This talk investigates questions about methodology and collaboration that arose from our attempts to write about Eugenio Barba’s artistic practice as a theatre director.

Embracing Barba’s occasionally paradoxical approaches, the authors’ non-chronological, rhizomatic account unfolds from a central concern with Barba’s production The Tree (2016), which provides a point of connection to the various ‘branches’ of his work since 1964. Given the metaphorical density of the image of the tree, how can we as dramaturg-scholars simultaneously embrace it as an image through which to write, deconstruct the performance-in-process, and treat it as a model for a ‘living archive’ within a multicultural theatre laboratory tradition? What was distinctive about this interaction between artistic methods, a performance, different cultural and academic agendas and constraints and the sheer practicality of two academics writing the same piece?

The talk is presented as a dialogue between Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham) and Annelis Kuhlmann (Aarhus University, Denmark; currently a visiting researcher at the University of Kent, Canterbury), who reflect on their digression into trees in order to write in a radically spatial way.