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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