Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance

Meetings with Remarkable Women

Virginie Magnat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135081706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

As the first examination of women's foremost contributions to Jerzy Grotowski's cross-cultural investigation of performance, this book complements and broadens existing literature by offering a more diverse and inclusive re-assessment of Grotowski's legacy, thereby probing its significance for contemporary performance practice and research. Although the particularly strenuous physical training emblematic of Grotowski's approach is not gender specific, it has historically been associated with a masculine conception of the performer incarnated by Ryszard Cieslak in The Constant Prince, thus overlooking the work of Rena Mirecka, Maja Komorowska, and Elizabeth Albahaca, to name only the leading women performers identified with the period of theatre productions. This book therefore redresses this imbalance by focusing on key women from different cultures and generations who share a direct connection to Grotowski's legacy while clearly asserting their artistic independence. These women actively participated in all phases of the Polish director's practical research, and continue to play a vital role in today's transnational community of artists whose work reflects Grotowski's enduring influence. Grounding her inquiry in her embodied research and on-going collaboration with these artists, Magnat explores the interrelation of creativity, embodiment, agency, and spirituality within their performing and teaching. Building on current debates in performance studies, experimental ethnography, Indigenous research, global gender studies, and ecocriticism, the author maps out interconnections between these women's distinct artistic practices across the boundaries that once delineated Grotowski's theatrical and post-theatrical experiments.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Research Context, Interdisciplinary Methodology, Fieldwork Objectives

Building upon her important re-evaluation of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s System, Sharon Marie Carnicke provocatively posits actress and director Maria Knebel as the Russian director’s true heir. Given that canonical theatre history has long upheld and at times revered Stanislavsky as the father of psychological realism, Carnicke’s bold endorsement of Knebel interrupts patrilineal transmission processes that safeguard the legacies of great male pioneers. She provides solid evidence for her provocation by grounding it in Knebel’s unique insight into the final period of Stanislavsky’s work, in which she participated by serving as his assistant, and argues that although Knebel’s interpretation of Stanislavsky’s ultimate contribution to actor training was both more accurate and more sophisticated than that of her rival Mikhail Kedrov, the latter was nevertheless adopted as the official version that came to be known as the Method of Physical Actions. Carnicke historicizes the tension between Knebel and Kedrov over Stanislavsky’s legacy by placing their divergent views in the political context of Stalinist Russia. Since both Knebel and Kedrov assisted Stanislavsky in the last phase of his research and drew from this experience to develop their respective directing careers, Carnicke remarks that “she, as easily as he, could have called herself Stanislavsky’s heir” (“Stanislavsky and Politics: Active Analysis and the American Legacy of Soviet Oppression” 20).

However, Knebel did not share Kedrov’s loyalty to Soviet cultural policies, and Carnicke suggests that by foregrounding physicality over psychology within Stanislavsky’s final expression of his System, Kedrov’s conception of the Method of Physical Actions expediently aligned Stanislavsky’s approach with the Soviet regime’s Marxist materialist expectations. In contrast, Knebel’s understanding of what she named Active Analysis reflected “the full psychophysical range in the technique” (22) and engaged the actor’s entire being—body, mind, and spirit. In “The Knebel Technique: Active Analysis in Practice,” Carnicke observes: “Not only did this approach defy atheistic Marxist philosophy by embracing spiritual dimensions in art, but Knebel’s term for the rehearsal process stressed the actor’s holistic usage of body through ‘action’ and mind through ‘analysis’” (104). As reported by Vasili Toporkov in Stanislavsky in Rehearsal, the Moscow Art Theatre director required from actors that they gain an understanding of the overall structure of a play by exploring on their feet, by means of improvisation, the actions and counteractions of dramatic conflict within each scene. Since Stalin’s ruthless enforcement of Socialist Realism in the arts “had made conflict itself politically subversive” (“Stanislavsky and Politics” 22), Knebel’s holistic approach and her view of Active Analysis as a “gymnastic for both body and soul” (23) became ideologically suspect and were superseded by Kedrov’s more politically correct endorsement of the Method of Physical Actions.

