Performance Workshops: Three Types

Jerzy Grotowski was a visionary Polish theatre director, producer, and educator whose groundbreaking work in experimental theatre redefined the very nature of performance. He made his directorial debut in Kraków in 1957 with a striking production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs, heralding the emergence of a bold and uncompromising theatrical voice. From the outset, Grotowski challenged conventional forms, crafting a radical approach to theatre that would profoundly influence modern performance practices across the world. At the heart of Grotowski’s philosophy was the belief that the soul of theatre resided not in ornate sets or technical spectacle, but in the sacred and immediate exchange between actor and audience. He championed what he termed ‘Poor Theatre’—a stripped-down aesthetic that placed the performer’s physicality, voice, and emotional truth at the centre of the dramatic experience. His rigorous actor training demanded discipline, vulnerability, and complete surrender to the creative process—pushing the boundaries of human expression. Grotowski stands as a towering figure in the history of modern theatre, a relentless seeker whose revolutionary ideas continue to ignite the imaginations of actors, directors, and scholars. His work at the Laboratory Theatre, and later his explorations into ritual, culture, and performance, have deeply influenced contemporary theatre-making, particularly within the realms of physical and devised theatre. This research offers a structured exploration of the practical application of Grotowski’s theories, performance methods, and directorial vision within academic contexts—illuminating how his enduring legacy continues to shape and elevate theatre education today.

This essay proposes two examples of avant-garde theatre, Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, as resources for Christian ethics. Both pursue theater as bodily copresent interaction whose moral labor is the liberation of the human body from conventional gestures for the sake of authentic encounter and from oppressive postures for the sake of social intervention. Focusing on the body in this way reveals that the place of narrative, while essential to Christian ethics, is ambiguous. The outcome of this argument is the possibility of combining the insights of monastic and liberation accounts of the moral life in order to release moral action in microsocial encounters, thus recovering the constitutive humility of Christian ethics.

This article is part discourse, part story: an act of ‘fictional-criticism.’ ‘Motley Cow’ was the name that Friedrich Nietzsche gave to the town in Thus Spake Zarathustra; this town represented everything that was small, trivial, cowering, and slave-like in the modernity he saw around him. The first two sections of the article are set in a modern city, one of Nietzsche's present-day Motley Cows, the city of Wrocław in Poland, where Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory had its home from 1964 to 1984. Grotowski shared Nietzsche's contempt for much of the insubstantial fabric of modernity: ‘The rhythm of life in modern civilisation is characterised by pace, tension, a feeling of doom, the wish to hide our personal motives and the assumption of a variety of roles and masks in life .. We suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves’ Grotowski wrote in the ‘Statement of Principles’ he drafted for the Theatre Laboratory [Towards a Poor Theatre (Methuen, 1969) p.255]. Yet, as Ludwik Flaszen has noted, ‘Nietzsche . was actually disliked by Grotowski’ [Grotowski & Company (Holstebro/Malta/Wroclaw, 2010) p.212]. The second section of the article enacts the witnessing of a meeting between the ghost of Nietzsche and the ghost of Grotowski, as they debate their legacies. The third and final section, in a more conventional critical mode, looks at some recent samples of the Grotowski legacy – Piesn Kozła's Macbeth and particularly Chorea's Grotowski – an Attempt to Retreat (2010). There is also consideration given to the legacy of Nietzsche in Modernist theatre. Finally the questions raised are about the problems of legacies and the failures of heirs.

In his seminal essay, ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’, Jerzy Grotowski advocates a new form of theatre that will strip itself to the bone in order to reveal the quintessential nature of the art form. Borrowing this notion for the medium of cinema, this article proposes that the production practice of the Burmese-Taiwanese director Midi Z operates on a similar principle of a skeletal scale that demands a rethink about the nature of cinema. Midi Z’s homecoming trilogy, which comprises his first three feature-length films, was shot on a shoestring budget involving minimal cast and crew. This article seeks to advance, in the spirit of Grotowski’s conception, poverty as a paradoxically positive premise for a mode of filmmaking that will be termed ‘poor cinema’. It draws on Midi Z’s filmmaking career to illustrate two dimensions of poor cinema: the ubiquity of trafficking as a condition of production, and poverty as a problematic in the diegeses of the films. It argues that Midi Z’s poor cinema sets out to circumvent censorship through trafficking and, in this invariably transnational modus operandi, also to stage poverty as a problematic that interrogates the ethics and aesthetics of filmmaking.

