I think of it as asking “Nutrition versus Flavour: What is a Chef’s Job?” – creating a dichotomy when, in the finest examples of the craft, the two are not mutually exclusive. A comedian would say that provocation is entertainment. A person who loves mystery novels and puzzles would feel cheated by an entertainment that gave up its resolution too early, or too simplistically. A great story of revenge would not be satisfying if the antagonist did not provoke our moral outrage, making us wish he’d get his just dessert. And a story would fail us if it did not leave us with something pertaining to the here and now; whether to confirm our hopes in a happy ending or to shock us by revealing a dark, but familiar evil of the human condition. Provocation is at the heart of our most classic and most contemporary entertainments.

I believe the dichotomy is in “Preaching versus Playing”. In the early stages of childhood development, we play games with children that have to do with sneaking up and shouting “Boo!” Normally this behaviour provokes the primal fear response. But because the child is playing a game with someone known and safe, the response is expressed as laughter. It is the sense of safety and trust placed in the environment that allows “play” to happen.

This is where I see the audience of today’s shrinking theatre. They’re a bit shy of playing because the last few times they did they got burned, or someone cheated on the prize. To compensate, the artists have turned to preaching; telling people why art is good for them and how culturally bankrupt they will be if they don’t support it. Well, when was the last time you genuinely felt like doing something because someone shouted “It’s good for you.”?

I’ve had the unique pleasure to work with a theatre company who regularly sells out all of its performances. In most cases the entire run will be sold out before the middle of the first week. How is this possible? I think it has to do with what Aaron posted as “starting a tribe”. Which, if you follow Aaron’s links through to Seth Godin’s talk, has to do with becoming a leader of a group who shares common values. Like Godin’s idea of group organization (which he says is 10,000 years old) theatre has to turn back to an older model. We were the story tellers, councilors, educators and newspapers of our tribes. Making good, quality theatre is part of the solution, of course. But, as anyone in business would say, making a “better mousetrap” is not addressing the whole picture.

To get our audience back, I think we have to get them to trust us. We have to give them their sense of confidence by not telling them what is good for them. And I think it is the artist’s job to develop and reward his audience by acknowledging its shared values and being true to them. If you bulls**t them, just like cheating a kid in a game, they’ll stop wanting to play with you.

To go back to the culinary metaphor; I compare the audience to the customer base of a restaurant. Remember a time in Vancouver (it was only the 70s) when there were virtually no ethnic restaurants? In about a decade Vancouverites became a lot more “foody” and developed the confidence to experiment and become the loyal supporters of “their favourite” Thai, Japanese or French restaurant. Part of that had to do with the quality of the product, but the other half of that relationship came from the shared set of values surrounding the food.

With all the tools we have at our disposal today such as social networking sites, twitter and other web 2.0 applications, we can “find our tribe”, as Aaron quotes, and offer to lead them. I am confident that theatre will not go the way of the dinosaur, no matter how bad an economy gets. It is too close to our innate mode of communication. If Peter Brook can wander post-war Germany and find cabarets being performed in bombed-out buildings, we can certainly find our audience.

So I would say that theatre’s job is to find its audience, not in a generalized way that “entertains” or “challenges” them as if they a non-descript mass; a restaurant never says it is simply feeding a group of people. The audience is sophisticated, opinionated and has a lot of information at its disposal. It wants dialogue and memorable experiences. We have to cultivate the energy to meet that expectation if we want them to come out and surpass it if we want them to come back for more.

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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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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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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IUGTE offers many workshops across Europe, often in isolated towns during the off-season for tourism. It is an ideal environment for disciplined work and reflection. This particular workshop and conference offered five days of intense physical training followed by a three-day international conference on physical theatre techniques.

We were somewhat isolated in the ski resort town of Bovec (pronounced BŌ-vets), Slovenia, surrounded by the monumental landscape of the Alps on all sides and enjoying the opportunity to study with very few distractions. Our community for the week consisted of artists from around the world; Canadian, American, Austrian, British, Croatian, Irish, Ukrainian, Norwegian and Russian. We met each day, trained in the morning and afternoon and then met for discussion each evening. The training concentrated on the biomechanics of gesture, following in the area of study pioneered by Meyerhold over 90 years ago.