In the post-Stalinist era, however, Knebel’s importance as one of Stanislavsky’s close collaborators and the significance of her artistic contribution became increasingly recognized by major Russian theatre practitioners. The prominent theatre director Anatoli Vassiliev, for example, claims both Knebel and Jerzy Grotowski as major influences, and has edited Knebel’s writings in a book available in French under the title L’Analyse-action. Knebel nevertheless remains largely unknown in North America, and although she authored six books during her lifetime, Carnicke deplores the fact that none have appeared in English translation. This leads her to infer that the confusion around Stanislavsky’s legacy “lies as much in gender politics as in Stalinist repression” (“Stanislavsky and Politics” 25). She concludes that, whereas literary critics have “sought to bring new visibility to female writers of the past” by questioning the process of canon formation that tends to privilege male authors in the academy, “a comparable process of selectivity” (25) continues to prevail in the theatrical canon, as evidenced by Knebel’s conspicuous absence from official theatre history.

Women as Illegitimate Daughters: The Contested Legacies of Stanislavsky and Grotowski

Carnicke’s argument is particularly relevant to my research project for three main reasons. Firstly, Grotowski stated in several of his major talks, including his final Collège de France lectures, that he had always considered Stanislavsky to be his artistic ancestor, yet that it was only the final period of Stanislavsky’s work which had deeply interested him and served as a foundation for his own approach. Stanislavsky in Rehearsal, the book in which Toporkov offers an account of his experience of Stanislavsky’s last studio, was a key reference for Grotowski, and he strongly recommended this text to the MFA Acting and Directing students attending his Master Class at the University of California, Irvine, where he developed his Objective Drama Project in the 1980s.¹ Toporkov, as noted by Carnicke, referred to the Method of Physical Actions in his detailed description of Stanislavsky’s experiments, and in his preface to Stanislavsky in Rehearsal, Jean Benedetti remarks that Toporkov’s insights led Brecht himself to reconsider his harsh critique of Stanislavsky. Was Brecht’s change of heart induced by the Marxist tenor of Toporkov’s perspective, influenced as it may have been by Kedrov’s authority as Stanislavsky’s official heir? Or did Toporkov’s description of Stanislavsky’s unprecedented experiments convince Brecht that the Russian director had undeniably touched upon something of substance, as later intuited by Grotowski? These are some of the questions I will address within the particular context of my reassessment of Grotowski’s legacy in terms of its relevance for contemporary performance.

Secondly, Carnicke suggests that “in postmodern America, the historical paragon (still often taken for Stanislavsky the Seeker) seems a tarnished statue of a hero, whose thinking registers as too patriarchal for feminist actors and theorists, too essentialist for scholars of performance studies, and too absolute for contemporary theatre artists in a multi-cultural and unsure age” (“Stanislavsky and Politics” 25–26). Interestingly, these remarks are also applicable to the various academic constructions and deconstructions of the figure of Grotowski—which include but are not limited to Modernist Genius, Avant-Garde Garde Elitist, Great Reformer, Trickster, and Charlatan—either corroborating or discounting the competing interpretations of the nature, function, and value of what Grotowski proposed in practice—a Polish version of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, a Western attempt at reinventing ritual and tradition, an outmoded counterculture movement, or even perhaps a dangerous sect.

Carnicke imbues the “tarnished statue of a hero” with new life through her documentation and analysis of the creative research which the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre pursued in spite of the oppressive regime’s effort to control his work. Drawing from her detailed examination of Stanislavsky’s interest in Yoga and Hinduism in Stanislavsky in Focus, Carnicke challenges us to reconsider his contribution to actor training in light of “his psychophysical experimentation with yoga and his interest in modern dance,” which he pursued in his various studios; she asks that we take seriously his “probing of the actor’s dual consciousness,” which she suggests may be of particular interest to “those who try to capture the fragmented nature of the contemporary world”; and she points out that the important insights into “the cognitive processes of performance” which he gained from artistic practice are currently under investigation by cognitive scientists (“Stanislavsky and Politics” 26). Carnicke’s refreshing investigation of Stanislavsky’s lesser known yet arguably most fertile experiments makes it possible to perceive the latter as Stanislavsky’s personal way of resisting Soviet oppression and testing the limits of his own approach. By choosing to work on Tartuffe with the actors of his last studio, Stanislavsky challenged them to cross the boundaries of psychological realism to explore a heightened reality which was more energetically demanding for the ensemble and resulted in a psychophysically charged sense of immediacy. In the last years of his life, Stanislavsky therefore seems to have taken a giant step into the future, anticipating what would later be known as improvisation techniques, physically-based performance, collaborative creation, and devising.

