This article – a chapter from The Paper Canoe: a Treatise on Theatre Anthropology, forthcoming from Routledge – was dedicated to NTQ's co-editor, Clive Barker, on his recent sixtieth birthday. In some senses, therefore, a reflection on the rite of passage into old age, it is more importantly a recognition of the quality and nature of experience understood – as applied to life and, in this case, to the profession of theatre. Eugenio Barba is the founder both of Odin Teatret and of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, and here he links the impulses behind the two in highly personal experiences with universal implications – childhood epiphanies of feeling with the perception of theatrical genius, even the fending-off of boredom triggering an understanding of an actor's body movement shared across cultures and continents. Theatre, he concludes, ‘allows me to belong to no place, not to be anchored only to one perspective, to remain in transition’.