The Country where trees fly

In a quiet Danish province, people are getting ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Odin Teatret, a theatre company founded by Eugenio Barba. Under Barba’s leadership, the company has changed the coordinates for what theatre could be in the second half of the ‘900 by feeding its own alphabet with various scenical cultures from all over the world. Groups of children, kids and artists from all kinds of different latitudes – Kenya, Bali, Brazil, India and Europe – arrived in the city of Holstebro to energise a choral event with their acrobatics, music and voices under the impetus gaze of the barefoot-white-haired director.

The Odin Teatret is not just a company, it is a large and timeless community, it’s a visionary flux and unshakable everyday life, it is a tangle of wild humanity and this film tenderly observes the company’s perseverance, intuition, paradoxes and horizons. Actors who also serve as construction workers-tailors-organisers, a mayor-mailman-scholar and a farm lent to the theatre and a director-welder-lumberjack, all gave birth to a fellowship between political vision and the universal value of art over the course of half a century.

The preparation of the party – which put tribal rhythms and western classicism in the fun research for a common language – invoked the theatre’s possibility of blending the sky and the land, in between regenerative bonfires and flying trees.