is so touching to see how people will react when we tell about our difficulties about the problems and how we started with rejected from theater schools how we made our own culture as a theater group. Now, my motivation for the Fundación I started because I have a lot of activity with women in theater. And I participated in the beginning of the Magdalena project, which is a network which started in 1986. And so has been working all over the world. And I did a festival in Denmark called Intertet called Transit, which I continue with. And at a certain point I was wondering what would happen with the money I have when I am no longer on this planet. And I wanted very much to be able to contribute to the work of women in theater. And for a long time we tried to make a trust that was called in the UK. In Denmark it was very difficult. But in Italy, they had just made a new law where one didn't need a big capital to make a foundation, a fundazione. And so Genio came to me and said, well, I will give you my name, which is, one can use it for something. So that was the beginning. How to leave some economical support also for women in theater. Then the fundazione grew during the pandemic also because we wanted very much to do a session of Easter, the International School of Theater Anthropology. And it was a risky economical situation because one didn't know if one could have participants and also the teachers traveling from countries where you still needed permissions and quarantine and vaccination. But we really wanted to do this Easter session. We did it in the south of Italy in Favignana because we felt that for people working in theater to give them back a bit of the energy and the hope and the desire to work and to continue when needed to have a meeting where the bodies could finally communicate. And so the fundazione took on itself this economical risk to organize the Easter session. And also the Journal of Theater Anthropology was one of the initiatives that we did during the COVID time because we wanted to use a lot of the material that is in our archives and transform it and give it like a new life with the Journal. So it was interesting also to go back to all the film material that we have from the first Easter sessions in 1980, in Bonn in Germany. And the film material, you can see it's done with very primitive technique, but it is so incredible to see the images of Sanchukta Parigai, this great Indian Odissi dancer of Katsukawa Tsuma of Boyokabuki in Japan and see them talking about their first day of work, explaining the very basics of their technique in these films. And from that, we also have made 10 films about theater anthropology, which are available online for free. And this is also something that we try to do to put our knowledge available for all those people that are hungry to grow and develop and get in contact with the rest of the world. Incredible, yeah, fantastic. It's almost like we mentioned Joseph Boyce's idea of the free international university where he felt that next to the established academia, there needs to be centers of knowledge, transfers of knowledge, a performing of knowledge to transfer experience and this ultimately I think is also what this makes us the different from the animals, that we can learn from experiences and tiger more or less will always be a tiger but humans over decades or generations, they change fundamentally and it is the transfer of experience. Let me ask the fondazione, is there the physical presence, the physical manifestation of is there an office in Italy or I see names of libraries, you know, the Bibliomuseale in Puglia and there is the Bernadini Library in Lecce. So where can people go and see it? The fondazione has an operative place in Rome. In Rome, there's an office with windows and a computer and someone sits there. We don't have, we have three or four people only and we are not living in Rome, but we gather in Rome when we can. We work very much through technological communication of course, the main person who is taking care in Italy is Claudio La Camera, he's a lawyer who has been working for the United Nations against programs with theater for re-socializing young people and criminals. So he is also a theater director. So he is taken care of all the administrative bureaucratic aspects. One of the projects we have, we have many projects, one of the projects is called Sharing Knowledge. It is mostly, I suppose, Julius in my experience of being in Latin America in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, when still there was a difficulty in getting information, books, films about theater and also very expensive. And therefore, we thought, how can we make accessible all this richness of material which we have accumulated in our archive? And from here, this project of Sharing Knowledge, which in the beginning was with a way of transmitting and injecting the present. So it was done through the Journal of Theater Anthropology. Then we made these films, we put them on YouTube, they can be downloaded. But then I decided to give my library and all my artistic legacy, which could not longer be remained here in Denmark, in Oscebro, because they were not interested anymore in the new director of the Nordic Theater Laboratory. So I donated all this to the region where I was born and they accepted on the condition of building what I called Living Archive Plotting Islands. This is dedicated to theater group. I think that in the 70s, it started in the 60s, but in the 70s came