Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporeal Exercises

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?

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 Communication with Spectators

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

  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • influence
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • social, cultural, political and historical context


PC: Were there stories that Grotowski returned to that fit his way of constructing productions?

PA: The story of Jesus and his disciples was a reference point throughout Grotowski’s work. He was very inspired by Ernest Renan’s book The Life of Jesus, as an archetypal figure that we associate with – a person who goes out on a limb, one who’s followed but who is then betrayed.

PC: Can you explain what you mean by archetypes and why they were important?

PA: The idea of archetype is important because it is not stereotype, it is not character, it’s what we can readily associate with. It was Jung’s idea. We recognize the martyr figure in The Constant Prince and Dr Faustus. We recognize the mother taking the Constant Prince in her arms like the image of the Pietà. We can understand these archetypal figures even beyond language, which is probably why his theatre was internationally so successful.

PC: That links back to what Raymonde Temkine said about the “structured composition of the role into a ‘system of signs'”.

PA: Yes, I’ve heard people talking about ‘signs’ quite a lot. It fits in with a semiotic understanding of theatre [a focus on the meaning of the images created] at that time but it is a bit limiting. For me, the embodied experience is so much more important; there is this montage of images, of signs, of symbols, of archetypes but at the same time we are experiencing that work very viscerally. If you try and read Grotowski’s work in a purely semiotic way, you’re only getting a very small part of the story.

PC:  Does that visceral experience, the sense of truth, come out of the physical repetition, the exhaustion, the score of signs? For example, was the pain that they were trying to present of Auschwitz in Akropolis somehow captured through the physical intensity of the performance?

PA: Peter Brook’s introduction to the film of Akropolis is very interesting. He says that it is not a documentary or a recreation of Auschwitz; he feels it’s like black magic happening in front of the you: the spirit of it or the rhythm, the sounds, the energy, the fear is conjured up before you. He says that this is what is distinctive about the theatre. It can do that because it is not referring to the past, quoting the people who were there, it’s in the here and now and you are a witness to it. He feels that this is what Grotowski has done so brilliantly in that performance: he’s somehow brought some essence of it to life.

PC: How did he get to that essence of life?

PA: Grotowski understood that it isn’t about shaping a dance or external pattern, it is actually about letting the actors find their innermost feelings. Not just splurging those out in a very indulgent way, but really precisely shaping them. It was a rigorous exploration of their innermost feelings.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski’s Work with Text

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
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: How did Grotowski work with the actors to articulate the role? Jennifer Kumiega cites Raymonde Temkine’s description of the process of articulating a role.

Raymonde Temkine has described what she calls ‘articulation of the role’ in Grotowski’s productions as a three-part process: initial structuring, performed by Grotowski on an original text; a collective phase of elaboration, involving a great deal of spontaneous creative work; and finally the structured composition of the role into a ‘system of signs’.

Kumiega, J., The Theatre of Grotowski (Methuen, 1987)

What initial structuring did Grotowski do on the text?

PA: He had a very strong dramaturgical influence from Ludwik Flaszen, his collaborator, who had helped with adapting some of the texts. His relationship with text was very different from Stanislavski’s.

PC: Who is Ludwik Flaszen?

PA: Flaszen is a well known Polish critic who was a hugely respected national figure before he even worked with Grotowski. He had been quite critical of Grotowski’s student work when he had seen it in Kraków. Flaszen was offered a theatre in Opole: The Theatre of Thirteen Rows, a very small theatre. He invited Grotowski to run it with him. Even though he had questioned Grotowski’s work, he could see he had some potential. Ludwik Flaszen depicts himself as devil’s advocate to Grotowski’s work in his book Grotowski and Company. He was a principle figure in the founding of the company and actually took charge when Grotowski emigrated in 1982. His work has not been given enough recognition so it is important that Grotowski and Company came out. Flaszen, for example, coined the term ‘Poor Theatre’.

PC: How did he work with Grotowski on the structuring of the text?

PA: Sometimes they did a text in full but more often than not, as in The Constant Prince, they would remove certain characters, take out some scenes, simplify it for their small ensemble. It was a process of condensing and distillation. I think a lot of this work was done initially by Flaszen and then in consultation with Grotowski. It was very much a collaboration.

PC: People often see Grotowski as quite a domineering director.

