ABSTRACT
Barba is essentially a creative artist, a poet both in the theatre and in his writings about it. This poetic quality calls for a careful reading of his ideas since he favors poetic metaphors over the more traditional intellectual approach of deductive logic to sustain his arguments. His two major books in English, The Floating Islands, and Beyond the Floating Islands, even contain a metaphor in their titles-the theatre group as an island-which he uses as the basis of discussion. Other metaphors abound in his theoretical writings, including describing the theatre as a body losing blood (1979:129), presence as body-in-life (1988a), and group theatre as pueblos (1986a:208).