Alternate theatre is not, of course, limited to the North American continent. Such theatres exist in virtually every theatre country in the world including central and South America, the democratic countries of western Europe, the socialist countries of eastern Europe and Japan. The term “alternate” itself tends to be used only in Canada. In the States, the term is the more grammatical, Alternative. Beyond North America, these companies tend to call themselves independent theatres, tree theatres, café theatres or open theatres. The latter term — Open Theatre — has been most popularized internationally by Boguslaw Litwiniec, the director of a festival of Open Theatre held every two years or so in Wroclaw, Poland, home of Jerzy Grotowski. Some years back, Litwiniec even wrote a book on the subject in which he set forth what he felt to be the 21 basic principles of Open — that is, alternative — art. In it, he suggested that Open art

Feasts in Time of the Plague: Polish Theatre and Drama, Post-Solidarity E.J. CZERWINSKI The classics are back and East European theatres are feasting on them. It is that time again when the winds ofresistance die down and the ominous calm spreads across the theatre community. It has happened before, each time signaled by the censorship of Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefather's Eve), a nineteenthcentury class.ic· that straightforwardly excoriates the old Russian regime. Unfortunately, things have not changed much and Mickiewicz's diatribes against the Russians translate fortuitously into criticism of the Soviets. The present state of theatrical ennui in Poland, however, was precipitated not by Mickiewicz's poetic abuse, but rather by General Jaruzelski's prosaic convening of ZOMO - the Polish equivalent of Hell's Angels. Polish actors, directors and producers responded with their own convocation - a total boycott of television (one channel continues to drone on, attempting to give a semblance of normality to a catastrophic cultural situation). The television boycott has had its reverberations in Poland's theatres. When Jan Pawel Gawlik was appointed director of Warsaw's Dramatyczny Teatr (Dramatic Theatre), the actors and staff, led by the actor Gustaw Holoubek, resigned their positions. J6zef Szajna took an early retirement, resigning from his post as director of Teatr Studio, rather than compromise the dictates of his conscience. Adam Hanuszkiewicz is no longer director of Teatr Narodowy (The National Theatre). Of the respected figures in the theatre, only Kazimierz Dejmek created a controversy within the theatrical community when he assumed the directorship of Warsaw's Polski Theatre. By comparison, it came as no surprise that Jerzy Krassowski and Krystyna Skuszanka, the husbandwife team of Nowa Huta fame (in the fifties and early sixties Szajna was their scene designer), quickly stepped in to fill the void created by Hanuszkiewicz's resignation from The National Theatre. As a result of the theatre boycott and the actors' insurgency, the government quickly abolished all unions and called upon the aging former president of 42 E.1. CZERWINSKI SPATIF/ZASP (Union of Polish Artists), Henryk Sletynski, to form a new "house union." The effort, of course, was unsuccessful: actors, artists and professionals - as if answering in perfect hannony -:- refused to join any governmentsponsored organization. Ifone group in Eastern Europe is following the spirit of Solidarity, it is those whose moral duty is to create a country's culture. The best artists have proved to be the finest citizens. On 4 May 1983 Andrzej Wajda was dismissed as head of Group x, the movie production unit. His activities as spokesman for Polish artists during Solidarity's too brief halcyon days and his film Man of Iron, which won the Golden Palm Award of the Cannes Film Festival, stressed too blatantly the cynical shifts in Polish politics. Wajda remains in France, where he is completing work on Danton's Affair, based on the Polish play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska. During the same period Poland's finest actor, Daniel Olbrychski, star of several international productions including Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum, was requested to leave the country because of his criticism of the tactics employed by the government. Other artists have been directed - ordered - to conform, to create for a dubious posterity "sermons in stones." Some have succumbed; the majority, despite insidious harassment, continues to hold on to what one director has referred to as "a still and quiet conscience."I I The plethora of classics, whether by design or not, has turned into swan songs for various directors. Jozef Szajna retired, leaving behind him three productions which will continue in Teatr Studio's repertory: Replika (1973), Dante (1974), and Cervantes (1976). His premature retirement (he now devotes his time to painting) startled the professional community. Vibrant and filled with a lust for life, despite the fact that he spent his youth (from age seventeen to twenty-two) in several death camps, Szajna has always been proud ofhis role as Poland's Hound of Heaven. For this reason one takes his alleged retirement with a grain of salt. In contrast, Jerzy Grotowski's exit from the theatre, especially with the recent abolishment of his Laboratory Theatre in Wrodaw, has an air of...

