Are There Performance Universals?: Theatre Anthropology

In Eugenio Barba, Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, read chapters titled:

Introduction
The Dictionary
Anatomy
Apprenticeship
Balance
Dilation
Dramaturgy
Energy
I have listed these by chapter titles because there are editions with differing page numbers.

Also read the Japanese Noh play Dojoji, in Traditional Japanese Theatre edited by Karen Brazel (OCRA)

Things to think about.
Many often consider the West to be devoid of highly physical theatre and many are often more comfortable with naturalism's "psychological acting." But Barba makes clear the intense physicality even of extreme naturalism, and the history of codification in the West is often overlooked. Renaissance Commedia del arte, for example, heir to the long tradition of Roman and medieval European miming, shares a great deal with other global forms (as Barba also explores). 

For an example of a highly physical, more contemporary Western theatre form think about biomechanics in the video below, invented by Meyerhold (Stanislavski's student):

Reading Response Prompts:
1. Would you say the tradition of Western naturalism is physical theatre? Why? Why not? If it is physical,  is it codified? How so?
2. Spend some time exploring gesture. Take a "daily gesture" and make it "extra-daily." Describe your process and your final outcome. What is the difference you find between daily and extra-daily and how do you get to that difference? How does it feel?
3.What do you think is most essential to extra-daily performance? Make up a category like Barba's whether it is breath, or timing, or sweat -- it can be anything -- elaborate upon why you think it is important and possibly even "universal" to human performance.
4. What would you say is the most exciting, or most important moment, in Dojoji? How would you see that moment staged if you were directing it not as Noh (about which you know nothing yet I assume) but as a play in whatever tradition you call your own?