PA: It is a common but false assumption that Grotowski was a director whose vision was total. Grotowski put out this statement which is at the beginning of Voices from Within where he wanted to correct this view:

“In our productions next to nothing is dictated by the director. His role in the preparatory stages is to stimulate the creative associations for which the impulse comes from the actors and to organize the final structure in which they assume a specific shape.”

I think people were sometimes using him as an excuse to themselves be a demagogic, auteur director in a way that he wasn’t. It is interesting when you read the interviews in Voices From Within with members of the company; they say he was very empathetic, he was very tough but they respected him and he gave them a lot of space.

PC: How did they go about finding texts?

PA: In the last piece, Apocalypsis cum Figuris, the actors were set tasks to go and find texts that suited the action they were developing. They would develop proposals, sort of propositions, small etudes. Grotowski would then look at them and say, “That works, I believe that. That doesn’t work, go and find that text.” He set them tasks, reading tasks to bring in material and then he would shape it. He’d construct the whole score, which was very difficult and not always a very happy process.

PC: How did he go about constructing the score with text?

PA: Grotowski worked with opposition in a Stanislavskian way: if you wanted to find someone’s greed, look for their generosity; don’t play greed in general. In The Constant Prince, the physical action is of someone being tortured, but what did Cieślak work on with Grotowski? His feelings of love, sweet delight and ecstasy; completely contrasting emotions. The idea of apotheosis [meaning: a perfect example of its type] and derision comes up a lot in Grotowski’s work: you set something up and then you bring it down. Nothing is sacred. These holy cows can be suddenly destroyed in a moment; he constructed an oppositional dialectic: for Cieślak in The Constant Prince it is between torture and ecstasy. They were always trying to find texts which go against the action, which worked as a layer. They were building a montage if you like. The actors were responsible for finding those because it was coming out of their process of work and their investigation. It wasn’t predetermined.

PC: Why was that not a happy process?

PA: It was a research process, you don’t always know what you’re getting, you need to reach the bottom to then break through. He asked his actors to go through the clichés, go through exhaustion because only then do you find something of value. That need for exhaustion can be seen as being masochistic. However, it can take a certain level of exhaustion to find something new and fresh, to pull on resources that you didn’t know you had. In sports and adventure we hear that idea all the time, but you don’t think of it in relation to theatre. Taking people with you, as Grotowski did, letting them know it’s okay to be lost is very hard. There were times when they struggled, they lost their direction but then they had a breakthrough. Grotowski had that ability to be patient and accept moments of failure, of doubt, but then pick people up and take them with him.

Full interview here:

Grotowski

Grotowski Inspired Creativity and Outrage

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
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • influence
  • social, cultural, political and historical context

PC: How did spectators respond to Grotowski’s productions?

PA: A lot of people found it impenetrable and they found that kind of work too difficult; but it was work you had to go back to. It was not served up on a plate, it was difficult and dramaturgically complex. What the actors were doing is extraordinary. It is not something that you got in the first sitting. Grotowski was demanding something of the spectator just as he demanded of the actors; he demanded something of all his participants.

PC: Why did he make theatre productions then?

PA: It was a laboratory process, it wasn’t about making productions. Productions were the tool with which he investigated something. People measure it by the yardstick of theatre production and the people who funded him did as well. It was very hard for him to create an ensemble investigating something within the constraints given to him. Luckily his success and the relative security that gave him meant he could do that later on.

PC: Was it always successful with audiences?

PA: It is very hard to ascertain the audience response: a very small total number of people saw the work. One thing that does come across is that a lot of people who did see it were changed, they were touched. Even if they didn’t like it, they could see that he was trying to push theatre into a different possibility, extending Artaud’s work for example. If you look at The Grotowski Sourcebook, Eric Bentley is very critical about Grotowski, his ‘guruness’ and his claims about what he was trying to do. People from a more literary background didn’t always like his text work: it wasn’t for everyone. Lots of people, inevitably, were disgusted by it and thought it was blasphemous. The Primate of Poland tried to stop Apocalypsis cum Figuris being presented, because one of the actors masturbates into a loaf of bread; this is very blasphemous, partly as the piece was indirectly about Jesus. Despite these controversies, or maybe because of them, it became hugely popular, with, for example, people paying two hundred dollars to get tickets for the performances in New York. That’s not really the essence of what Grotowski was trying to do though. It is hard to talk universally about critical response: lots of people were against the work but it equally inspired people, particularly practitioners and theatre-makers.