Tag: Dr Faustus

Grotowski’s Influence: Barba, Brook and Beyond

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • influence

PC: How have people been influenced by Grotowski’s work?

PA: People have been influenced in different ways; from someone who has only read Towards a Poor Theatre and then been inspired by it; to people who have perhaps seen a bit of The Constant Prince or Dr Faustus on film and used that to make their own physical theatre; to people who worked directly with him.

PC: You have mentioned Eugenio Barba a lot. How was he influenced by Grotowski?

PA: Barba always talked about Grotowski as his master; he was always very explicit about that relationship. Barba was his assistant director and apprentice for two years then set up his own company – Odin Teatret in Denmark. He used the training processes, starting from the same point as Grotowski but taking it in a very different direction. He was very much more about making theatre. Barba has kept that company together for fifty years, an extraordinary feat to keep an ensemble making theatre productions. He edited Towards a Poor Theatre and was crucial in introducing Grotowski to the world. He opened up Grotowski’s work in many different ways, the practice and the writing. He was very closely connected to Grotowski throughout his life.

PC: Peter Brook is someone we know well in British theatre. How was his work influenced by Grotowski?

PA: Peter Brook is important because he was also looking for something, a fresh impetus; something more universal; something beyond language. He saw in Grotowski’s work a physical way of trying to do that using song, rhythm and musicality. There are lots of parallels between Grotowski and Peter Brook’s work. At the time when Grotowski was going into paratheatre, Peter Brook had left England to set up in France and do three years of research. Brook’s was a similar process of investigation, of taking theatre back to the community. The connection came out of Peter Brook having Grotowski and Cieślak do two weeks’ work on Brook’s production of US with the RSC in 1966. Brook’s collaborator Albert Hunt said it changed the work for the worse and made it indulgent and personalised, when he had wanted it to be political, ‘Brechtian’ if you like. He felt Grotowski took the piece in the wrong way. Peter Brook kept very close to Grotowski and employed Cieślak in the Mahabharata (1985) playing the blind prince. It was the only role that Cieślak did after he left the Laboratory Theatre before he died. Peter Brook also coined the phrase ‘Art as Vehicle’ that came to be used for Grotowski’s final phase of work. They both had an interest in G.I. Gurdjieff, the mystical philosopher. The film Meetings with Remarkable Men by Peter Brook was based on Gurdjieff’s book of the same name. Gurdjieff believed that “We’re sleeping all the time, we need to wake up.” He had these rigorous exercises to wake people up in their daily lives. We can see that idea in Grotowski and Brook too.

PC: How about Tadashi Suzuki? He is a contemporary of Grotowski’s that you have written about.

PA: Suzuki has been called the ‘Japanese Grotowski’. He actually met Grotowski for about three days once when Grotowski was in Japan in the 1970s. Again, he was inspired by what Grotowski was doing and Towards a Poor Theatre. Similar to Grotowski, Suzuki investigated what the body could do but he looked to his own traditions of Noh and Kabuki rather than looking at world traditions.

PC: It was quite a revolutionary time for theatre!

PA: When you think about Peter Brook, Barba’s Odin Teatret, the Living Theatre, and Grotowski, all at the same time in the seventies, breaking down the walls, breaking out of the theatres in an attempt to reestablish new relationships to the community; that whole community theatre movement is a major part of Grotowski’s work. It’s about re-establishing a relationship with the spectator, not just about the aesthetic or the training.

PC: Do you see that Grotowski has influenced Physical Theatre?

PA: Lloyd Newson, Artistic Director of DV8, has said that ‘physical theatre’ is a Grotowskian term. He locates this whole movement in the UK as starting with Grotowski. However, Grotowski didn’t call it physical, but psychophysical. He didn’t want to focus on the exterior or the virtuosity of it. Nevertheless, I can understand how Grotowski’s visits to the UK in the sixties and seventies influenced companies like DV8.

PC: How has Grotowski influenced training for theatre?