Across the different periods of Jerzy Grotowski´s trajectory, from Poor Theatre to Objective Drama, the article detects and examines the close connection between action, space and place within both the con- ceptual and the practical framework of each one of them. The approach concerns, in particular, the flagship spaces and places of each period, that is, the Laboratory Theatre of Wroclaw, of Poor Theatre, the buildings and the surrounding countryside of Brzezinka, of Paratheatre, and the Barn and the Yurt of the University of Irvine, of Objective Drama. Being theYurt the only building constructed for Grotowski in his trajectory and according to his precise instructions, it deserves special attention as model space with respect to the pretensions of his work.

This article discusses the performance Gypsy Ad (Gypsy Hell) by experimental company Alma Alter, which offers one of the most original and inclusive devising of Roma narratives on the Bulgarian stage. Drawing from field research, video archives, and personal interviews, it analyzes the synchronized and noncontradictory use of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre and Paratheatre in the show that consequently enables physical as well as participatory exploration of the Roma myth. In the center of the discussion is the performance of Petya Yosifova, who constructs a dual stage persona of a Roma nomad in search of acceptance and an actor-provocateur who constantly challenges her audience’s perceptions and prompts self-evaluation. Operating in the liminal space between fictional and real and between embodiment and being, the actress performs archetypes and plays with stereotypes, ultimately unmasking their instability and addressing social divisions and isolationism amidst a precarious postcommunist environment.

The Clown Group – Engineers without Borders (Knowledge Connections) is a group of clowns formed by Engineers and Engineering students. The theoretical basis of the Clown Group goes back to the origins of Jerzy Grotowski's “poor theater” (1933–1999). Concerning the use of music, theater and dance to present and promote the pleasure of art, the Group values the interaction with the public and does not worry about the structural elements commonly characterized by the theater as stage and lighting. In this way, the Clown Group promotes a Humanistic Formation of its members by providing a development in the capacity of communication, contact with the external community and also the satisfaction, by allowing the art to be spread in a simple and effective way. The objective of this work is to analyze the importance of Humanistic Training in the professional and personal development of Engineers and Engineering students, treating as a special case the Humanistic Training linked to the actions of the Clown Group – Engineers without Borders (Knowledge Connections). As a hypothesis, it is expected that the experience of members and ex–members of the Clown Group can be proven through their training and presentations over the years. In order to evaluate the personal and professional development of members and ex–members of the Clown Group during the training process, a qualitative research was carried out, via an applied questionnaire, in addition to a documentary research by observation, in which data were collected through analysis and observation of photos and documents of the Clown Group. In addition, Artificial Neural Networks were used to correlate the members and ex–members based on the two applied researches. The members and ex–members of the Clown Group have experienced a major break in introspection, significantly improving their way of communicating with society. The members and ex–members presented an improvement in the way they relate to each other in a team, a fundamental aspect of an Engineer's professional life. The Clown Group presents itself as a very important action for Humanistic Training and the professional and personal development of Engineers and Engineering students. The diffusion of art in the academic and external community promoted by the Clown Group also allows the deconstruction of the stereotype that the areas of Engineering and the Arts cannot coexist.

The Open Theater’s The Serpent (1968) offers a critique of the humanist belief in world-shaping agency that provided a foundation for the counterculture – and by extension, for avant-garde theatre and performance – of the 1960s. Taking as its subject the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, The Serpent offers a new approach to this classic myth of human origins and human nature, rejecting both a romanticized attachment to the story of an idyllic paradise to which humanity might return and a secular dismissal of that story as a counter-revolutionary narrative of human subjection. The myth of Eden becomes the story of an unfulfillable longing for a knowable, reliable human nature that can ground a revolutionary faith. New archival research into the rehearsal process of The Serpent reveals that the company moved slowly, almost reluctantly, toward its discovery that the category of the “human,” whether alienated in modernity or unalienated in the garden, is a political and philosophical dead end. The play the Open Theater collectively created laid the groundwork for the anti-humanist generation of avant-garde theatre artists that followed, even as the play continues to challenge readers and spectators to develop a non-humanist ethics built on intellectual vulnerability and distributed agency.