Given that Grotowski claims Stanislavsky as his ancestor, Carnicke’s critical re-evaluation of Stanislavsky calls for an examination of Grotowski’s own interpretation of Stanislavsky’s experimental work identified by Knebel as Active Analysis and described by Toporkov in his book as the Method of Physical Actions. Since Grotowski considered that Stanislavsky’s final experiments provided him with guiding principles for his own work, I will use the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage as an entry point into the work of Grotowski’s collaborators, and examine how the artists involved in my project have integrated, adapted, and/or transformed such principles in their creative research and teaching.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Carnicke’s argument is relevant to my research because women’s participation in and contribution to Grotowski’s cross-cultural investigation of performance has similarly been omitted from theatre history. In The Grotowski Sourcebook, Richard Schechner points to the small number of women among Grotowski’s main representatives and their virtual absence among his official inheritors. Indeed, Grotowski’s legacy seems so unquestionably linked to the men whom he designated as his heirs that my decision to focus exclusively on women may very well appear to theatre historians as radical as Carnicke’s pledge to canonize Knebel, Stanislavsky’s ‘illegitimate’ daughter. I must nevertheless stress one important distinction: I am not claiming that the women whose work I am exploring are Grotowski’s ‘true heirs.’

Instead, I question the necessity to legitimize the artistic achievements of women by tracing their lineage to an influential male innovator as the proof that they are worthy of being included in the canon. This is reflected in the title of my research project, Meetings with Remarkable Women, which appropriates and revises the title of Peter Brook’s film Meetings with Remarkable Men based on the book by G.I. Gurdjieff, whose spiritual teachings influenced both Brook and Grotowski. My project subtitle Tu es la fille de quelqu’un (You Are Someone’s Daughter) featured on the poster created by Polish visual artist Piotr Gardecki (Figure 1.1, page v) similarly reconfigures the title of Grotowski’s 1985 talk “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un” (“You Are Someone’s Son”). These appropriations and revisions have enabled me to challenge the latent assumption that the legacy of innovators such as Stanislavsky, Brook, Gurdjieff, and Grotowski must be channelled through highly selective patrilineal transmission processes to protect them from contamination by misguided applications and unwarranted interpretations.

It is important to note, however, that while such an assumption does appear to underscore dominant cultural constructions of intellectual and artistic lineage, its impact on such unconventional individuals remains debatable. Gurdjieff’s decision to entrust Jeanne de Salzmann with the transmission of his research and the flourishing directorial career of Irina Brook are cases in point. As for Stanislavsky and Grotowski, the former chose a stage name derived from his admiration for the ballerina Stanislavskaia and was later influenced by the work of Isadora Duncan, while the latter’s role model as a young director was Halina Gallowa, a key member of the Reduta Theatre who was Grotowski’s teacher at the Krakow State Theatre Academy.

Moreover, Grotowski’s collaborators always included women: as evidenced by on-going transmission processes, personal testimonies, and unpublished archival sources, as well as books, articles, and interviews unavailable in English, several generations of women from different cultures and traditions actively participated in all phases of Grotowski’s practical research, and continue to play a vital role in today’s transnational community of artists whose work reflects Grotowski’s enduring influence. While they acknowledge and value this influence, these artists clearly assert their creative independence and define in their own ways their relationship to the Polish director’s legacy. Consequently, their work often crosses and blurs boundaries which, in Grotowski’s terminology, delineated the theatrical and post-theatrical periods, from “Art as presentation” to “Art as vehicle.”

By focusing on key women from different generations who share a direct connection to Grotowski’s work, I therefore propose a counter-perspective conducive to the type of re-evaluation advocated by Carnicke but not predicated on claims of faithfulness to a prestigious lineage. This is, of course, a delicate balancing act since the relevance of Grotowski’s approach for contemporary performance practice cannot be underestimated and playing down the significance of his legacy can only be counterproductive. I am therefore grateful to the anonymous reviewers who argued on my behalf that while it was desirable that Grotowski’s name be included in the title of this book, signaling that his approach served as a foundation, point of departure, and provocation for many of his collaborators, the main objective is to foreground the diversity of women’s current artistic practices, the directions in which they have developed their creative research, and the modes of transmission through which they share their embodied knowledge.