PA: I think the impact that Grotowski has had on training is massive. The ‘traditional’ theatre has in general been quite a sedentary form – the cliché of it being talking heads is too often true. Grotowski offered an alternative to that in terms of realising the actor’s full potential. Nowadays, even if you’re going to produce an Ibsen play you can start from physicality. The director Katie Mitchell, who is very interested in Polish theatre and Grotowski, has brought that sensibility of the importance of the ensemble, of the voice, of singing to her work, especially in its early phase. It is not just about speaking the text, it is about embodying something.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski’s Context: Sickness, War and Oppression

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • artistic intentions
  • theatrical style
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • social, cultural, political and historical context

PC: You have mentioned how important the imagination and associations are when the Theatre Laboratory were developing their work. These are very subjective connections that cannot be separated from context. What was the context and how is it revealed in his productions?

PA: It is a really important point, as I think the context is often overlooked. Grotowski was working in Poland until he started to tour internationally. His work was then picked up by Eugenio Barba with the production of Dr Faustus which, like all his productions, was performed in Polish. People sometimes say that Grotowski was dismissive of language but it was the Polish language and it was very beautiful language, often recited or sung very fast. He was working with beautiful text and the dramaturgical work was important. People who don’t know Polish overlook the textual elements, that’s why they focus on the physical aspects too much.

PC: What other contextual reference points were there?

PA: The Second World War was another key contextual reference. Grotowski was born in 1933, so he was six when the war started in his country. Hel peninsula was invaded by the Germans and they took over Poland within six weeks. He was used to deprivation, violence and fear at a very young age. His mother was key in bringing him up through that. She educated him, and was very interested in Hindu and Indian culture. He was also very ill and was told that he had a year to live, but somehow he survived to the age of sixty-six. He had recurring health problems and it is interesting thinking about the impact this might have had on him as someone who is working beyond their own life expectancy. Did it impact the urgency, the rigor, the intensity of how he lived; of what he expected from other people? He never had children; never married. It perhaps explains his transience, for he was very much a wanderer later on, absorbing different source cultures.

PC: How did the work change as he moved?

PA: Poland in the 1960s was a very isolated, Soviet occupied country, behind the iron curtain. He lived in the tiny town of Opole before he moved to the bigger city of Wrocław where he became well known. In Opole, it was a very marginal, experimental theatre where he’d sometimes perform just for two people. In the seventies, when people could travel more, he became an international figure. It was quite a big transition from Opole to Wrocław to the Edinburgh Festival; in 1969, he was suddenly on the international stage. There was a lot of interest in Polish theatre at that time: figures like Tadeusz Kantor started making an impact on the world stage. There’s something about the difficulty of their working environment: the poverty. ‘Poor theatre’ is a phrase that Ludwik Flaszen coined for the work with Grotowski; but it was also poor economically and in its material resources. If you see the Apocalypsis room, as the main space in Wrocław is called, it’s not a very big studio. This is someone who’s an international figure, but he had very simple means. He’s a very political person and I think this is often overlooked. With something like The Constant Prince, although it is inspired by Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth century play, in Poland the implications of seeing someone being tortured by the Moors to the point of death meant something very particular. People tend to think that Grotowski’s work wasn’t very political but for his local audiences it was extremely political; they understood this was Poland being sacrificed to the Russian oppressors. They had that allegorical meaning but it didn’t necessarily translate to other countries. When it was shown in New York or Manchester there was a whole different set of expectations and people focused more on the aesthetics. The context is absolutely vital; it’s very Polish but it also became very international.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski’s Voice Work: Connecting Body and Voice

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: Voice is another element that I think gets forgotten. It is given a lot of space in Towards a Poor Theatre. So how did that translate to the training and productions?