a generation which created a completely new way of imagining thinking and practicing theater and were the theater groups. A theater group has nothing in common in reality with institutionalized theater, as we know it. Traditional, artistic, high quality or experimental. Theater groups gathered because people want to on one side to change society or on the other side to change themselves. And therefore, Bertolt Brecht or Dario IV were so fundamental at the time or Artó Engrotowski became the other reference point. But this was, I would say, a unique generation which decides the thought all over the planet. The theater was the vehicle to transformation. It was a transformative tool and not a representative tool. So I started imagining that this Living Archive should be dedicated to what I call the third theater, which is not the institutionalized art theater or the experimental, but all these groups, these almost mushrooms, which exist for very short time and then disappears, but which represent today all over the world the majority of performances, which are taking places and in places which are anonymous. Therefore, all these anonymous heroism of people doing theater in conditions that we never, Martin Benjamin said that the historians should take care of the memory of the nameless, the nameless, the those who have no name. And this is what the foundation is trying to do. We are directed or actively to the nameless, the nameless, the companies, the groups, the activities which are in a way discriminated not because society wants to discriminate it, but simply because they are not taken into consideration in what is the context, the material, economical, sociological context in which our profession takes place all over the world. So the regional employer in this place, the lecture in this Bernardini's library is given several huge rooms and there will be a part dedicated to the sort of center of all our archive of the audience theater that my personal archive will be there, a copy of it. And then there is also a part dedicated to the audience theater. And then the biggest part is dedicated to the group theater, which I consider a particular form of theater which cannot be compared and is very original, starting from the fact that they're coming together is built on a common sharing of a deducted apprenticeship. They are, most of them are auto deducted, for instance. They've been learning themselves. And second, the way of organizing all their inner group dynamic, not according to a repository or something, but according to the fact that all the members have to be part of the performance adapting the totality of the small microcosmos we think of micro society, they represent in expressing themselves, all of them into a performance. So there are certain characteristics concerning the professional identity, which are so different from the theater. And this I found extraordinary in our time, this diversity which our profession has acquired. Today, theater does not exist anymore. To speak about theater, it's a sort of abstraction. It sees the theaters with different purposes, with different techniques and different audiences and spectators. And therefore, the less privileged part of these different cultures, which is the one of the group theater, of the projects, of the people, young people coming together and sharing for a certain period an experience, the sort of socialization in a society where socialization becomes more and more difficult in reality. So I think it's very important to have a place which is a sort of a memorial where people can not only can go and learn about it, but the idea is to transform all these in a sort of artistic installations. The living archive is not only transmission, not only memory with documents, but also transformation and artistic transformation which a designer, Italian designer Luca Ruzza and I and Julia, we are working. So you will be coming rooms where you will see a strange universe of red, small plants almost. And when you approach them, then a name comes out. What we want is that the thousands and thousands of these pieces should be represented. And then all the technology which we possess they can indicate addresses. People can direct contact them. They can see the films on the walls, up, down. So it's impossible to dream of something like this for those who are searching, for those who are searching. For young people who want to do an experience which is not the usual one. When you ask for a physical address, what I think of is that we, what we want to do is to build an environment. And the environment are people and how we can get people to meet. And another way we have done apart from the office in Rome, apart from our computers which received emails and a bibliotheca in Lecce, we have created a tenorant centers which means that our theater groups or libraries in Colombia, in Italy, in Greece, in Spain, in Cuba and they are all working in connection with us and so can make initiatives. And one of the things which we are planning for the next year is also a meeting of these itinerant centers so that we will come together. And one of the big projects we have is to make a kind of woodstock of third theater. So of inviting all the groups that we know to one place and make an enormous festival in which we can also exchange the process of work because what we have noticed with the theater groups is that just as important as the result, the performances that are shown is the process and how the different