Theatre as an Encounter

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Grotowski believed that the text itself did not have objective value. The strength of a great work lies in its catalytic effect, on all elements of the performance including space, spectators and performers. The words themselves do have an importance, Grotowski refers to classical texts as “a message we receive from previous generations” (p. 55) and values them because they throw a new light on our own condition. But these, by themselves, are literature, not theatre. Its value is in its role as the context for an encounter between creative people. I imagine that Grotowski includes the audience in this statement because he has often made reference to the audience as actively participating in the self-analysis it is provoked into. It is echoed in Peter Brook’s suggestion that the director must direct two ensembles; the performers and the audience.

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Grotowski’s Holy Theatre

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] There is quite a lot of discussion of the Holy Theatre in “The Theatre’s New Testament”. Grotowski makes a distinction between the Courtesan Performer, whose body is for display, and the holy actor who sacrifices (burns away) the body, eliminating anything between the audience member and the raw impulse. The Holy Theatre has a different set of responsibilities. Rather than existing for the satisfaction of a spectator’s cultural needs, it is there to provoke a confrontation between the spectator and himself and allows the spectator to enter a process of self development. It requires a special kind of audience, making this form elitist, but not in a way that makes distinctions based on education or economic status.

This theatre asks the essential questions about the differences between theatre and TV/film and amplifies the gap. If theatre cannot be richer than television, then it should be poorer (p. 41). Where the Rich Television makes use of lavish sets, quick changes of location and time, and elaborates lights, the Poor Theatre concentrates the event on the closeness of the living organism and a real sense of time and physical location.

This theatre is meant to explore Myth, but from a common awareness. It is not to be holy in any kind of religious or dogmatic way, but meant to provide a secular consciousness. In order to accomplish this, the process of creation is not based on speculation, but on experience. The pieces combine images of the sacred and the holy and seem to be created in a “hands on” manner, exploring practical ways to include fascination and negation with/of the subject.

The Holy Theatre is an extreme expression of performance in its most raw form. The laboratory conditions Grotowski placed on this work were not meant to create commercially viable entertainment or high culture. He meant to explore, with extreme control, the essential characteristics of live performance. It is an ideal which, even if it cannot be made practically in the business of theatre, can exist as a direction for further work. Even if it is not wholly attainable, it can produce practical results.

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New Testament of the Theatre

The second chapter of Grotowski’s “Towards a Poor Theatre” discusses a process of paring the form down to an absolute, defined, essential craft. The rigorous subtraction ideally strips away all cultural and personal/psychological information in search of a gestural form that transcends language and enters the “space” of mythic expression. It is a form of the Holy Theatre as described by Brook. Both Grotowski and Brook oppose “dangerous” eclecticism in the theatre, but Grotowski is more zealous in this conviction. He uses the term “Rich Theatre” to describe performance aesthetics that have been diluted by other forms of plastic and performed arts.

This purist view contrasts directly with a widely held concept derived from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (”total work of art” or “complete artwork”). Wagner’s total theatre sought to encompass music, performance, and the visual arts (Wikipedia: Wagner) and unify them under the vision of a single director. Growtowski pushes against every facet of this status quo, placing all components of training, preparation, production, performance – even performance space – under consideration.

Grotowski proposes a deep redefinition of theatre, one which severs its dependency upon literature. In his proposed 8-year training process he emphasizes that the first four years (preferably started at an early age of 14) should not include education in literature and the history of the theatre. Instead, he proposes years of practical and technical exercises and humanistic study of the most stimulating phenomena of world culture. Secondary Training of an additional four years would include apprenticeship and study of literature, painting, philosophy and so forth, but only to a degree necessary in the profession, and “not to shine in snobbish society” (Grotowski p.61).

The role of literature in this theatre is placed on a lower step than in others. It is meant to provide the common ground for a confrontation between the individual spectator and concepts that are deeply rooted in his or her culture/psyche/nationality/religion/philosophy. It covers ground that is, as Grotowski puts it, so deeply rooted that we feel it our blood. He is speaking of myths that we carry with us and maybe even beleieve wthout knowing we do — spiritual myths of rebirth and resurrection; biological myths of birth, gender and death; nationalistic myths of progress, power and “the other”. He proposes a Holy Theatre which provokes a spectator’s self analysis by entering myth and simultaneously profaning it. It is profaned by intersecting it with experience and made sacred by the performer’s sacrifice to it; his/her abandonment to it.

