Practicing Odin Teatret's archive: training transmission, interaction and creativity

The progress made in the fields of technology, information theory, computational modeling, and immersive multisensory displays put the notion of the body as archive in a new perspective, especially as far as theatre technique is concerned. In line with these recent developments, this research proposes to investigate what it means to develop, practice and perform an archive. We propose to create a sustainable model for the development, transmission and distribution of virtually archived theatre acting techniques, in which the user becomes interactively and creatively engaged in the production of knowledge about theatre training practices. By elaborating on hybrids of both physical and virtual spaces, we allow a user to drift towards a new awareness of embodied knowledge transmission, production and distribution, in which the freedom of a theatre laboratory provides the space for an interactive and creative encounter with codified artistic techniques and practices through virtual reality immersion. In this sense, the archive becomes a dramaturgical tool for the actor, dancer and performer, an ‘architecture of access’ to find one's way through the great amount of data available nowadays through lived experience. By treating archive/embodied heritage as an interactive tool where the main focus is on an interdisciplinary functionality of one's experience, this research gives voice to its potential on fostering innovative expressive communication.