groups work and how one can exchange this knowledge. Fantastic idea. So in one way there is in a library, there will be installation in some kind of artistic environment almost like in Pabellon at the Biennale where the work of that third theaters of the nameless of the unknown but who in some way are the heroes of theater because it's not about entertainment but about transformation of the world instead. I don't know if it's possible. This is the first sketch of the installation about the groups of the other groups. Yeah, it's a fantastic idea. And also the title of the talk which theaters politics by other means, of course, refers to Klausiewicz, the military strategist, the Prussian one who said war. Politics by other means, but to say that, you know, what is stronger is the beauty, the hope that, you know, beauty art and knowledge, you know, is actually as if not more powerful ultimately because it's close to the truth and it's close to nature and who we are. And we had just had biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber from Germany with us who reminded us, you know, that nature and art are so connected. It's so chaotic, it's wild, there's no copyright. There are 20,000 orcas, even so the species of the orcas is highly defined but they come in all shapes and sizes. We do not know about it but the idea of producing art, producing theater is what life is and that we are nature. Once you produce theater, you act, you direct, you are nature, it's actually not separate and you are create what is life and that makes planet Earth different from the observable universe of millions of light years where we cannot find any life and the highest expression and to feel alive in that short time we are on letters. Theater is the great way and Oginio and Julia are finding an archive of, you know, these great human beings, the heroes, as you said, who creates theater and connect to life for the community and for others. The idea of apprenticeship, you mentioned it, there's of course a big discussion also in the US, does academia work, do the big institutions work and in the old days, theater was apprenticeship or you were born into a family. What do you think about Oginio about institutions and about initiatives like yours? Grotowski used to say that theater is a relationship between two individuals, actors and one actor and one spectator. It's a very beautiful definition but it's not in to do with reality because the theater is a sort of trinity. It's the actor, the spectator and then the market. And by market I don't, I think the material conditions in which this meeting can happen. I mean, now you can say that we are, you are actors and somebody's looking at us but we have a space and we have a space and a sort of information how to find us. So no theater can happen without the market deciding and the way you become independent from the laws and the criterias of the market makes you political, efficient, concretely, it exists. It exists a theatrical system which everybody, most of the people consider as the theater. When you think of a theater, you think of a building and this building has certain features, certain characteristics. Then you go there and you buy ticket and then you expect to have an evening of entertaining intellectual or simply the version. So this is what in reality is being the origin of our profession in Europe and all over the world. In the 20th century comes a generation of performers from Stanislaski, Meijer, Kornalpia, Craig, Koppel, Brescht and so on. They start thinking theater as art and giving to this art in order, another value and purpose. It could be political, it could be analytical, it could be therapeutic, it could be a sort of creation or approaching the masses to beauty. It was a reality what Stanislaski was dreaming of because as you were mentioning before, beauty is the truth. And exactly as Dostoevsky, all these ideology or this vision of how to enlighten the people to the beauty, it characterize the efforts which Stanislaski was doing with his art theater. But I would say in all these, you have to prepare, you have to prepare and theater schools prepare back to which sort of theater are they preparing. The great difference between an institution which accepts actors on the basis of their talent and then they give you a contract and as long as they are useful to each other, they remain and work is very different from all the culture which is based on projects or theater groups who want to remain a permanent entity because they come together because of a certain affinity because they want to do certain things which in spite of the different personalities, the diversity, the conflicts, it can be ideological vision or it can be an aesthetic vision or it can be a discriminative vision. Very often today we know that theater is the possibility for indigenous people to gather together in order to resist a certain effort to make them similar to the rest of the society. So I find that on one side, the market decides how theater schools have to be, but it is fundamental to have a sort of subversive or dissident theater culture because this dissident theater culture is the one which permits a social people to socialize and create a sort of good situations which are politically in the sense that they change the context in where this happened. So there is no one solution. Multiplicity is what characterizes, diversity is what characterize alien culture. No culture is homogeneous. It's made of hundreds