Tag: Towards a Poor Theatre

Grotowski and Gurawski: Configuring the Space

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
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: Why was the configuration of space and the actor/spectator relationship so crucial to his work?

PA: It is interesting that he worked with Jerzy Gurawski who was an architect and not a stage designer. They clearly thought about the whole room as an architectural space rather than as a space of viewing as you would in a proscenium arch or some traditional theatres. The acoustic dimensions were also important especially when working on the actor’s resonance and the musicality of the whole performance.

PC: What example do you think best illustrates their control of the acoustic space?

PA: The stamping boots of Akropolis: the actors dive into a seemingly impossible tiny box at the end of performance, they disappear and then we hear a voice saying, “All that remained was the smoke.” Then there was silence. Flaszen would say that he felt this performance was successful when the spectators didn’t clap.

PC: You choose to use spectator rather than audience: is that deliberate?

PA: Yes, it’s about an individual encounter. Grotowski, in Polish, talks about the spectator not the audience, so it is singular. It is never homogenous; it’s never the audience as a total body of people. It’s always about that one-to-one relationship. People accused his work of being elitist, because he wanted to keep the audiences small. I don’t think that’s elitist. I think it is just having a clear understanding of what the limits of your theatre are. He knew the best way of experiencing that event. That intimacy, that proximity was possible with only a few people. It is interesting to see the growth in popularity today of one-to-one performance, immersive and participatory theatre. Grotowski was doing that but within a much more theatrical set up, because it was still within a single unitary space of a building: a room, a studio, a gallery sometimes.

PC: Are there drawings of these different configurations?

PA: In Towards a Poor Theatre there are diagrams by Eugenio Barba: black boxes for the actors and white boxes for spectators. These show the shifting arrangement for every performance, moving away from that distant proscenium arch remoteness. They were immersing themselves in the group of spectators.

PC: What configurations stand out for you outside the significant productions we have discussed?

PA: In Kordian, the spectators were in a mental asylum, sitting on bunk beds with actors above them and around them. The actors were tied up in straightjackets right next to them as fellow inmates in the asylum. There is always this configuration as you say, which is a good word for it.

PC: Why did he finish the Theatre of Productions phase with such a stripped back performance like Apocalypsis cum Figuris?

PA: They wanted it to be left open, there wasn’t any attempt to configure the spectators. The production was a wild party where a simpleton is abused by those present. There wasn’t any projection onto the spectators of who they were, they were just people coming to this event as witnesses. I think he saw the limits of manipulation, the limits of the actor/spectator relationship. That is why he moved away from theatre productions.

Grotowski Burning at the Stake After Artaud

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
  • innovations
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was the relationship between Grotowski’s performance work and Artaud’s ideas?

PA: The relationship with Artaud is explained very clearly in Towards a Poor Theatre in the chapter titled ‘He Wasn’t Entirely Himself’. In this, he says that his engagement with Artaud came later than one might expect. He developed his practice and his ideas of theatre and then discovered the connection and closeness to Artaud’s ideas. He didn’t look at Artaud and think “I could put that into practice.” Artaud has incredible ideas about total theatre: people on revolving chairs, using all the mise-en-scène and including cinema, sound; but it is quite hard to enact. You see the same words, the ‘total’ theatre of Artaud and the ‘total’ act of Grotowski; but they are completely different. Grotowski is about paring away scenography, lighting, sound – of course, the actors are still lit but it’s never decorative, it is totally functional. It’s about getting a really simple mise-en-scène which he adapted for every production to focus on the actor. That’s what is at the core of it for Grotowski: the actor/spectator relationship, whereas Artaud was really about total theatre, in a much more filmic way, the montage of all these elements that would somehow take over the audience.

PC: Would you say there was a closeness in their intensity, even though Artaud’s ideas were never fully realised?

PA: Yes, I think there is a similar interest in rigour. How, through theatre, you can create an impact that changes the spectator. Artaud wanted it to be like the plague where this psychic contamination spreads out from the theatre event and changes society somehow, ‘heart and soul’. Through your nervous response to this extraordinary, frightening, sensational experience you’re changed and society is improved. Grotowski wanted that as well but through very different means. Both Artaud and Grotowski wanted to push limits: how far can you go? It is not about the entertainment industry, it’s not about pleasing the audience. Grotowski is quite critical in his language talking about the Courtesan actor who’s selling themselves for the price of an expensive ticket. The actor should rather be giving themselves to the audience. I think that has connections with Artaud’s view of this actor opening him/herself up. Grotowski cites Artaud’s image of “the actor should be like the martyr burning at the stake, still signalling through the flames.” I always find that a very potent idea; even when you’re burning up, you’re still trying to communicate through the flames as you die, like Joan of Arc. It is a powerful metaphor that captures the rigour, that extremity of what they’re both trying to do. The cruelty that I think Artaud talks about is a cruelty to yourself; Grotowski is interested in the actor penetrating their own existence, in questioning themselves to a deep level: What happens if I go on stage in front of people? Why should I have the privilege of doing that? If I do, how do I get over the desire to entertain; the desire to please; the desire to be successful? Instead you work in a ‘via negativa‘ way, stripped back, not resisting things.

PC: How would you explain via negativa?

PA: It is quite difficult to explain the via negativa but he talks about removing psychophysical blocks, making impulses actions. Stanislavski did acrobatics with his actors and Stanislavski thought, “If you can overcome your fear of doing a leap or a roll, how much easier is it then to overcome a difficult role or a difficult bit of text.” It gets you over that sense of fear and it makes you freer. Grotowski is the same: he is finding that freedom of action, of not hesitating, of turning impulse into action and stopping that self-judgmental voice in the head that’s always saying, “Am I good enough?” Instead, you really commit to something, like the idea of the gift, you give yourself totally: the ‘holy actor’; it’s an act of submission. However, if it’s too vain, if it’s too egotistical, then it becomes an imposition.