In Grotowski’s words, “If we really wish to delve deeply into the logic of our mind and behaviour and reach their hidden layer, their secret motor, then the whole system of signs built into the performance must appeal to our experience, to the reality which has surprised and shaped us, to this language of gestures, mumblings, sounds and intonations picked up in the streets, at work, in cafés – in short, all human behaviour which has made an impression on us.” (p. 52)

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Jerzy Grotowski: Towards a Poor Theatre

Jerzy Grotowski’s “The Towards a Poor Theatre”.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] In this first chapter of the book, Grotowski explains the concept of the Poor Theatre. His studio is a laboratory which aims to study the essential elements of theatre. His work is a process of reduction, moving away from eclecticism and a “total theatre” of composite disciplines towards a singular discipline, examining impulse and rendering it as reaction (p. 15-17). Ideally, the Poor Theatre is a place where the spectator sees only the impulse made visible. The “skill” of the performer, in this work, is in the transparency of the actor’s body to the impulse; a process Growtowski calls “via negativa”; an eradication of obstacles rather than a layering of skills.

Grotowski mentions how Stanislavski’s dialectic relationship to the work influenced his own process. Grotowski, taking Stanislavski as an ideal, sought to renew the craft by renewing its basic tools. While the approach was similar (developing a methodology of observation and experimentation) the results differed widely.

The description of the laboratory work sounds familiar because it has been echoed and replicated in most modern theatre arts training environments. The actor approaches the work through a process of reduction (“via negativa”), stripping away and eliminating inhibitions and “blocks”. Working from impulse in this environment does not mean generating the will to do something, but “resigning from not doing it” (p. 17). He names the essential unit of expression a “sign” instead of “gesture” because the gesture is seen as a departure from the pure impulse and a move toward behaviour which is informed by myriad components of psychology, society and belief.

In this extremity of reduction, all elements of performance are put under the microscope. Only the essential is retained. For Grotowski, these are the actors body (the site of discourse) and the audience (the receiver of discourse). Semantic theory would suggest that there is a third element, the signified, but I’ve a feeling that discussion leading in that direction is a departure from theatre practice, and be more appropriate to linguistics.

The process of stripping away ultimately leads into other areas, because the Rich theatre is an extension of literature, political dialogues, visual art, music – even myth, religion and anthropology. Grotowski acknowledges this and points to one essential truth about modern culture; that there is no longer a group identification with myth. It has lost its potency as a direct equation between personal truth and universal truth because we no longer live under a “common sky” (p. 23) of belief. But this does not mean that theatre is now divorced from being “mythic”. Grotowski discusses the role of theatre in confronting myth, in forcing the body to such an extremity of expression that it becomes mythic in and of itself.

Throughout this chapter he is proposing a theatre of transformation instead of spectacle; one that must be actively read by its audience in the same way as one interprets language. Because the work is not prescribed (there is no proposed lexicon of signs) but created newly each time and through the experience of each actor. A theatre of this sort must, by definition, connect to its audience on a very deep level; placing the senses and individual associations over a hegemony of language.

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The Immediate Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 4, The Immediate Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] The Immediate Theatre is the theatre of the fresh. In this chapter Brook generously positins himself as a fellow “student” of the art. The most valuable thing I have taken from this book, and that I continue to practice years later is a tolerance for ambiguity. This is largely because, as Brook implies, performance is constantly recreated. Film is a representation of the past. There are great and timeless films, but a popular film loses its “playability” in 10 years. Production designs for theatre have an even shorter life span according to Brook. Even beyond the design elements which might incorporate fashionable colors or costume details borrowed from popular culture, the character of a performance changes in the course of a run. Opening nights are filled with tension and newness, the edgy risks of the new production are highlighted because they have not been done before an audience yet. By second night, the audience is not as exposed because they know it has been done at least once.

In this chapter, more than in the others, Brook addresses Time and the theatre. In a cast of older and younger performers, you can see the differences in actor training techniques and the practices of different “generations”. Brook calls upon all the ranks in a company to aid in the art of reinvention and re-creating (of play-ing) during rehearsals. He speaks of the importance of improvisation, not to indulge in the self or for its own sake, but to step outside of the defined and preconceived and begin to create a creative language unique to the needs of the present work.