and hundreds of shades of subcultures and the same should be the culture of theater. Therefore, the 60s and the 70s was extraordinary age because we saw nearly that this was possible. And here I would like to add one of the motivations which I had to work with the Magdalena Project, this network of women in theater was exactly listening to Eugenia making lectures and talking about the history of theater. And he would come with a long list of men just like he's just done. Stanislavsky, Michael Grotowski, Kopo, Arthur, Antoine. And I always asked myself, why are the women not present there? And I got the answer one day when Central Tapanigai died and I wanted her very much to continue to touch and be in contact with people that people should know about her beauty. And I wrote an article and this article, I sent to an international theater magazine and the director wrote back to me saying, ah, it is very well written, it is very warm, ah, but I can't print it, I can't publish it because it is too personal. And there I suddenly understood why the women are not present because obviously we choose to write or to document, to tell about our work with very personal language. And there, for instance, with the Journal of the Open Page, which is connected to the Magdalena Project, one of my aims has been exactly how to allow women to find a new language, which is not the academic language. And so there this subversive of which Eugenia was talking, for me is fundamental in getting women to write about their work and to be present in history, not because they adapt to the language which is used in the academia, but because they find a language which is then afterwards accepted. And that is what I found with my own writing. In the beginning it was very, it was refused from the academia. And now slowly they are asking me to write, but I have fought a lot to find my own autonomous, independent way of passing on knowledge and so not adapting. And I wanted also to tell about the title of one of the transit festivals I made was beauty as a weapon. And of course, with beauty, we are thinking of poetry or thinking of nature. We are thinking of fantastic costumes in theater, but also for me what was interesting was to recapture a word like beauty, because when you put beauty together with women, the immediate thought is to go to fashion models or to make up and how beauty can be thought of with wrinkles, with experience, with old women, with very old faces, and that the experience which is showing through the face through the work is the beauty and not just the word. So also this of recapturing words and finding a language which is adapted to our own experience. And the other thing, because often when one thinks of Eugenio's books and all he has written, when things that the books come before the experience, no, the books come after the experience and it is fundamental to understand that when we try to explain, we are trying to explain something which we have done. And so it is important not to turn upside down or the head over heels our experience. First comes the experience and then we can try and talk about it, write about it and teach it. Yeah, quite a big statement. If you really, really think about it, if you really take it serious and in its true, I agree. Its life, first of all, is experience. It's not meaning, not so much about meaning as Yang reminded us, but also we have to experience first and then perhaps also in the way come to theories and collections like the book by Eugenio, put together Eugenio might be an unfair question, but when you were young and you were a welder, I think, and you worked in the shipyards and you didn't know where your life was going, but you had that inside voice to do theater, to perhaps create something. And what is the experience at that time which someone would have told you? What is the essence in a way of, if you may say to many young artists, I'm sure this is an academic, what would you have liked to know at that time when you, I don't know where you were in some bar and then small place where you were sleeping to get back to work in the shipyard the next day, what would have made a difference to you? What made the difference was an experience which was very radical because I lost my language. I was an Italian, we had been in the 50s studying humanistic, Latin and Greek, eight years in Latin, five years Greek, I could translate Sophocles and Platon, but I could not speak one foreign language. So when I went to Norway, I stopped working. Nobody understood me. I couldn't understand, I was considered a stupid person because I couldn't express myself. And I also myself felt very, very stupid. And the easy experience made me extremely aware of the behavior of the people, the way they were speaking to me, the intonation of the voice or the body. It was an introverted or extroverted way. How was the sound, the musicality of their speech connected to the way their face was saying it or their eyes. So all these was made huge lesson which made me become very grateful every time I met human compassion. It was the 50s and the Italian at the time in Europe were considered still fascist people, people of color, the people who had the most, the Second World War, they had been collaborating with Hitler, they had been fighting with Franco in Spain. So there was a lot of racism in Norway. As an Italian, I was considered a spaghetti. I was called spaghetti when I was a sailor for two years or a Belgian boat. It wasn't, racism was