Up Next:

Part 4: Grotowski’s Significant Productions

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

Grotowski’s Reply to Stanislavski

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
  • use of theatrical conventions
  • influence
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: What were his early influences?

PA: There are lots of routes into Grotowski’s work. One is his connection with Stanislavski. In 1955, he was studying at GITIS in Moscow, one of the main Russian drama schools. Grotowski worked with Yuri Zavadsky, who had come out of the Stanislavskian tradition. People often see Stanislavski and Grotowski as being opposed; that is a real mistake. Grotowski wrote this text, Reply to Stanislavski in 1983 in Polish. It was only published in English in 2008 in The Drama Review. He explains how he’d been influenced by Stanislavski after studying him in Moscow and how he was carrying on the work ‘On Physical Actions’ that Stanislavski had left unfinished when he died.

Many people have difficulties distinguishing technique from aesthetics. So then: I consider Stanislavsky’s method one of the greatest stimuli for the European theatre, especially in actor education; at the same time I feel distant from his aesthetics. Stanislavsky’s aesthetics were a product of his times, his country, and his person. We are all a product of the meeting of our tradition with our needs. These are things that one cannot transplant from one place to another without falling into clichés, into stereotypes, into something that is already dead the moment we call it into existence. It is the same for Stanislavsky as for us, and for anybody else.

Grotowski, J., & Salata, K. (2008). Reply to Stanislavsky. TDR (1988-), 52(2), p.31.

His interest in Stanislavski was underpinned by the phrase ‘I don’t believe you’ which they both used. Grotowski’s is actually quite a Stanislavskian psychophysical technique but much more movement orientated.

PC: Can you pinpoint where Grotowski’s aesthetics differ?

PA: Grotowski wasn’t starting from interpreting or staging plays, he wasn’t working with characters; he was working with roles.

PC: What is the difference between Stanislavski working on characters and Grotowski working on roles?

PA: Grotowski says the role should be like a ‘scalpel’ for opening up the person, the actor. It is really about using theatre as a way of revealing the person not the person identifying with the character.

PC: Is there an example that can illustrate that difference?

PA: When Cieślak played the role of the Constant Prince in the eponymous play it is all based on his memories of the first time he fell in love with a girl as a teenager. He and Grotowski spent nine months reconstructing the score, the inner life, of this awakening feeling. They reconstructed these feelings of passion, of erotic desire, of prohibition as a young Catholic boy where feeling these things was sinful. The narrative is of the Constant Prince being tortured by the Moors: a horrible story, based on the Calderón de la Barca play. The torture ends with the Prince’s death, because he doesn’t give in: he’s constant. We see that story but, without knowing it, we experience this whole other life intuitively. It was a physical realisation of what Stanislavski called the ‘inner life’. Grotowski combined the musicality and plasticity of Meyerhold with a Stanislavskian psychological process. It was never about true to life character, it was about revealing something of the actor.

Up Next:

Part 3: Grotowski Burning at the Stake After Artaud

Part 4: Grotowski’s Significant Productions

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

Discovering Grotowski and Pushing Yourself

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

 

Part 1: Discovering Grotowski and Pushing Yourself

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

  • theatrical purpose

PC: What led you to the work of Jerzy Grotowski?

PA: When I was at secondary school in the late seventies we went down to Ashby-de-la-Zouch and had a whole weekend doing Grotowski-based training with RAT Theatre; very rigorous, very demanding. We saw them perform on the Friday night. I had no idea what to expect and these guys were basically whipping and beating each other. I later found out that these actors did this thing where they didn’t decide who was going to be the one whipping or who was going to be the one being whipped until just before the performance. RAT Theatre had taken the Grotowski thing in a way he wouldn’t really have liked.

PC: Did you study Grotowski when you went on to university?

PA: Absolutely. When I went to Exeter University in the mid-eighties my lecturers had been inspired by Grotowski in the seventies; people had gone over to Poland and returned and put it into practice. Exeter was a very practical course and our first project was working ten to ten every day, six days a week with someone who had worked with Grotowski. My friend and I used to look at Towards a Poor Theatre and impersonate it; he looked a bit like Ryszard Cieślak, so I used to pretend to be Grotowski. I got really into pushing myself, acrobatics etc.

PC: When did you formally start to write about Grotowski?

PA: I did a PhD on Gardzienice, another Polish theatre company. Their director, Włodzimierz Staniewski, had worked with Grotowski in the seventies. The only way I was allowed to research them was to actually be there training. It was later that I came back to Grotowski, to see what was behind the work I had been doing. I did the British Grotowski Project between 2006 and 2009. I saw that there was then very limited access to audio/visual material about Grotowski. I knew it existed but most of it was in Polish and quite difficult to get hold of. I wanted to spread the word a bit and make stuff available.

PC:  What was the main way of accessing Grotowski’s work before that project?

PA: Most people accessed Grotowski through Towards a Poor Theatre. It was really influential in the late sixties and seventies after it came out in 1968 but there are lots of issues with it. It is badly translated; it calls Grotowski a ‘producer’, never a director and there are lots of other aspects of it that are not accurate. It only covers the Theatre of Productions but that is only one period of Grotowski’s work. Paratheatre, Theatre of Sources, Objective Drama and Art as Vehicle are the others.

Up Next:

Part 2: Grotowski’s Reply to Stanislavski

Part 3: Grotowski Burning at the Stake After Artaud

Part 4: Grotowski’s Significant Productions

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