The Unwritten Grotowski

Theory and Practice of the Encounter

Kris Salata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136158100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata posits Grotowski's work as philosophical practice, and more particularly, as practical research in the phenomenology of being, arguing that Grotowski's departure from theatrical productions (and thus critical consideration) resulted from his uncompromising pursuit of one central problem, "What does it mean to reveal oneself?" — the very question that drove his stage directing work. The book demonstrates that the answer led him through the path of gradually stripping the theatrical phenomenon down to its most elemental aspect, which shows itself through the craft of the performer as a non-representational event. This particular quality released at the heights of the art of the performer is referred to as aliveness, or true liveness in this study in order to shift scholarly focus onto something that has always fascinated great theatre practitioners, including Stanislavski and Grotowski, and of which academic scholarship has limited grasp. Salata's theoretical analysis of aliveness reaches out to phenomenology and a broad range of post-structural philosophy and critical theory, through which Grotowski's project is portrayed as philosophical practice.

1	Grotowski Studies in a New Key
	What does it mean, not to hide from another person? Not to veil or mask yourself from another person? Not to play a different person? To reveal yourself. To reveal yourself. To disarm yourself before another person and to come forth like that? Jerzy Grotowski, 1972

GROTOWSKI: THE PROLIFIC AMBIGUOUS PRESENCE

The legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) has yet to be fully understood. One of the key figures in the twentieth-century theatre, Grotowski left behind highly identifiable terms, a colorful legend, as well as traces difficult to follow indicating a vital message yet to be communicated. All great masters have an ability to teach long after their passing, and Grotowski, as a master of an art particularly susceptible to death, took special care so that his “unwritten” lessons would live on. “Shape-shifter, shaman, trickster, artist, adept, director, leader,” as he is notoriously called by Richard Schechner in a hard-to-top article title, the Polish-born director has been “hard to pin down”¹ throughout his lifetime, and remains so today. Over a decade after his death, and after volumes of scholarship, his “case” is still wide open.

With pop culture–like familiarity and enigma, Grotowski serves as the subject of a dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn and André Gregory in the 1981 art-house classic, My Dinner with Andre, or is a buzzword in Bernard Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski,² or plays lure in the countless acting workshops that promise a “Grotowski technique,” or even “the Grotowski method.” There seems to be a lot of confusion about the man and his work caused by the instant recognizability of his name matched with nothing final “pinned down” behind it. Those eager to learn more about the Polish director, who reach for the superb collection The Grotowski Sourcebook, edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford, can be puzzled by five distinct, peculiarly titled phases Grotowski considered in his lifework, none of which has to do with staging plays, and four of which have nothing to do with the stage: Theatre of Productions (1957–1969), Paratheatre (1969–1972), Theatre of Sources (1976–1982), Objective Drama (1982–1986), and Art as vehicle (1986–). Yet young practitioners and theatre students still develop an attraction to Grotowski’s ideas and manifestos after reading the classic and bestseller Towards a Poor Theatre,³ and seek further fulfillment in all that bears the author’s name. A decade after Grotowski’s passing, international interest in his legacy only grew, prompting UNESCO to designate 2009 the “Year of Grotowski.” Yet, again, despite worldwide attention, conferences, symposia, and publications, Grotowski continues to circulate as a mixed metaphor, and his broad presence in critical literature and theatre practice and pedagogy seems often incomplete, fragmentary, and lacking comprehensive perspective, particularly one inclusive of the culminating period of his work dedicated to the controversial “transmission” of his knowledge and research to a carefully chosen artistic heir.

Justification

To most, Grotowski remains a dictionary entry or a chapter in a theatre history book: an avant-garde director famous for a few productions, remarkable actor training, experiments with the actor/spectator environment, and the concepts of “holy actor,” and “poor” and “autonomous” theatre. All of these markers come from a ten-year period (1959–1969), during which Grotowski, with his Laboratory Theatre, created groundbreaking performances and creative processes. His consequent withdrawal from theatre productions for the sake of audience-less⁴ research focused on the performer and his or her craft has resulted in a complex silence among theatre scholars, for whom the lack of spectatorship in the work became a central theme and an impassible obstacle. To many, Grotowski became “frozen in the imagination”⁵ as an innovative stage director from the 1960s, rather than a practitioner and researcher driven by some of the same core questions who continually worked until his death in 1999, and left behind an active center carefully prepared to keep the research alive and in full operation without his daily presence—all of which must be accounted for as his legacy.