horrible. But at the same time, what I kept in mind was not the wounds I received, but the generosity of people. And this is this generosity which for me is the meaning of, or let's say the substance of my energy in spite of age, because I have a feeling that I have to give back what I received of these generous people. I have this love me chance, who adopted me a family, very poor family of communists. They adopted me because they want to be solidarity, show solidarity towards this poor emigrant. All this has remained in me as well as the owner of the workshop. I was working, the patients and I would say, they were right, just fair way of treating me in spite that I didn't know anything. It let me really grow on my skill as well, without practicing, without. So all this is what has become the substance of my judgment or my standpoint towards life, towards the profession. I mean, all the entirety is the attempt to recreate my workshop in Oslo, where when I went there already, the owner was waiting for us, he was sharing, explaining to us what to do. And then all the time following us, anytime we get the problem, we went to him and we respected him not because he was the owner, but because he helped us and he knew more than us and he worked more than us. They're different. And from this person and similar examples, which have nothing to do with theater, I am absorbed by way of, I would say, sort of ethos. Ethos in the sense of behavior, not only of moral, moral obligations, I feel towards other people, or towards society, or towards nature, or towards, but also a behavior, the way you behave towards the others. So all these is something which you cannot transform into a method and put on a book and say, so should it be. No, I think that the experience that Julia is speaking about is fundamental and therefore I was always, I always touched human point of view when I went in the most abundant places in this planet and then I find this more theater group was from just amateur doing theater and seeing this sort of warmth coming out, sort of light, just a spark. Of course, my esthetical and theoretical experiences, most of them are from traditional theater. I have seen the Berlin ensemble, I have seen the Polish theater when it was, it is right in the sixties, unbelievable, I have seen recently a performance by a folk, which was re-taking again Mascarada of Megacord. Unbelievable, beautiful, fantastic. But from a human point of view, from a political point of view, from, I would say, a criterium of a theater going beyond theater. So these groups, theater, these projects, these, they are very close to me. But the two books, The Secret Art of the Performer and The Five Continents of Theater, you have written saying that that is the kind of knowledge that you would have liked to have had when you started. So you have also tried to give... Is it possible to write a theater history from a point of view of an actor? This is what The Five Continents of Theater... A stunning book, a stunning book, I have it, yeah. And it's very strange because there is almost no author mentioned in this, but the experience, how you were to perform in such a way that people has to pay a ticket because the invention of tickets, when they, in Europe, when the first company, professional company gather, joins together, what they are inventing is the freedom of the actors. Before there were the bishops, there were the aristocrats who decided for the actors. But when the actors decided that by letting each spectator pay a very small amount, they can become free from what all the theater history shows us, where those who decided what sort of performance should be church in Europe and the aristocracy. Then the theater, the theater became during the Renaissance when they laughed at Shakespeare, looking the leachness, the freedom, the vitality, the malolence showing an age which is changing. But also sociologically speaking, the possibility for good people, for women, for homosexuals, for serfs, or aristocrats who had no money or any title, join and live through theater sort of freedom which they've time given to not give them. Yeah, democratization of the theater art through tickets to sales. It's a fantastic book, The Five Continents, not only do we have conversations about a dialogue, about the book itself and it was your collaborators. But I like the idea of what you said, to see the history of theater through the eyes of the actor, Claire Bishop, who's an artist choice says, let's look at art history, but let's look through theater and performance. Why does it have to be painting and sculptures? But you say, even within theater, why let's look through the eyes, the experience of the body of the actor over centuries and you created an incredible archive. And put together in a book is a fantastic, brilliant, and as you would say, a wild garden of theater. There is no copyright in nature, there is no copyright in theater, things multiply, it's chaotic. It's all, I think, a movement and it's all encounters. People go somewhere here, there are movement, Michelangelo said, all art is movement. And I think he's right. Virginia, before we go, we have some time, you went from Italy to Norway and Denmark and in a way you're going back to Italy with your archives and your work, you spend time there and let you, what does Italy mean to you? What does the landscape, well, how are you connected to it in your memory? I was very influenced by my childhood in a small village in South Italy