The famous Polish experimental director, Jerzy Grotowski, made an invaluable contribution to the development of the world modern theatrical process. His search during the theatrical (1959–1969) and paratheatrical (1970–1979) periods acutely raised the problem of the relationship between the actor and the audience in the process of creating and perceiving a performance or ritual… Grotowski’s discoveries expanded and deepened the subject of the theatre, actualised the philosophy of perception of the field of joint action by the viewer-participant and the actor-creator. The article examines the fundamental foundations of the reconstruction of ritual structures and space in the earliest work of the Polish experimenter. On the example of the play Shakuntala based on the text of the classic Sanskrit drama by Kalidasa (1960), the main methods of working on new connections between the actor and the audience in the course of theatrical performance as a ritual form of complicity are examined. At this stage of the director’s work, the primary expressive means are: deconstruction of the stage space, freedom from a clear division into the stage and the audience – this allows the viewer to be included in the process of theatrical performance, makes him or her an active participant in the action; a specific selection of material for the production, a classic Indian text that simultaneous ly arouses irony in the director, actors and viewers, and at the same time refers to the story of eternal love at the archetypal level; the use of children’s drawings in the process of creating stage costumes as a kind of fetishisation of ritual time and space; creation of a unique bodily score of actors to achieve maximum penetration into the problems of the text and at the same time exclusion from it. The central figure in the production is the actor who, without penetrating the stage image at the level of the psychological score of the role, using a mode of existence close to the theatrical systems of V. Meyerhold and B. Brecht, creates the score of the role, combining bodily techniques of life (M. Moss) and gesture in metaphysical dimension (M. Jousse). The performer’s body acquires the functions of a conductor, creates a new type of communicative model of actor-viewer relations, reveals the dichotomy of visual mise-en-scene solution and the verbal textual part of the performance. Owing to the use of Indian sign systems, the traditional theatrical performance connects with the prototype of the ritual structure that is being created here and now in the living process of the action.