TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE by JERZY GROTOWSKI

[selections]

from TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE

We are seeking to define what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle. Secondly, our productions are detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship. That is, we consider the personal and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art.

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The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate the organism’s resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.

Ours then is a via negativa - not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks.

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Through practical experimentation I sought to answer the questions with which I had begun: What is the theatre? What is unique about it? What can it do that film and television cannot? Two concrete conceptions crystallized: the poor theatre and performance as an act of transgression.

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of the perpetual, direct “live” communion.

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No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in theatre. We have resigned from the stage-and-auditorium plant: for each production, a new space is designed for the actors and spectators. Thus, infinite variation of performer-audience relationships is possible…The essential concern is finding the proper spectator-actor-relationship for each type of performance and embodying the decision in physical arrangements.

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Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness - fulfill ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent. In this struggle with one’s own truth, this effort to peel off the life-mask, the theatre, with its full-fleshed perceptivity, has always seemed to me a place of provocation. It is capable of challenging itself and its audience by violating accepted stereotypes of vision, feeling, and judgment - more jarring because it is imaged in the human organism’s breath, body, and inner impulses. This defiance of taboo, this transgression, provides the shock which rips off the mask, enabling us to give ourselves nakedly to something which is impossible to define but which contains Eros and Caritas.

from THE THEATRE’S NEW TESTAMENT

The word research implies that we approach our profession rather like the mediaveal wood carver who sough to recreate in his block of wood a form which already existed. We do not work the same way as an artist or the scientist, but rather as the shoemaker looking for the right spot on the show in which to hammer the nail.

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We can thus define the theatre as “what takes place between spectator and actor”…Since our theatre consists only of actors and audience, we make special demands on both parties. Even though we cannot educate the audience - not systematically, at least - we can educate the actor.

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Just as only a great sinner can become a saint according to the theologians (Let us not forget the Revelation: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth”), in the same way the actor’s wretchedness can be transformed into a kind of holiness. The history of the theatre as numerous examples of this. [Revelations 3:16]

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If we were to express all of this in one sentence I would say that it is all a question of giving oneself. One must give oneself totally, in one’s deepest intimacy, with confidence, as when one gives oneself in love. Here lies the key. Self-penetration, trance, excess, the formal discipline itself - all this can be realized, provided one has given oneself fully, humbly and without defense. This act culminates in climax. It brings relief. None of the exercises in the various fields of the actor’s training must be exercises in skill. They should develop a system of allusions which lead to the elusive and indescribable process of self-donation.

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We are not concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyse himself. We are concerned with the spectator who does not stop at the elementary stage of psychic integration, content with his own petty, geometrical, spiritual stability, knowing exactly what is good and what is evil, and never in doubt. For it was not to him that El Greco, Norwid, Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky spoke, but to him who undergoes an endless process of self-development, whose unrest is not general but directed towards a search for the truth about himself and his mission in life.

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In order that the spectator may be stimulated into self-analysis when confronted with the actor, there must be some common ground already existing in both of them, something they can either dismiss in one gesture or jointly worship. Therefore the theatre must attach what might be called the collective complexes of society, the core of the collective subconscious or perhaps super-conscious (it does not matter what we call it), the myths which are not an invention of the mind but are, so to speak, inherited through one’s blood, religion, culture and climate.

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representations collectives

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It is far less risky to be Mr. Smith all one’s life than to be Van Gogh. But, fully conscious of our social responsibility, we could wish that there were more Van Goghs than Smiths, even though life is much simpler for the latter.

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When i take sides against half-heartedness, mediocrity and the easy-come-easy-go attitude which takes everything for granted, it is simply because we must create things which are firmly oriented towards either light or darkness. But we must remember that around that which is luminous within us, there exists a shroud of darkness which can penetrate but not annihilate.

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the creation of a secular sacrum in the the theatre

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From where can this renewal come?…in short, a few madmen who have nothing to lose and are not afraid of hard work.

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We are talking about profanation. What, in fact, is this but a kind of tactlessness based on the brutal confrontation between our declarations and our daily actions, between the experience of our forefathers which lives within us and our search for a comfortable way of life or our conception of a struggle for survival, between our individual complexes and those of society as a whole?