The qualities that made Grotowski famous as a stage director further evolved in his post-production (post-presentation) periods and must be included in the discourse on theatre practice, as well as theorized, not merely for the sake of Grotowski scholarship and the reception of his life-work, but because the questions he was asking about the phenomenon of human presence, representation, mediation, intersubjective experience, and the non-conceptual content of performance remain of high relevance to the field of theatre and performance studies.

As a theatre director, pedagogue, and scholar, I have been fascinated with these problems for many years. Undoubtedly related to this enthrallment, my long-lived interest in Grotowski comes with its own cultural baggage: I grew up and lived in Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the heyday of alternative theatre and deep political and cultural awakening, and belong to the generation inspired by Grotowski’s myth. Too young to see any of his productions, or even take part in the paratheatrical projects, I saw their reverberation in those who had experienced them. It is not that Grotowski has changed theatre, but rather, those touched by his work have become newly aware of the potential available in the art of performance: its ability to reveal, activate, and transform people. It is in this activated and transformed theatre community that I formed my conviction that theatre is indispensible in society, that in fact it is its beating heart, that it is political because it is philosophical, and that it is spiritually more potent than the church, and that with a considerably more engaging ceremony. When I left Poland for Paris and then later Paris for California, I could not understand why the West “didn’t get it.”

Years later, I found many of those who did, of which a large number (oh irony!) were working with or in proximity to Grotowski, who settled in California before moving to Italy to establish his Workcenter. But to be fair, most young American actors naturally and eagerly seek in theatre more than a career, and more than public recognition. As a director and performance teacher who works merely in the context of Grotowski’s questions and without any claims to his “techniques,” I meet undergraduate students who have never heard of Grotowski, who in fact have become attracted to theatre by means very foreign to me (for example by starring in high school musicals), but with whom I very quickly manage to work in the spirit so familiar to me from my own youth.

Jan Kott states that Grotowski “brought with him to the West the Method and Metaphysics.”⁶ As tempting and as accurate as this claim appears, I will argue against both its points. First, I clearly detach Grotowski’s attitude from metaphysics and present it as phenomenological— the move, I believe, he would approve. Second, if Grotowski’s project as theatre and as a more broadly conceived cultural practice seems concrete, it defies consistent methodology, and yields neither algorithm nor (thus far) applicable theory. Rather, it itself is a way of holistic thinking and theorizing, which I hope to demonstrate in the chapters of this book. While the form of his practice has evolved from performances to participatory events to exchanges of work with other groups to other types of meeting through, or with the help of, performance, the only aspects that remained unchanged were methods of creating new methods,⁷ and questions that drove them. The working answers and all arriving knowledge recorded itself in the complex and fragile medium of performance and the craft of the performer, as tasks, problems, and questions rather than statements. Some synthesized features of this knowledge Grotowski offered in his talks, and some of those talks became texts. The rest has lived and died in the continued work, as its “unwritten” substance.

A Few Words on Methodology

In his talks, Grotowski usually commented on the phase of work he had already finished, providing a narrative and coherence only available from the nascent perspective. From Poor Theatre to Art as vehicle, the Polish master remains the most eloquent critic of his research, leaving behind a rigorous intellectual record of his ever-evolving artistic endeavor. Many of these pivotal summaries remain only marginally known to the English language–based scholars. Some important texts from the Theatre of Productions have been published only in Polish and/or French, the lectures he delivered in Rome in 1982 have been published in fragments and only in Italian, while the final account of his lifework delivered in the series of Collège de France lectures (interrupted by his death) will remain available only as audio recordings in French (per his wish). But even when Grotowski’s collected works become available simultaneously in several languages, and his project receives an adequate critical commentary, Grotowski scholarship will not become complete without access to the Grotowski-established practice. From this perspective, the existence of the Workcenter and the continuous work by Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini become determinedly important.

The methodology that I assume in this book leads me to examine the written record on Grotowski, while greatly relying on the fruits of my ongoing encounter with Richards and Biagini and their complex enterprise that involves practice and discourse. For those who wish to receive “pure” Grotowski and decide to question the validity of this approach, I offer two points to consider. First, my investigation follows the questions rather than the man who asks them, although it is often impossible to discern the difference. Second, this approach is very much in the spirit of Grotowski, who consciously gradually stepped away from the research, while taking great care that it would continue after his death. Both these points represent a strong anti-purist stance, which emphasizes traditional oral transmission in which authorship as well as knowledge remains cross-generationally collective—a way of passage Grotowski wished to restore to theatre practice. Grotowski will always be there, as the self-appointed continuator of Stanislavski, as a master to many students who claim him as their artistic ancestor, as a brilliant researcher with unique insights, and as someone who carefully chose a single continuator and devoted to him the last years of life. All these deeds must be written into a text on Grotowski.

