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.

Other Reading:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike

The Holy Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 2: The Holy Theatre

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Holy Theatre the theatre of the invisible made visible. Brook calls for a theatre that not only offers the possibility of presenting the “invisible” but also the conditions that make its perception possible. He presents four pioneers of the Holy; Merce Cuningham, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski and The Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. In these four sections convey what one could take to be the main values of a Holy Theatre.

1) The importance of a tradition, or knowledge of one’s place in the evolution of one’s discipline.

2) The invisible can never really be perceived by pointing directly at it. It must be evoked through symbolism that has clarity. By clarity, I think he means a truth that is not vague but has immediate resonance without necessarily being immediately readable (This = That).

3) He makes an excellent point of showing how one’s art has to be validated by providing its practitioners a living. There are implied questions here to the reader; “What would you consider a living?” “How would you arrange your life so that you could serve your art and have it serve you back?” “Where does your work and your community lie? Is it in a friendly environment where there is a unity of values and tension shared by the work and its audience, or is it in hostile territory where its value might be to divide and provoke its audience?”

4) The Holy Theatre often contains its opposite. With moments of apotheosis come moments of derision. We cannot see all of the invisible at once and must be knocked back down to earth. It seems to be an essential aspect of the human condition, which a Holy Theatre could not deny without becoming deadly.

This chapter makes brief mention of Tradition and its role in the theatre, and references several areas of inquiry that were coming into the fore at the time of writing. He calls it a “rich and dangerous eclecticism” (p. 63). Superficiality is, as he has pointed out, the road to deadliness. But, ironically, so is tradition. This contradiction seems to have become the backbone of the work conducted at Paris’ International Centre for Theatre Research. There is an essay, “Peter Brook and Traditional Thought” by Basarab Nicolescu Translated by David Williams. Basarab Nicolescu is a quantum physicist from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Paris 6.

Other Reading:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike