A Heart of Flesh: Beyond “Creative Liturgy”

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A Heart of Flesh: Beyond “Creative Liturgy” Catherine Madsen In the mid‐1980s, a young acting student, Thomas Richards, took a two‐week workshop in California with the great Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Grotowski was the intellectual heir of Konstantin Stanislavski and the founder of laboratory theater, a school of acting based on intensive improvisation and concentrated emotional power. His aim was to create what he called “a poor theatre,” in which the actor’s sharply honed skills took the place of elaborate sets and props. Sometimes he spoke of a “holy theatre,” whose spareness and intensity could raise performance to the level of ritual. As a first assignment in the workshop, Grotowski asked Richards and the other students to show him what they thought they would be doing there. They put together a short piece that involved spontaneous singing, chanting, dancing, and running barefoot into the prickly desert. To their confusion, Grotowski denounced these initial attempts as “universal human banalities” (20) and sent three of them off to renew their tetanus shots. For the first solo assignment, each student was to compose a brief “mystery play” built on a traditional song from childhood. Richards put together a sequence of symbolic actions to express his feelings for his father, added some unrehearsed elements at the last minute, and gave a performance he felt as cathartic, soul‐baring and exhausting. Grotowski watched him impassively and said simply, “Please repeat.” As Richards discovered over the next two weeks through much humiliating critique, Grotowski’s use of improvisation was not at all free‐form and spontaneous. It was highly structured and painstakingly revised. It ruthlessly cannibalized past experience and spontaneous emotion for clear and repeatable moves. Richards had assumed that emotional intensity would communicate itself simply by being intense; as it turned out, his audience only saw him working himself into a frenzy for no intelligible reason. Long afterward—by this time having worked as Grotowski’s assistant for several years—Richards reflected, “I had mistaken agitated nerves for true emotions; I had avoided true practical work, and tried to pump an emotional state” (36). Anyone familiar with contemporary liberal Jewish liturgy will recognize some of the same beginners’ mistakes. The quick and uncritical construction, the emphasis on kavvanah or “intention,” the assumption that feeling conveys itself automatically, the effort to generate ecstatic states without first having laid a solid structural groundwork: these are more or less the working methods of the Jewish Renewal movement, feminist experimental liturgy, the current Reconstructionist siddur, and (minus the ecstatic states) liberal Jewish interpretive prayer generally. The emphasis is on “having a liturgical experience,” not on “performing a liturgical act,” and the Orthodox sense of fulfilling a liturgical obligation is out of the picture. Yet an experience is not always available for the asking. Even kavvanah cannot be reliably summoned, and is apt to evaporate at the fatal imperative, “Please repeat.” Liturgy differs from theater in several obvious ways. It is meant for participants, not for spectators; it is slower‐moving and less compactly dramatic; it is in no sense an entertainment but makes a direct, naked effort to intervene in our lives. Theater, like literature generally, operates at one remove from actually giving commands. In this sense, liturgy is not and cannot be a purely literary form. But liturgy shares with theater the need for aesthetic and psychological coherence. The participant in liturgy, like the audience at a play, must have the sense of being expertly guided. Inept writing, sudden gratuitous political gestures, and a sweet tooth for novelty—those hallmarks of contemporary “creative liturgy”—produce neither holy theater nor durable prayer. The leopards in Kafka’s parable break into the temple so dependably that they finally become part of the ritual, but there are kavvanot that will never be more than irritants no matter how often we hear them. On what basis can “creative liturgy” be evaluated? Does it want to be evaluated? It turns away critique with those two dread adjectives, elitist and judgmental. But repetition leads inevitably to evaluation. A one‐time audience may not be highly critical of the play, but the actors who must produce the same effects night after night...