Imagination is the great rambling whale of the audience’s minds that must be harpooned by the controlled imagination from the stage… it must be hooked, trapped and made one by the hypnotic power of the performers and their gestures…

The spirit of magic and fairytale should pervade the stage… ledgends and myths tap the dreamworld of the spectator. In his imagination of unconcious world lie much unexplained debris, fears and repression, anxieties and coded dreams.

The need to explain this huge storehouse is made apparent in the myths that man has invented to chart the inner life. the need to weave the ledgends that will give vent to these states and not supress them.

– Steven Berkoff, On Audiences; The Fall of the House of Usher

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

The word text, before reffering to a written or spoken, printed or manuscripted text, meant “a weaving together”. In this sense, there is no performance which does not have “text”.

That which concerns the text (the weave) of the performance can be defined as “dramaturgy”.

…

All the relationships, all the interactions between the characters or between the characters and the lights, the sounds, and the space, are actions. Everything that works directly on te spectators’ attention, on their understanding, their emotions, their kinaesthsia, is action.
The list could become uselesly long. It is not so important to define what action is, or  how many actions tere may be in a performance.

What is important is to observe that the actions come into play only when they weave together, wen they become texture: “text”.

– Eugenio Barba, Actions At Work