because I was a son of a widow and when my father died, my mother could not go out in the evening because a widow should not go out in the evening. I mean, this was a time which is very difficult to understand today in Italy. But, and so I was very, when I left Italy, I had gone to the experience of a military school, I made all of my high school in a military college. And what for me in Norway was, was it freedom? You know, and this calling, how limited I was being Italian. I ignored all the licorice, when I started reading, was able to read Norwegian and this calling Norwegian licorice was unbelievable. My mind, boom, exploded. And therefore I never felt Italian. Although I feel a great pleasure in eating only Italian food. I mean, when I eat all the rest, even French, me only the Italian food is for instance food. My mind, my brain is satisfied together with my stomach. When I eat all of them every day, Scandinavian, Scandinavian food often, okay. But it's not Italian. So in a way, I am Italian. But at the same time, I, when I go back to Italy now, it's a really foreign country. I've been away for almost 70 years. And the place, when I go and visit Gallipoli, this small village of fishermen, poor people, immigrants, misery, Catholic women going there and mummling in Latin. They were an alphabet, these women, but they were sort of mantra. Who is the perfume of incense? Oh, this is disappeared. Now Gallipoli has become a very fashionable police place. Unbelievable to be there here. It's impossible to be there in summertime. There are thousands, because it's very beautiful. It's only small mine. What are your first memories? Do you remember, what do you remember first as a child when you grew up there? Your first memory ever? My first memory, in reality, the bumping of the body where I was there with my family. And this is the first memory. You were in the house? You were in the house? When the house, my other, has just come back from Africa, had been working, had been fighting with Rome, in Alamai. It's normal, incredible. Oh, so he was, he returned just before the artists when Italy capitulated. And then first they alive, the Americans start bombing body, which is the town where we were living with my family. And then the Germans, when the body was liberated by the, by the online, the Germans start the bombing. And I remember, this is the first memory. I clearly remember all the, yeah, the terror, the terror of this bombing. Still in my, in my body, I was sort of a reflex because we couldn't go to a refuge because my father couldn't move, he was on the bed. So we remained in the apartment around of my father's bed and my mother and my brother line. And I remember we kept each other's hands and then every time there was a boom, all these tensions in our hands. This is what I remember, this physical memory of hands tied to the, keeping or giving each other, sort of a, courage. Yeah, incredible, yeah. And then out of war, using in theater is politics by other means. And so it's, it's quite, quite an, quite an experience. Do you remember, so we think, I remember Dario Faux speaking with Dario Faux, with, we can also talk about it with Frank Aram. We did together the only, as far as I know, a memory of Frank Aram and he talked about his memories of the glassblowers, I think, you know, and visiting comedians. What are, were there experiences of, and of transit of music, of art, or artisans in your memory of the town where you were? I lived, my family was a family of very bourgeois lawyers and doctors. So there were books in home. My brother, my older brother was an intellectual. He was the real intellectual of the family. And he read very much. But I was, I began to read. And when I was in Norway as an immigrant, because I, after work, I went to the library and started reading the Italian books, in order to have a company in something, you know. And this was the moment where I started discovering that literature was another universe in which I really enjoyed too. Right. And now your entire, your entire personal library is in Puglia, I guess, in the library. People can come and all your personal collection, your collection of art, or art, or art. Books in Polish, books in Norwegian, books in Danish, books in Portuguese, books in Spanish, books in Italian, French, English. Yeah, eight, eight, nine languages. And amazing. And what's your, your personal collection? You said, what is, what can people see there? Oh, a lot of books about anthropology, about history of religions, a lot of novels, a lot of about esotericism and a lot about guerrilla, books about the general job, or the field of the, the biggest and strongest nation in the world of the United States, you know, the Vietnam War, books on how to make it in Kudeta, but apart is the treatise of how to make such a Kudeta, or even Che Guevara's, many others, guerrilla. Because the guerrilla books teach you one thing, how to, as a theater group, live in an hostile environment, and how to conquer one person after the other through the ideas and the, what we are doing. And for me, when I arrived from Norway to Denmark, which was a completely new country with my actors with Norwegians, we didn't speak the same language. And we were doing a theater which nobody understood, not only because of the language, but also because we were doing a performance in a, in a gymnastic space. This was in 1965, in 1966, when still the great revolution of 1968 where the traditional space is blown up, no? Then