PA: Zygmunt Molik had been to drama school and led a lot of the exploration in voice, working with the resonators. Just as they were pushing the body in terms of its acrobatic potential and its flexibility, its strength and balance, they were also pushing the voice. They explored the head resonators, doing animal noises. They wanted to find a voice that was rooted in the body; the whole body needed to be making the voice.

PC: You have spoken about the score and musicality; how does the voice work fit in with that?

PA: Grotowski said that he later looked back at his early performance work and saw that it was sung. What is special about singing? Singing is something we don’t do all the time. We speak, we don’t sing. So when do we sing? We sing when we’re happy, we sing when we’re sad, we sing at demonstrations. Song is tied up with identity and national identity. It is very powerful, it is very physical and has a range which goes beyond daily talking. Song is important and interesting because it is not about speaking, it is not conversation. That is why in the last period of his work (Art as Vehicle), he looked at the quality of Afro-Caribbean vibratory songs and the impact they have on your energy. He was investigating how the voice, the song, can change what you’re doing. Just as what you’re doing changes the voice. It is about finding that absolute connection between body and voice. You start with the body and then you find the voice.

PC: How does text fit in with that process of discovery?

PA: You don’t suddenly stop what you’re doing and look at the text, you find a continuum between working with the body and voice before then bringing in text. This is why they sounded the text or recited it very fast.

PC: Did they ever use the voice without language?

PA: Yes, in Dr Faustus for example, the actor creates the sound of when he’s being drowned by Mephistopheles. You can hear he’s created the sound of going under water and coming back up again for air, the sound of spluttering. You haven’t got any taped or recorded music so the actor is creating the mise-en-scène: the wind, the atmosphere. They were always pushing the actor to find a voice which wasn’t their natural register.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporeal Exercises

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: What were the plastiques exercises?

PA: Plastiques are distinctively Grotowski’s idea. Beginning with isolation, isolating the wrist or the hand or the elbow, you start to rotate and flex it and explore its possible movements. Then you see where that takes you, where the wrist leads you; the wrist is moving you through the space. You can then start to have one part of the body doing one thing in dialogue with another part of the body; the wrist in dialogue with the left knee. Then you open that up to a partner, a key aspect of Grotowski’s work. Plastiques are always done in relation to a partner: the partner could be the wall, it could be the floor, it could be an object. Plastiques are about building a flow where you can move from the wrist, perhaps to the knee, to the elbow, but all the time it has to be unplanned and it has to be impulsive; not rationalized, not conceived, but responsive. Cieślak talks about it is as though the nerves are on the outside of the body, as though you haven’t got any skin. How do you wake up your nerves so that you’re that sensitive that impulse becomes action immediately?



PC: What about corporeals?

PA: Corporeals take the same principles adjusted to more dynamic, gymnastic-like movement. You can think about it in terms of a jump: if you dive into a forward roll, once you commit, you can’t stop halfway through. If you do, you bang your head, so you have to commit. Impulse has to become action. Then you might do the jump or the roll, not just as a task in a gymnastic way but because someone is chasing you or because you’re getting over a river or there are hot flames. Both the plastiques and the corporeals are really about developing associations and waking up the imagination.



PC: How important were the imagination and associations for the actor?

PA: I think that this is one of the problems that Grotowski identified with people imitating the work. People can watch exercises in a film called Letter from Opole, a thirty minute film about the early training or they can watch Cieślak training; but they can’t necessarily understand the connection to the inner work or associations, as Grotowski called it.

PC: Can you give a practical example of these types of associations?

PA: If you’re reaching up with your arms, don’t just lift your arms up in a way that doesn’t have any imaginative connection: What are you reaching up to pick? An apple? It is a Stanislavskian idea: you’re reaching for something but you’re not anticipating, instead the imaginative connection constantly changes: does the apple become something else? Or the tiger exercises where you’re being a tiger. It’s not about imitating the tiger, it is finding the essence of tiger; trying to get to the heart of tiger. To put it in a slightly banal way: how do you become different on stage? Grotowski talks about people imitating his work in Reply to Stanislavsky, and that they saw it as being acrobatic and virtuosic. He said that this is not what it’s about; it’s really about the inner process. It’s about finding that connection, that association between feeling and the physical score you create.