Since my own Grotowski-based performance training is rooted in the transmission processes my project investigates, one of the ways of positioning myself within my research has been to reflect on the reasons why in my early twenties, after having studied acting in France for several years, I became interested in pursuing this type of training. I can now say retrospectively that I was searching for a performance practice that could provide women with creative agency beyond the limitations placed upon them by the conventions of psychological realism. In my Master’s thesis, which focused on Sam Shepard and American experimental theatre, I discussed Shepard’s collaboration with actor and director Joseph Chaikin and examined how Chaikin’s work with the Open Theatre was a critique of and response to the dominance of psychological realism. In The Presence of the Actor, Chaikin refers to his experience as an actor initially trained to work in commercial theatre:

My early training for the theatre taught me to represent other people by their stereotype—taught me, in fact, to become the stereotype. [...] In trade papers there are calls for ingenue, leading lady, character actress, male juvenile character, etc. The actor attunes himself to fit the type for which he may be cast. He eventually comes to see people outside the theater as types, just as he does for actors within the theater. Finally, a set of stereotypes is represented to the audience. This in turn is a recommendation to the types within the audience as to how they should classify themselves. (12)

Feminist theorists who have scrutinized the assumptions underlying the conventions of psychological realism concur with Chaikin’s analysis by arguing that realist theatre naturalizes the normative gender roles it reproduces on stage. However, whereas the feminist critique tends to focus on how realist plays and their staging affect audiences, Chaikin is concerned with the actor’s positionality. He points out that actors working in realist theatre are typecast in accordance with the gender roles society expects them to play, and argues that by taking on these roles, actors become complicit with the naturalization process at work in psychological realism, while at the same time being deeply shaped by these representations. He concludes that actors who uncritically embody the role models prescribed by dominant culture inevitably contribute to sustain and promote what he calls “the big setup”:

Actors, through their acting, are validating a definition of identity and rendering other definitions invalid. Recommending a way to perform oneself is working to sell a mode of being. [For example,] there are people who indicate how we can suffer beautifully: if you can suffer the way Ingrid Bergman suffers, then it is not all that bad to suffer. These actors who become icon-star-favorites have a lot to do with our lives. [...] The more confused and chaotic the era is, the more these icon personalities are taken on as models. [...] They serve an extremely important function and sustain all kinds of misrepresentations, all of which help keep things going as they are. (69–70, 72–73)

In an attempt to break with psychological realism, Chaikin and the collective of the Open Theatre developed physically-based training that was influenced by their encounter with Grotowski. Chaikin’s aim was to alter “the limitations of life as it is lived,” for he was convinced that “when the theatre is limited to the socially possible, it is confined by the same forces that limit society” (22–23). Accord i ng ly, my ex perience of Grotowsk i-based training is that it offers an alternative to psychological realism precisely because it challenges actual and perceived limitations, including social and cultural constructions of gender.

This Life is Not Sufficient

Grotowski is commonly remembered by his collaborators as someone who entrusted them with doing the impossible, a recurring theme in the testimonies of the women and men who collaborated with the Polish director during the various phases of his practical research. The women involved in my project each attested in different ways to this propensity for the impossible, initially rooted in a defiance of the severe restrictions that characterized the oppressive socio-political system of Communist Poland.

For example, Rena Mirecka, a founding member of the Laboratory Theatre and the only woman to have performed in all its productions, asserts that the company’s extremely exacting work ethic, which constantly required actors to go beyond what they already knew, gave her the possibility to do, and the freedom to explore what was missing in her personal life. Iben Nagel Rasmussen, a key member of Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret, recounts that she derived from her experience of Grotowski’s approach the need to forge her artistic independence as a creative artist by developing her own training and transmitting it to others. Maja Komorowska affirms that she gained from her foundational experience at the Laboratory Theatre the assiduity that enabled her to pursue a long and successful film and theatre career. Elizabeth Albahaca emphasizes that the Laboratory Theatre’s final production, in which she performed within the context of occupied Poland, conveyed the power of the human spirit in the darkest of times. Czech theatre artist-scholar Jana Pilatova attests that when faced with the oppressive political situation in her own country, she drew strength, inspiration, and courage from the work she did and witnessed at the Laboratory Theatre. Katharina Seyferth, who was part of the core group of young people involved in the transitional period from paratheatre to the Theatre of Sources, explains that Grotowski urged his collaborators to search for something other than what was already familiar, obvious, or easy, a way of working which, as a young woman who struggled with social norms, she found particularly compelling. Stefania Gardecka, Grotowski’s main administrator, relates how she managed to devise strategic an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Research Context, Interdisciplinary Methodology, Fieldwork Objectives
• 2 Practice: Mapping Out Interconnections
• 3 Towards an Ecology of the Body-in-Life
• 4 At the Crossroads of Theatre, Active Culture, and Ritual Arts
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index