Eugenio Barba delivered this address when he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Plymouth on 27 October 2005. Eugenio Barba founded the Odin Teatret in Oslo in 1964, taking it to Holstebro in Denmark in 1966 where, ever since, he and his collaborators have explored and reinvented the vocal and corporeal possibilities of performance. In the speech which follows, he explores anew several images for the theatre that recur in his writings, notably Beyond the Floating Islands (1986, a new version of The Floating Islands, 1979) and The Paper Canoe (1994). Here they resurface in the all-embracing trope of the sea, accompanied by Barba’s reflections on multiculturalism and diversity in the theatre. Other familiar concerns of Barba’s writings and the Odin’s work such as exile and the search for community are crystallized in this speech in Barba’s lapidary ‘The country in which I dwell is the theatre.’ During Odin Teatret’s UK tour in the autumn of 2005, documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of this issue, Eugenio Barba opened the new Library at Rose Bruford College, named in memory of former NTQ Co-Editor, Clive Barker.