Grotowski's Work Research Articles

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

The Childhood of Theatre: The Errant Method for an ‘Infant Public’

Chiara Guidi, along with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, was one of the founders in 1981 of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (now renamed Societas), the Italian company that, above any other, has been at the forefront of the international theatre scene since the early 1980s. She was the soul of dramatic rhythm and vocal composition for the company’s productions, directing numerous plays and researching each actor’s spoken part. Author and producer of sound theatre since the 1990s, she has also created an intense artistic experience with children as part of her research and analysis of the relationship between voice and childhood, which has earned her several awards, including an Ubu Prize in 2013. In this interview1 she discusses the early projects of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which explored immersive, environmental performances for and with children – a line of research within the company’s multidirectional and overlapping experimental activity that she led. Dominika Laster is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work (2016), and is Executive Co-Director of the ‘Performance in the Peripheries’ initiative (see https://www.performanceperipheries.com).

Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing, and Transmission in the Grotowski Work

Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing, and Transmission in the Grotowski Work

Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work by Dominika Laster

Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work by Dominika Laster

Dominika Laster, Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work

Dominika Laster provides a comprehensive analysis and lucid synthesis of several periods of Grotowski’s work around the theme of memory in the performer’s craft, which is ultimately seen as the “work on oneself.”

Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work. By Dominika Laster. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2016; 163 pp.; illustrations. $35.00 paper

Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work. By Dominika Laster. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2016; 163 pp.; illustrations. $35.00 paper

Stanislavsky to Grotowski: Actor to Performer/Doer

Stanislavsky's ‘life of the human spirit’ is at the heart of his understanding of how the actor could become an organic actor rather than a player of borrowed actions and lines. In this article Maria Shevtsova explores the links between Stanislavsky's aspirations for the actor and Grotowski's ‘holy’ actor, the latter providing the impetus for a theatre of presence rather than one of presentation – one that is concerned with the embodiment of fictional bodies and souls. The notion of actor ‘training’ is re-examined in the light of Stanislavsky's practice concerning the actor's mindful and probing work on himself/herself. Grotowski's work on presence-in-action, the basis first of the performer and then of of the doer, has been a catalyst for the singer-movers of Teatr ZAR and this group's goal of spiritual journeying, shared also by its spectators. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book is the The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (co-authored, 2013). She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Embodied Memory: Body-Memory in the Performance Research of Jerzy Grotowski

In this article Dominika Laster examines the embodied-memory work undertaken by the Polish theatre director and performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski. While Grotowski approached work with memory – which in his practice necessarily implied body-memory – in a variety of ways, it was often as a mode of inquiry. For Grotowski, there were at least two different types of memory work, which emerge in two distinct phases of his research. The first was the use of body-memory undertaken during the Theatre of Production phase. Here, the work with body-memory was used as a tool in the actor's process of self-penetration and opening, serving as an instrument in the rediscovery of impulses and intentions of a past moment. This process of rediscovery is integral to the freeing of creativity and tapping into the obstructed internal resources of the actor. Another use of memory work, which became articulated in the phase of Grotowski's research known as Art as Vehicle, is that which facilitates the rediscovery of essence. Grotowski's practice of ‘active remembering’ functioned as a tool in the search for one's essence, understood as the most intimate, pre-cultural aspect of the self, which precedes difference and is at once the most singular and universal aspect of being. Dominika Laster is a Lecturer in Theatre. Her book A Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing, and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and her edition of Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland, are forthcoming from Seagull Press (distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press).

Toward the Non-(Re)presentational Actor: From Grotowski to Richards

Situating Apocalypsis cum figuris as a turning point in Grotowski's efforts to move beyond theatrical representation, Salata considers the trajectory in Grotowski's work from acting to doing. Emphasizing the centrality of Buber's concept of the I-Thou, Salata examines the implications of Grotowski's search for unmediated perception through the lens of such theorists as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Levinas.

Reply to Stanislavsky

While it has its origins in a talk given at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1969, this key essay has never previously appeared in English. Publications in Italian, Polish, and Spanish, however, have ensured the circulation of this historically crucial text in European and South American theatre culture, resulting in a far more accurate historicization of Grotowski's work and its indebtedness to Stanislavsky.

Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts

The past 21 years constitute a period longer than Grotowski's entire work in the theatre, even if we add his training as actor and director. He spent I8 years in the theatre, including 1 years (1957-1968) as a director. We must take note of these facts to avoid misunderstanding. Grotowski's work since 1985 represents the closure of a 30-year creative journey-the achievement and crowning of a lifetime. This is the fourth period of his work. The first, the of Productions, lasted from either 1957 (the year of his directorial debut, Ionesco's The Chairs, at the Stary Teatr in Cracow) or 1959 (the founding of the Teatr Trzynastu Rzqd6w in Opole, which later evolved into the Teatr Laboratorium) until 1969. The second period was the of Participation (known as Active Culture or Paratheatre, 1969-1978), the third the of Sources (1976-1982). The fourth period, the Ritual Arts, corresponds to the work he has been doing in Italy. The short interim period after the Theatre of Sources, when he was working in California, is known, to use his term, as Drama. It is possible to associate this term Objective Drama withJung's unconscious or T. S. Eliot's correlative, but it would be more profitable to link it to the distinction between objective art and subjective art made by G.I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949) (see Gordon 1978; Bennett I973). Subjective art relies on a randomness or individual view of things and phenomena, and thus it is often governed by human caprice. Art, on the other hand, has an extraand supra-individual quality, and it can thereby reveal the laws of fate and the destiny of man. * The term Objective Art appeared in 1921, completely independently

Two Years before the Master

Ed. note: We received fiom Philip Winterbottom a journal of 1oo manuscript pages telling his reactions to being inJerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Project at the University of California-Irvine, fromJanuary 1984 to April 1985. Because of space limitations, we are printing only a few fiagments from Winterbottom's journal. Perhaps some publisher will pick up the whole journal, read it, and issue it as a monograph. It is one of the few documents regarding Grotowski's work that speaks in a wholly personal voice. We believe it reflects the way a number of persons who have worked with Grotowski over the years feel about him and his methods.

The Four Theatres of Jerzy Grotowski: an Introductory Assessment

The original series of TQ included very little about the work of the pioneering Polish director Jerzy Grotowski – not for any lack of offerings on the subject, but because potential contributors seemed unable to distinguish discipleship from the need for analytical description. It is, therefore, with special pleasure that we now include, by way of introduction to the more detailed study of specific aspects of Grotowski's work, this clear overview of the director's development, from his first experiments in Opole, Poland, over 25 years ago, to his present researches into ‘objective drama’ in California. Grotowski himself has divided this work into four distinct though developmental phases, and here Richard Fowler, himself currently responsible for the Canada Project of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, outlines the distinctive nature and achievements of each successive stage of the work.