188 \ 189 Introduction Of course I was already aware of the barter projects 1 initiated and organized by Odin Teatret during their various journeys around the world. I had read about their cultural exchanges early on with local village people in Sicily, about the idea and experience of barter, and I had also seen the beautiful flm On the Two Banks of the River 2 , directed by Torgeir Wethal and edited by Niels Pagh Andersen, which recounts the story of several barter encounters in Peru in 1978. I watched it with my entire family one Sunday morning to show them what I am studying and constantly on the lookout for when investigating the theory of theater. It is not true – as has so often been maintained in the classical drama tradition – that everything in addition to the words of a play is something extraneous to the drama. The experi- ence in Peru allows us to clearly see the core of what theater is truly about: it is not about understanding, it is not about recognition; at the heart of the art of theater there is no cognitive purpose. You only have to watch the faces of the people parti- cipating in the barter, the many diferent wide open eyes, full of concentration and expectation, to perceive that what matters is not what they see and receive from the actors as they pass by, but the very fact that they are afected in a particular way, are enlightened, and enter into another circle of existence. There is some- thing quite simple to be observed in these images, it is something that really hap- pens. Even the most sophisticated theatrical performances still contain this nucleus. It is the essence of theatricality, and something that is so clearly visible on the surface of the theatrical exchange events invented by Odin Theater – a thing they call barter. I like to call it »a festival of life.« It is the kind of nucleus we imagine inside the earth, burning with light and heat. If you take away this core, you might have a play, you might have traditions, words and so on, but you will lose theater. All this I already knew. But as I sat in the large riding hall in Bethel during the barter with the artists of the XII Session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) 3 and the local residents of Bielefeld, smelling the dark, peaty soil, the straw we were sitting on, the heavy sweat of the horses entering the arena and gliding around the huge circle, pas de deux, with young girls dressed like princesses on their backs not yet performing their airs but simply sitting high up on those beautiful animals and riding around, their faces full of eagerness, glowing with excitement, pride, and true happiness, as I listened to the sounds pro- duced by the Indian musicians and watched the faces of the people around me, those I knew from the ISTA and ones I had never seen before, and as I watched Ragunath Panigrahi and his musicians, the actors from all over the world and the German girls riding around the circle, I realized that theater is a kind of gift, a gift circulating among the audience and the actors. This was the beginning of my thinking about theater in terms of and as a concept related to the gift. Ingrid Hentschel Experiencing the Gift: Theater, Festivity, and Play Based on the experience of theater as an event of cultural exchange, this contri- bution will refect upon the theatrical and philosophical dimensions of the relation- ship between theatrical performance, ritual, play, and festivity. What’s potent about the dynamic interaction between actors/performers and audience is, in an ideal case, the process of giving and receiving that is rooted in the ritual heritage of theater. The performance as a singular event – in contrast to the play, which may form its basis, and the staging as the intended performance – can be described as play accor- ding to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Although with play, as with gift giving, clear positions of the subject and object are difcult to pin down. For this reason the discussion is more about an intermediary zone, a betwixt and between that corresponds to the position of the gift as an intermediary entity and a cultural metaphor. According to Hentschel, the basis of theatrical performance can be described as barter – as a reciprocal giving and taking between spectators and actors. Theater thus unveils the ontological dimension of human existence, which, as reality, we do not control, but which we shape and make palpable for one another with the help of art.