Chapter 2: The Holy Theatre

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 seems to have become the backbone of the work conducted at Paris’ International Centre for Theatre Research. Here is an essay on the topic, “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.
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