Of all the directors under discussion in the book, none has enraged and engaged the imaginations of theatre practitioners and audiences over the past 20 years as profoundly as Jerzy Grotowski. Starting out as a director quite content to treat his actors as his raw material, he has changed and developed to the point where he now sees his role as simply that of a catalyst of others’ creativity. The major performances by his Laboratory Theatre — Akropolis, The Constant Prince, Apocalypsis cum Figuris — served as slaps in the face of the largely unfocused and complacent experimental theatre that mushroomed worldwide in the 1960s. The rigorous exigencies of his ethic have had extensive repercussions for the members of his group, carrying them beyond the domain of theatre, determining a way of life. However, despite the mass of material produced around the ‘Grotowski phenomenon’, much remains misunderstood or shrouded in the obscurantist mysticism that appears to characterise Grotowski’s own gnomic utterances (the fruit of a peculiarly Polish blend of Catholicism and existentialism).

Reviewed by: Gin & "It." Johnathon D. Boyd Gin & "It." Created and directed by Reid Farrington. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. 7 March 2010. Artists frequently utilize media and film in live theatre as tools for creative expression, and innovative [End Page 684] productions such as Reid Farrington's Gin & "It" demonstrate how technology provides new ways of thinking about adaptation and the role of the theatre technician. Farrington took on multiple roles, working as both a director and designer, to show that designers and technicians possess a unique voice and the desire to tell a story. In addition, Farrington created a multi-layered adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope that functions as a metatheatrical commentary on the process of adaptation. This production demonstrates how technicians might be utilized as actors, and serves as an example of how an adapted work alters audience perception to create new perspectives. Developed at the 3LD Art & Technology Center, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts's creative residency program, Gin & "It" received its world premiere in the performance space at the Wexner Center for the Arts. This exceptional and distinctive production originated from the desire to intersect live theatre with Hitchcock's Rope. As Farrington related to me in a post-show interview, he received a copy of the film as a gift and immediately felt a connection between his own artistic goals and Hitchcock's film. He began developing his production by designing software and planning the timing of sequences from Rope that might be incorporated into the narrative of a live-action performance. This inventive approach is one that Farrington has cultivated over time. He has worked on similar theatrical experiments as a part of the Wooster Group, contributing to such shows as To You the Birdie!, Brace Up!, Poor Theatre, House/Lights, and Who's Your Dada?! and producing the video, software, and editing for the company's production of Hamlet in 2007. With Gin & "It," Farrington built on his previous knowledge and experience, using eight projectors rather than the single projector utilized for Hamlet, and moved beyond simply creating discourse through the juxtaposition of image and performance to developing a production in which the performers communicate with and against the projected narrative to create a new discourse with flawless precision and timing. As both director and designer, Farrington created a production concept in which the technical elements drew attention to themselves. The actor/technicians both created a backstage or behind-the-scenes world of the play, and then disrupted it to focus the audience's attention on the process of creating that world. To do this, the actor/ technicians used interruptions, frantic movement, and occasional breaks in the action. Midway through the play, a musical dance number broke up the action, referencing dance breaks often included in theatre productions so that actor/technicians can set up another scene. Farrington used the interlude in his show to comment on how technicians frequently work backstage during these moments in a performance. With all the abrupt shifts and transitions, the actor/technicians adopted an improvisational style that felt natural and seamless. Click for larger view View full resolution Karl Allen, Keith Foster, Christopher Loar, and Tim McDonough create Gin & "It."(Photo: Paula Court.) Click for larger view View full resolution Karl Allen, Keith Foster, Christopher Loar, and Tim McDonough create Gin & "It."(Photo: Paula Court.) Beyond this unique performance style, Gin & "It" provided multiple levels of understanding regarding how an audience receives information and interprets the performance. As the live actor/technicians moved onstage, they created and manipulated the frame of the projected film at varying degrees of depth; the edited film, combined with the rhythms and melodies created by the live actor/technicians onstage, produced an intersection of rhythmic counterpoints. Within the text of the play, however, we see that life is not always perfect or harmonious; every so often, the characters onstage missed their mark, questioned one another, and reacted to "mistakes." There was even an offstage video operator who interrupted the action to make adjustments or direct the actor/technicians to move on to another [End Page 685] scene. Attention to...