PC: What do you mean by ‘score’?

PA: They created a score like a music score; he uses that word. When we see musical notes, it is very clear that those notes have a certain rhythm and time; but how you play the instrument, how it fits with the other parts is so variable. He used lots of images about the actor’s score, it being like the banks of a river, for example: what’s important is the water that is flowing between the banks; or the score is like a candle in a bowl and the inner life is the candle flame, flickering. It’s the inner life that gives meaning to the action, that makes the score come alive. That often gets forgotten about Grotowski’s work.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

 

Acting for Grotowski: What is it to be Human?

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • theatrical style
  • theatrical purpose
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: What was acting to Grotowski?

PA: Grotowski thought acting isn’t about going to drama school and learning a set of skills; instead it should be about learning who you are; being yourself and then bringing that to the task. In some ways we hear about that in drama schools: in the first year you get broken down. But it is much more subtle than that: it’s not about breaking down and rebuilding, it is really just a process of investigation: what is it to be human?

PC: Did he often begin the investigation one-to-one with the principal actor?

PA: Grotowski always worked with a significant other (whether it was Zbigniew Cynkutis in Dr Faustus or Cieślak in The Constant Prince and then Thomas Richards later) who’s epitomizing his working process and really taking it forward. He worked with the whole group but there was always this individual who was the protagonist, if you like. They would spend months working one-to-one on their personal score. He then brought in the ensemble, the chorus, to the work they had done. Grotowski needed to have that framework of the individual actor who’s at the heart of the play before they could add in the montage and the interactions. It would be different for every production but there was usually a protagonist and a chorus.

PC: How did they begin the broader training?

PA: It was quite mechanical at first: they learnt how to do mime walks like the moon walk; they learnt how to do isolation from mime exercises; they used ballet techniques, music and they explored Chinese vocal resonators. Eugenio Barba was in India watching Kathakali dance, where he learned how to do the eye exercises and brought that back. They drew upon different sources as a way of working on themselves. Grotowski wanted to know: if you’re not working on character and if you’re not trying to represent a character, then what are you working on? He was trying to find a new way of creating theatre and the best way to do that is to start to work on the actor. Grotowski was finding a way of waking the actors up, voice and body.

PC: How did the training develop after that early mechanical phase?

PA: Space was integral to Grotowski’s work with the actor; each different actor/spectator relationship sets up different problems for the actor. He took aspects of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics further. He used yoga but they found that when they did yoga it made them too introspective; so they used yoga asanas but called it ‘dynamic yoga’. They put yoga into a flow; you can see that in the Cieślak training video where he’s training two of Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret performers. He emphasizes that it is what happens between the exercises that counts.

PC: Did all the actors in the Theatre Laboratory contribute to the training?

PA: Yes, it was about building a group culture of the ensemble as well: creating adaptability and flexibility in performers who weren’t actually trained. Particular actors focused on different areas: Zygmunt Molik focused on the voice; Rena Mirecka focused on the plastique exercises.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski’s Significant Productions

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • theatrical style
  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

Images of productions can be found at grotowski.net

PC: How long was Grotowski working as a director?

PA: He wasn’t a director in the traditional way that we would understand someone who just produces a repertoire of work. That was a period of fifteen years: from studying in Moscow, then traditional drama school in Kraków and then setting up the Theatre of Thirteen Rows in 1959. He created his very last performance in 1969. It is a very short period of making theatre performances but they astounded the world and completely transformed our understanding of what theatre can do.

PC:  What was the sequence of the most significant productions?

PA: It was The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Akropolis, The Constant Prince and then Apocalypsis cum Figuris.

PC: Was Dr Faustus the only text he worked with?