Brook also talks about the director in contemporary theatre and the need to guide and unify without a strict pedagogy. A director must keep an eye on all elements of the performance from the shapes suggested by the floor plan to the context of the performance in the culture of its audience. He also speaks of a kind of balancing act, seeing the merits of both the “physical” and “psychological” approaches to performance and always outlines the need for adaptability while serving one vision. Discussion of this chapter is probably better served by comparing experiences in one’s performance and directing with those in the book.

Finally Brook outlines that the search is ultimately a search for form. As we progress forward, sideways and sometimes backward, the art of performance progresses as well. For this reason, there is never likely to be a “World Theatre” (p. 135) but there will be situations where a form will reach a moment of achievement that makes all distinctions and labels (Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate) redundant when compared to the lasting impression it leaves. We are always on the move. One of the hardest things for a young actor to do is to place value in the act of training. We are a society that validates Victorian ideals of forward progress. Reinvention seems counter-productive. Athletes understand the value of training, musicians and dancers do as well. But actors have a task of making their work seem effortless, effacing or masking the evidence of labour. The formula that Brook discusses (Theatre = R r a) is a great tool to examine exactly what we do. Theatre is Repetition, representation and assistance. Repetition gives technical perfection, confidence and strength, but it is hollow. The act of representation breathes life into the work, searching for the immediate, the real and comparing it to the fake. Assistance comes from the director, who is a privileged observer and guide, and also from the audience, who assists by participating: by making it meaningful and allowing the truth of the performance to become a truth of life, for two or so hours.

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The Rough Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 3, The Rough Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Rough Theatre is the theatre of tattered edges, dirt, makeshift and make-do. In direct contrast to the Holy, the Rough gives more validity to down-to-earth crudeness than to the eloquence of prayer (p. 71). Brook reminds us that theatre can exist in an attic or a bombed out theatre because the audience recognizes its necessity and purpose and that one of the responsibilities of the theatre is to meet this expectation of necessity (the “usefulness” of performance). Whether it is to provide an hour of escape during wartime or to rouse the spirit of revolution, the rough theatre uses whatever is at hand to fulfill its purpose in a practical manner.

Brook points out that there is a kind of antagonism between the rough and the holy; one is decidedly less high-falootin’ than the other. But he also reminds us that while the Rough Theatre makes an effort to exist outside of style it, in fact creates its own (while denying that it has – a knd of reverse snobbery). A movement in popular music comes to mind. Many are aware of the “alternative” music scenes which cropped up in the last decade or so. This genre-word sprang up to confront the overproduced sound of studio and techno bands, but after a while it formulated itself. The word “alternative” which, in its purest sense should refer to a vastness of possibilities, comes to mean a quite strictly defined look and sound. It has become quite easy to identify the “alternative” in the marketplace by the culture of imitation that it has propogated (the deadly).

In discussing the slope between the rough and the deadly, Brook looks to Brecht; a subject anyone interested in performance cannot overlook. But the “Brechtian” elements of contemporary theatre can often be seen as a victim of their own importance. Brook criticizes misreadings and half-digested imitations of Brecht’s work in this chapter. He does make a good point when he suggests that one should consider the context of Brecht’s work. I am of the opinion that today’s audiences are more skeptical, more intellectually engaged and already more alienated than Brecht’s original audience. Popular media culture and post-modern practices such as the displacement of symbols and the fracturing of narrative have conditioned us to be judgmental and subject illusion to scrutiny (maybe even creating an illusion of scrutiny: scrutiny as entertainment?). Perhaps this is why Brecht said what he did near the end of his days; that the theatre should have naivety as well.

As he does, Brook ambles quite comfortably from one topic to another in this chapter; from history to anthropology to politics to an actor’s studio work. He draws the reader to Shakespeare as an example of a theatre where the rough and the holy coexist and seem to energize each other by their contrasting qualities. He is a advocate of connecting the work on stage to its surroundings by using costume, setting (or no setting) to give the action of the play meaning and to assist in the fluid interchange between the outer and inner worlds that Shakespearean structure navigates so freely.

I would like to highlight one section that really stood out for me this time around. It is quite short; pages 77 to 79 where Brook addresses the simplification of the terms “psychological” and “naturalistic”. It interests me because the first hurdle one addresses in actor training revolves around the distinction between playing emotion and playing action. In good practice you want to discourage emotion and encourage action. But there comes a point where one leads the other and they seem (to the outside eye) one and the same. It is touched on in this section. I know that many of the actors studying in the studio have, at times, been exasperated by this, but I honestly think of this as the first lesson of the actor in training.

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