That implies that every classical performance is like looking at oneself in the mirror, at our ideas and traditions, and not merely the description of what men of past ages thought and felt.

from AKROPOLIS: TREATMENT FOR THE TEXT

The drama formulates a question: what happens to human nature when it faces total violence? The struggle of Jacob and the Angel and the back-breaking labor of the inmates, Paris’ and Helen’s love duet and the derisive screams of the prisoners, the Resurrection of Christ and the ovens - a civilization of contrast and corruption…

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But the struggle for the right to vegetate and to love goes on its everyday pace…There is no hero, no character set apart from the others by his own individuality.

In the fortissimos the rhythm is broken into a climax of words, chants, screams, and noises. The whole thing seems multishaped and misshapen; it dissolves, then re-frames itself into a shivering unity. It is reminiscent of a drop of water under a microscope.

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During the pauses in the work, the fantastic community indulges in daydreams. The wretches take the names of biblical and Homeric heroes. They identify with them and act, within their limitations, their own versions of the legends. It is transmutation through the dream, a phenomenon known to communities of prisoners who, when acting, live a reality different from their own. They give a degree of reality to their dreams of dignity, nobility, and happiness. It is a cruel and bitter game which derides the prisoners’ own aspirations as they are betrayed by reality.

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Each object has multiple uses. The bathtub is a very pedestrian bathtub; on the other hand it is a symbolic bathtub; it represents all the bathtubs in which human bodies were processed for the making of soap and leather. Turned upside down, the same bathtub becomes the altar in front of which an inmate chants a prayer. Set up in a high place, it becomes Jacob’s nuptial bed. The wheelbarrows are tools for daily work; they become strange hearses for the transportation of corpses; propped against the wall they are Priam and Hecuba’s thrones. One of the stove-pipes, transformed by Jacob’s imagination, becomes his grotesque vibe.

from HE WASN’T ENTIRELY HIMSELF

Artaud teaches us a great lesson which none of us can refuse. This lesson is his sickness. Artaud’s misfortune is that his sickness, paranoia, differed from the sickness of the times. Civilisation is sick with schizophrenia, which is a rupture between intelligence and feeling, body and soul. Society couldn’t allow Artaud to be ill in a different way. They looked after him, tortured him with electro-shock treatment, trying to make him acknowledge discursive and cerebral reason: i.e. to take society’s sickness into himself. Artaud defined his illness remarkably in a letter to Jacques Riviere: “I am not entirely myself.” He was not merely himself, he was someone else. He grasped half his own dilemma: how to be oneself. He left the other half untouched: how to be whole, how to be complete.

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And yet when Artaud speaks of release and cruelty we feel he’s touching a truth we can verify in another way. We feel that an actor reaches the essence of his vocation whenever he commits an act of sincerity, when he unveils himself, opens and gives himself in an extreme, solemn gesture, and does not hold back before any obstacle set by custom and behavior. And further, when this act of extreme sincerity is modeled in a living organism, in impulses, a way of breathing, when it is ordered and brought to consciousness, not dissolving into chaos and formal anarchy - in a word, when this act accomplished through the theatre is total, then even if it doesn’t protect, at least it enables us to respond totally, that is, begin to exist. For each day we only react with half our potential.

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Artaud was a great theatre-poet, which means a poet of the possibilities of theatre and not of dramatic literature. Like the mythical prophet Isaiah, he predicts for the theatre something definitive, a new meaning, a new possible incarnation. “Then Emmanuel was born.” Like Isaiah, Artaud knew of Emmanuel’s coming, and what it promised. He saw the image of it through a glass, darkly.

from METHODOLOGICAL EXPLORATION

We believe that in order to fulfill this individuality, it is not a matter of learning new things, but rather of ridding oneself of old habits. For each individual actor it must be clearly established what it is that blocks his intimate associations, thus causing his lack of decision, the chaos of his expression and his lack of discipline; what prevents him from experiencing the feeling of his own freedom, that his organism is completely free and powerful, and that nothing is beyond his capabilities. In other words, how can the obstacles be eliminated?