The system of biomechanics was developed in post-revolutionary Russia and at a time when the ideology of the newly formed Soviet Union placed the worker at the center of the national identity. Industrialization was a key element of the Soviet zeitgeist. Mechanical processes became the model for creation, production and management. Even human motion was rationalized and examined to increase productivity and industrial output. In this context, the dominant metaphor of progress was the machine and by transposing the language used to describe mechanical processes, the contemplation of human motion could also progress and enter the industrial age.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, the artistic pioneer and creator of biomechanics, was born in 1874 and died c.a. 1940. He was a student of Stanislavski but established himself as a major innovator of theatre in his own right. Much of his work was in reaction to the naturalistic theatre of the 19th century and investigated a theater that could reveal inner dialogue by means of movement. He rejected aestheticism, a popular artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “art for art’s sake”, and endorsed the constructivist view that art should always serve a political and social function. This “functionalism” is present on many levels in biomechanics training.

In Meyerhold’s view, the actor is an artist of plastic forms in space and human motion is a primary area of study for performance. Biomechanics provides a language for analyzing movement and outlines a practice for developing and reproducing it precisely. The system divides motion into four parts; Otkas, Posyl, Stoika and Tormos. These Russian terms are standardized, much like the French terms used in ballet training. The following definitions are transcribed from Jenny Marlowe’s article on the Meyerhold Technique:

Otkas – literally, “the refusal” – is a set-up or preparation for the main movement of the sequence, enacted by a movement in the opposite direction, like a spring.

Posyl – literally, “the sending” – is the main action of the sequence – the execution of the movement set up by the otkas.

Stoika – literally, “the stance” – is the completion of the movement – a stop-motion pose that serves both as the closure of the posyl and as the starting point for the next stage of the étude.

Tormos – literally, “brake” or “resistance” – is the element underlying the other three parts of the movement sequence – the physical control which allows fluid, precise completion of the action.

Under Ostrenko, we studied these principal elements of movement in the well-known étude, Throwing the Stone. As we repeated and refined our understanding of this movement sequence, we were able to use this technical language to give particular, individual feedback. Often are the times when a performer might obscure the clarity of a performance by idiosyncratic or unconscious habits. A performer in training might rush from moment to moment or appear stiff and wooden. Using the language of biomechanics and repeating the etudes, the rushed actor can learn to inhabit “otkas” (preparation) before rushing from idea to idea; the wooden actor can adopt more freedom of “posyl” (sending) instead of moving from stance to stance.

In our week of training, this language was applied to many exercises, each one designed to address form in movement on the stage. We learned to work with the aesthetics of figural composition by doing pieces inspired by the great neoclassical and baroque painters. One of the benefits of biomechanics lies in its versatility. It is not a performance style, but a language of construction.

It is beneficial to all styles of performance, even to the naturalism of film acting. Some of the most prominent practitioners of the American “method(s)” have come to the conclusion that much of what happens on the stage or in the frame of a shot is “action”. Whether in the extremities of Meyerhold’s symbolist art or in the minimalism of a ”kitchen sink drama”, what happens to the performer is based in what they do, not solely on what they think or feel. It is becoming more widely accepted in actor training that psychological and physiological processes are inextricably linked, requiring a psychophysical method to training. Meyerhold argued that one could call up emotions in performance through movement and gesture. This concept is present in some of the oldest texts on actor training from Cicero’s writings on rhetoric and gesture and the Natya Shastra by the Sanskrit sage Bharata to the more recent writings of Grotowski, Barba, Brook and Bogart.

Biomechanics does not stand alone as a complete or closed method of actor training. Through rigorous, skills-based physical training, the performer can develop balance, strength and coordination and integrate these with the unique conditions of performance on the stage. Like many physically-based training methods, biomechanics develops concentration and awareness of self and others. The breaking down and sequencing of movement focuses the performers’ perceptions on the moment to moment life in a scene, not solely on what is going on inside the mind.

Meyerhold’s constructivist views and Bolshevik sympathies did not prevent Stalin’s government from closing the Meyerhold Theatre in 1938. Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and finally executed sometime around early 1940. But his writings and legacy of work passed on through his students have continued to influence contemporary physical theatre practice.

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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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