therefore, it was evident, it was a huge reaction, negative reaction of the population against the politicians who had accepted us in a horse brawl. So for years and years, all the internet has been living in a horse brawl with a very hostile population who considered us foreigners, a parasite, without any utility. So this also has been a huge, huge teaching period, a learning period for me and my actors. Yeah. So the library with our genius books, we're trying also to turn it into a kind of installation. For instance, we're going to have books under a glass floor. We're going to make some of the library into a kind of labyrinth and then there will be books hanging and books flying. So it will not be a totally normal library. Incredible, I really can't wait to come and visit. When is there time for an opening of it? Is there a... You know, Italy is a beautiful country, but it has been colonized by bureaucracy. So everything goes forward, two steps forward, one steps back. So it will already have a sort of opening in October, but I imagine that next year begins... Next year. The wings to where we can begin to fly on the level. Fantastic. I mean, this is incredible. Like in this talk today, you guys, you both are sharing your experience, your knowledge and your deep love for the theater and also your conviction that it can and does and will make a difference. And your work is a living example of it and a live example and that for part of nature, you know, of the very force of being alive and you shared it also today. I think it's so exciting. Everybody who listens to us one day, I think you should go, theater students, actors and people will come anyway. And what a beautiful undertaking that next to the performing world, which is so ephemeral and this, I think Carl Valentino, great comedian of the time of Brexit. You know, theater is like a snowman from last year when it's gone, you might have the carrot or the charcoal, but you can't explain what it was, you know, it's gone and it transformed already. But you would now find, in a way, as you said, in the multiplicity, a way to, you know, touch the elephant of theater for many sides and to understand a little bit better ultimately that you have to make up your own mind and create your own group and your own artistic experience. So I would really like to thank you all. I think also the foundation for sure is open. There is a website. I think we have it on our homepage. So I'm sure there could be connections, how universities, artists, companies can connect or contribute to be part of your installation. So both of you really, really thank you. And maybe if I may ask next to this incredible work what you are preparing, are you also, do you have theater projects up on your mind in your sleeve? Are you preparing something? Yeah, but I'm working now on two new productions with all the theater here in Denmark. Next year is 60 years of our existence in several places. They are organizing small parties to celebrate this field. And I know the project which also in Italy because it's a pedagogical project. I would like to make a very particular special theater schools which last only six weeks. And these six weeks where the few participants can work with 14 different artists from different traditions. We're from Japanese know and Malinese and European, Gingio, Beijing Opera, in the Alcatacali, but in the Brazilian, so that for one week at a time they are simply immersed in this extraordinary multiplicity and ingeniosity which the human beings have invented, have generated with the performing techniques. So this is the next project I am being aware of. Right of all, fantastic. And I hope there is a way to also communicate or be part of it or be there or just look at it. So thank you, Gingio and Julia also both of them and all our respect for your work's life, what you achieved, what you put together. It's truly, you are Titans in the field, you are stars, like the sailors, you were a sailor when they are in the ship on the ocean and you look up how to orient, not in the sense of the holy water, but in the sense of guiding on ways to go and- Thank you, Frank and the city and foundation because you have been doing an unbelievable effort in all this period during the COVID, you have now really an anthology, an unbelievable anthology of what we feel that people in different parts of the world were thinking and imagining in that nice period. So thank you. Thank you, that really means the world to me to hear that from you and thank you. Thanks to Hal-Ram for hosting us, Talia, Vijay, everybody at the season and here at the Graduate Center CUNY in Manhattan. I mean, it is things like this that we miss actually here in our live and the downtown live. It's so complicated at the moment for companies and hearing you speak, I think is a great reminder of what that what we do is all about and how significant important, how fragile but also how alive it makes a city our own lives and a community. So thank you all. And I hope some of you will come back when we have a talk with Dorota Maslowska. We just published books from the great Polish playwright. It's going to come up at the Bohemia National Hall. We're going to have the talk, I think, this Thursday. So both of you, thank you. Goodbye. Hope to see you in person soon one day and I will come to the opening if there is one. I will try to really make it and please all of you enjoy your day. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Julia. Bye-bye, Virginia.