Performative migrations

Odin Teatret’s theatrical barter in the Seventies

Résumé

The essay explores Odin Teatret’s journeys through Southern Italy and Latin America in the 1970s as paradigmatic instances of performative migration. By retracing the group’s experiences in Lecce, Sardinia, and Carpignano Salentino, it analyses how Eugenio Barba and his actors transformed the boundaries between art and life through the practice of theatrical barter—a symbolic exchange of performances, songs, and gestures with local communities. This practice, far from being mere cultural animation, became a means of redefining theatrical identity through encounters with difference. The article further examines how these ephemeral exchanges generated an enduring “living archive” of gestures, memories, and audiovisual traces, now preserved in the LAFLIS archive in Lecce. Finally, it situates barter within a broader genealogy of intercultural performance, reading it as a device of negotiation that redefined the geography, ethics, and epistemology of twentieth-century theatre.