As it becomes apparent, I perceive Grotowski as consistent and persistent in his life-long search for human wholeness through the art of performance. Through constant reevaluation and consequent shifting, his work naturally fell out of the frame of theatre, as many might claim, and moved into a territory they might think strange, marginal, or even dangerous, which I and others find daring and promising. It is not a territory of “free enterprise” subjected to market demands, nor is it a museum of utopias supported by protectionist funding, but rather a concrete offering of the most refined qualities generated by marginalized but existent possibilities within contemporary cultural economy, of which the Workcenter is a great example. I wish to convince the reader that this place is not strange after all, and in fact, that it may even be the site of hope, if not for, then through, theatre.

Limitations

Although left behind by mainstream scholarship, Grotowski attracts great interest among those scholars and practitioners who find in his research a quest for ongoing artistic creativity, a meticulous analysis of the craft and the vocation of the actor, and a profound critique of habitual production and consumption of theatre and culture. While all these aspects of his lifework deserve further discussion, I concentrate on Grotowski’s work after the departure from traditional performance, with the main focus on the Workcenter—the work still unaccounted for, its legacy of primary importance to today’s theatre art and broadly conceived performance scholarship. Continuing from Stanislavski, Grotowski explored the essence of what “living” is in a live performance, and passed it on to his students as both the knowledge and quest within the craft. Such an investigation is particularly valuable in today’s society, which as Baudrillard suggests, lost its desire for and recognition of the real in life, replacing it with a reproducible commoditized objectivity. Aliveness, at least one that attracted Stanislavski and led Grotowski in his research, may after all be the most important and most difficult heritage to receive.

A LIVE PERFORMANCE DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY PRODUCE ALIVENESS

Field-based theories of acting emerge from the practitioner’s need to communicate the fruit of his or her experience to the adepts of the craft. Konstantin Stanislavski provided the foundations for acting pedagogy by writing a fictitious actor’s diary, the frame within which he follows an imaginary but plausible pedagogical track. Despite his ambition to turn out systematic knowledge of the art, craft, and pedagogy of acting, Stanislavski managed to treat the studio as the site of practical research, and writing as the site of theoretical summary and consequent rewriting. The complex history of Stanislavski’s writerly effort, as well as its misinterpretations, tell the story of an artist-pedagogue’s continuous striving for rigorous theoretical and methodological framework—a search for a system that helps the actor live his or her role on the stage. Yet when reading Stanislavski, his own superobjective—the ultimate search for the nature of aliveness in actor’s work—tends to slip from the page. In the introduction to the newly released translation of Stanislavski, Declan Donnellan clearly sees this “strange” phenomenon:

Somehow th[e] first intuition of Stanislavski can get squashed in our acceleration to learn the techniques and devices that he invented (and frequently discarded). The first step is not to ask “How can I be a successful actor?” The first question must always be “What is good acting?” And the answer will remain the same: “When it is alive.” Strangely we need to keep returning to this point of departure, otherwise we are lost forever.⁸

Grotowski understood the Russian master’s legacy as an ongoing research rather than the rigid system that he has been associated with as others turned his findings into fixed methods. Those who left to do their own teaching after having studied under Stanislavski in the early phases of his investigation caused irremediable confusion about the research that kept evolving and reversing its findings. Yet even Stanislavski’s most trusted “student,” the fictitious character in his books, Kostia Nazvanov (whose last name means “the chosen one” in Russian),⁹ ceases to develop past the master’s final version of the text.

Grotowski did not wish to subject his own legacy either to the finality of the writing or to his past “disciples” who had not kept up with his research. Therefo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Unwritten Grotowski
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note to the Reader
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: A Journal from a Voyage to the Living Room
• 1 Grotowski Studies in a New Key
• 2 The Inner Man and His Deed: Jerzy Grotowski and the Heritage of Adam Mickiewicz and Polish Romanticism
• 3 Towards the Non-(Re)presentational Actor: From Grotowski to Richards
• 4 Nearness in Creation: From The Twin to The Letter
• 5 Towards a Theory of Aliveness: Pyric Theatre
• 6 Genealogy of Homecoming: A Journey of The Living Room
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index