PA: No, all his other performances were based on classical texts but not just classical as in our canon in Britain, Western Europe or America. They were based on Polish and in one case a Spanish classic. This is something people mistake about him; they think that he was devising and creating these texts, but in fact they were mostly well known and classic Polish dramas. Some of them were fragmentary poetic dramas.

PC: Why was Dr Faustus significant?

PA: In 1962, Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe was reframed as the last supper where the audience are invited to see Faustus in his last hour before he gets taken away by Mephistopheles. Dr Faustus pushed the actors’ work a long way. It launched Grotowski on the world stage because it was the piece that Eugenio Barba saw and took visitors and producers to see at an International Theatre Festival. The actor/spectator relationship in the space was crucial as it was in all his productions. In Dr Faustus the spectators sat at a table with the action happening on this table at chin height, right in front of their faces. Rather than looking at the back of someone’s head, as you would do in a proscenium arch theatre, you were looking at another spectator also experiencing the same things. This very much amplified the experience.

PC: What about Akropolis?

PA: It was made in the same year as Dr Faustus, 1962 and there is the film record of it, even though it is not a very good rendition. It is more of an ensemble piece based on the classic play by Stanisław Wyspiański. This play was originally set in Wawel Cathedral, Kraków, which is the national cathedral where these dead kings and queens lie in state. Grotowski relocated it to Auschwitz. It was a very important production for addressing the Holocaust, being set in Kraków, thirty miles away from Auschwitz itself, just seventeen years after it was liberated. They developed this whole mise-en-scène where the concentration camp was built around and above the spectators during the course of the performance. They were surrounded by the action and at the start of the play they were told, “You are the living and we are the dead.” The spectator was positioned as a witness again.

PC: You touched on The Constant Prince earlier. Why was that a significant production?

PA: The Constant Prince followed in 1965 and is seen as the production where Grotowski’s acting techniques got taken to the highest level. It was Cieślak’s total act as the Constant Prince, this gift of himself: the holy actor. Critics couldn’t articulate their experience easily but they talked about Cieślak’s illumination. The extraordinary nature of what he did comes across even in a grainy film, shot with one camera. It is a bad rendition but the embodied sense of what it might have been like to be a spectator there comes through. For this production, the spectators were positioned above the stage, watching this actor enacting this repetitive ritual of torture, being asked to give in and yet not giving in, delivering this poetic response about why he would not do so, why he is constant. The high position of the spectators meant they are put in this awkward place: if they sit back in their chair they can’t see the action so they have to lean forwards to observe someone’s suffering. They are put into this position of being a willing voyeur in someone else’s suffering.

Full version available here

PC: What about his final production?

PA: Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1969) was his last performance which he carried on presenting until 1979. It stands out for many reasons. It overlapped with the paratheatre phase. People would often come to the performances, stay behind afterwards and talk, then get invited to participate in paratheatre. It was devised, as we’d call it today; they took texts from T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, from The Bible. The production was heading away from theatrical structures. The first version was in costumes, then Grotowski said, “No, wear your daily clothes.” Initially there were benches for the audience, then they removed them. It was performed in an empty room, getting back to that simplicity of just people in a space. The distinction between the spectator and the actor was being blurred. That interaction, that encounter was then extended into paratheatre, where there were no spectators, no observers, just actors.

Up Next:

 

Part 5: Grotowski and Gurawski: Configuring the Space

Part 6: Grotowski Inspired Creativity and Outrage

Part 7: Grotowski’s Work with Text

Part 8: Grotowski’s Communication with Spectators

Part 9: Acting for Grotowski: What is it to be Human?

Part 10: Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporal Exercises

Part 11: Grotowski’s Voice Work: Connecting Body and Voice

Part 12: Grotowski’s Context: Sickness, War and Oppression

Part 13: Paratheatre: What is Beyond Theatre?

Part 14: Paratheatre: Finding the Desire to Change

Part 15: Grotowski’s Influence: Barba, Brook and Beyond

FULL INTERVIEW HERE