Barba was born on 29 October 1936 in Brindisi and grew up in Gallipoli, in the far south of Italy. He left the Nunziatella military academy in Naples in 1954 and emigrated to Norway, where he worked as a welder and a sailor while taking degrees in French, Norwegian literature and the history of religion at Oslo University.

In 1961 he abandoned his studies at the State Theatre School in Warsaw to join Jerzy Grotowski at the Teatr 13 Rzędów in Opole — three years beside the director who was then taking apart nearly everything Western theatre assumed about the actor's body. From Poland he went to India and studied Kathakali, a form in which training starts in childhood and is never quite finished. He returned to Oslo intending to direct. As a foreigner he found that door closed, and so he built a company out of people the system had also refused. The founding is usually credited to Barba together with the Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe.

In 1966 the Danish municipality of Holstebro invited Odin Teatret to create a theatre laboratory in the town, offering an old farm and a modest amount of money. Holstebro was in the middle of a deliberate campaign to make itself culturally significant, and this was one of its bets. Very few municipal culture policies pay off on the scale this one did.

The company put down roots and stayed. Odin Teatret has been a self-governing institution since 1984 and today keeps a permanent salaried staff of eighteen — actors, technicians and administrators. It has created some 83 performances over its history, a substantial number of which remain in the repertoire, and it has toured them across Europe, Latin America and Asia for longer than most of its audiences have been alive.

Theatre anthropology is Barba's term, and it names the company's real subject: the comparative study of what performers do with balance, tension and energy before any question of style, character or meaning arises. What an Odin actor, a Kathakali dancer and a Balinese performer have in common at that level turns out to be more interesting than what separates them.

In 1979 Barba founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology, ISTA — not a building but an itinerant university and a network of performers and scholars, convened where the work is. Since 1990, in collaboration with the University of Bologna, ISTA has run the University of Eurasian Theatre, a rolling series of conferences and practical encounters. Its performance arm, Theatrum Mundi, assembles montages drawn from the physical scores of Asian and Odin actors on the same stage. In 1992 the Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies was set up with Aarhus University to document the company's work and to study theatre laboratories as a form.

The publishing arm began in the 1960s with the magazine T.T.T. — Teatrets Teori og Teknikk — and with a book that mattered rather more: Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre, which Odin published and which has since been translated into more than fifteen languages. One of the most influential theatre texts of the twentieth century went out into the world from a market town in west Jutland.

The press still works. It issues books on Odin Teatret and ISTA, recordings of performances, training and pedagogy, video of other practitioners' work, music, posters, and the journal The Open Page, produced in association with the Magdalena Project.

Founding member Torgeir Wethal died in June 2010 and became the first Odin member to be buried in what the company calls its family grave in Holstebro — an actual plot, for a company that has always described itself in kinship terms rather than employment ones. Others stayed for decades: Else Marie Laukvik, a founding member; Iben Nagel Rasmussen; Roberta Carreri; Julia Varley; Kai Bredholt; Jan Ferslev.

The structure around them has shifted. Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, the umbrella organisation that had housed Odin's activities since 1984, became a separate institution at the end of 2022, with Odin Teatret continuing under its own name and Barba still directing. He was awarded the Sonning Prize in 2000. He turns 90 in October 2026, and the company's calendar for that year — performances, masterclasses, festivals across Europe and Latin America — is full. The people who failed the audition have outlasted the school that failed them.