The approach begins with the intracultural aspects of the performer’s apprenticeships: how a given actor has trained a given body in a given cultural context.
It then proceeds to comparisons, doing transcultural work. This is important when approaching patients. First, the healer defines the patient’s intracultural itinerary; ideally, the healer also does that with his or her own itinerary. We then have two more or less complete sets of information available for comparison. Such study about patients and about healers facilitates their transformation from a functional interaction into mastery and transmission.
Theater anthropology has also focused on communities, examining the cultural traditions of Indian, Japanese, Balinese, African Brazilian and European performers, seen as performing groups. One interest is to understand how a tradition that has disappeared can be revived. Barba’s long-time collaborator Sanjukta Panigrahi revived the tradition of Odissi dance, from the Eastern province of Orissa, India. Her research consisted of finding traces of the lost tradition in books and among temple statues. When a statue was broken, the dance master tried to figure out the missing part, according to her basic knowledge of postures and attitudes. She reconstructed the missing parts through her own body memory as a dancer. Sanjukta Panigrahi was thus a founder of tradition.