Full tilt Double Edge responds to Don Quixote BY IRIS FANGER

In our throw-away culture, four centuries of reinvention count for something. Miguel Cervantes’s imperishable hero, Don Quixote, who has tilted at windmills in the ballet and on the musical stage, will celebrate his 400th birthday in The UnPOSSESSED, a theatrical creation of Double Edge Theatre Company, which the American Repertory Theatre and World Music/CRASHarts have teamed up to present next week at Zero Arrow Theatre.

Double Edge began in Allston and is best known for its Song Trilogy. Ten years ago, it relocated to a farm in Ashfield, where the actors live, rehearse, and train in the demanding physical style of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. They also run an actor-training person and tend their collective fields, chickens, and vegetable garden. "We are not a commune or a kibbutz," says artistic director Stacy Klein. "We bought the farm so we can financially afford to do our work, in our own way." The troupe has performed its intense, densely metaphoric works in Europe and South America as well as closer to home. The UnPOSSESSED was acclaimed last fall at New York’s La Mama Annex.

Although its imagistic pieces often stem from the troupe’s study of a particular source, Double Edge depends on the actors’ physical reactions to the material, which is unfiltered by a playwright but shaped by Klein. The performers’ tools range from circus skills to the audience-actor relationships forged in the street theaters of Latin America. They’re enhanced by props, puppets, and original music by company member Justin Handley.

Klein — who trained in the 1970s under Rena Mirecka, one of two women in Grotowski’s company, and with Eugenio Barba, the Italian-born director of Denmark’s Odin Teatret — credits her artistic partner, Carlos Uriona, with the company’s current fusion of styles: "What we share is our experience working in an ensemble." Uriona, who plays Don Quixote, explains, "I am an actor basically in the sense of action, not presentation. I was trained in all kinds of folk theater in Latin America." That would include the Wild West atmosphere of the Theater of the Gauchos.

Uriona found a role model for his Don Quixote in Che Guevara: "He’s a large presence all over the world, an image for me because of his passion and his dream. He was fighting a war." Klein adds, "The performance is not political. It’s about the Quixote in everyone. The danger of fanaticism is a possibility in each one of us."

Klein was first drawn to Cervantes’s novel four years ago, when she felt the need to question her own artistic, socio-political drive — as she says, "whether it was actually a Quixote dream to share creativity with a society that wasn’t interested. I do feel people are responding to the events after 9/11. The young people are interested in a way I haven’t seen for years."

THE UNPOSSESSED | Zero Arrow Theatre, Arrow St and Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge | November 16-20 | $30 | 617.876.4275 or http://www.worldmusic.org/