Katherine Tingley's Theosophical Theatre: Greek Revivalism and New Religion in Lomaland, USA Edmund B. Lingan (bio) In Point Loma, California, which is a small town a few miles west of San Diego, stand two eye-catching buildings on what is now the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University. One is a round building topped with what resembles a three-dimensional, purple, stained-glass teardrop. The other is an outdoor theatre with orchestra and hillside seating that recalls the architecture of ancient Greek theatres. These two buildings are reminders of the headquarters and residential community of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society (UBTS), also known as "Lomaland," which flourished under the leadership of Katherine Tingley between 1898 and 1929. During the heyday of the UBTS, the Greek Theater housed ancient Greek and original plays that Tingley directed as a means to teach the principles of her spiritual worldview, which is called Theosophy. Although Tingley's name is virtually unknown by contemporary theatre scholars, in her own time she was known and understood by theatre critics as an important director of experimental theatre. In The Open-Air Theatre (1918), Sheldon Cheney, who is one of the first American critics of avant-garde theatre, credits Tingley with being a pioneer of Greek Revivalism and the Open-Air Theatre movement in the US.1 Cheney writes that Tingley constructed the first outdoor, Greek-style theatre in California and credits her with developing a new and decorative form of drama that was "permeated by the Greek spirit."2 In a 1916 article entitled "Some American Experimental Theaters," W. L. Sowers compared Tingley's theatrical work to that of well-known Greek Revivalist theatre artists such as Maude Adams and Margaret Anglin.3 Tingley, however, differed from the professional theatre artists with whom she was compared because her theatre was created primarily to teach and promote Theosophy: one of the most well-known and enduring of the "new religious movements," or "NRMs," that emerged during the Occult Revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, Tingley was known internationally as the leader of the UBTS, and she predicted that the mysteries of a lost primordial religion, or "Wisdom Religion," would be [End Page 5] revived on the grounds of Lomaland, which was presented to the general public as a new Athens of the modern age.5 Tingley viewed theatre as one of the most important tools for teaching the mysteries of the Wisdom Religion. With the stated goal of reconstructing what she imagined the "supreme religious dramas" of ancient Greece might have been like, Tingley directed Aeschylus's Eumenides and original, Greek-inspired theosophical mystery dramas called "symposia" (see fig. 1).6 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Katherine Tingley (1847–1929). Copyright and courtesy of the Theosophical Society Archives, Pasadena, California. This essay explores the religious motivations behind Tingley's theatre, as well as the social and political concerns that were embedded within those productions. To accomplish this purpose, it has been necessary to depend for the most part [End Page 6] upon primary resources because little scholarship has been dedicated to Tingley's theatrical work. Emmet A. Greenwalt's The Point Loma Community in California 1897–1942: A Theosophical Experiment (1955) includes an illustrated chapter on Tingley's theatre, and a few theatre critics who worked during the early-twentieth century discussed Tingley's theatre.7 Knowledge of Tingley's theatre faded, however, after her death in 1929, and since then the bulk of the documents concerning her theatrical work have been held in The Theosophical Society Archive in Pasadena, California, which is not open to scholars and the general public. Between 2001 and 2008, two directors of The Theosophical Society—Grace F. Knoche and Randell C. Grubb—granted me permission to visit the archives on three separate occasions, and this rare opportunity has enabled me to access hundreds of photos, scripts, programs, and articles relating to the theatrical activities of Katherine Tingley and the UBTS in Lomaland (Point Loma) and New York City.8 Like many organizations identified by sociologists of religion as an NRM, Theosophy offers alternatives to some...

This article presents a comprehensive study of contemporary art technologies as key tools in directorial work in the opera theater. It focuses on the transformation of staging approaches under the influence of digitalization and on the role of technological tools in shaping new models of theatrical expressiveness. The study examines the use of multimedia projections, digital scenography, interactive platforms, motion-tracking systems, and virtual and augmented reality technologies in constructing the artistic vision of an opera production. It also analyzes how these innovations influence the structure of stage space, the dynamics of stage action, and the interaction between performers and audiences. Special attention is given to the professional challenges directors face when implementing cutting-edge technologies, particularly the need for collaboration with technical specialists, the rethinking of principles of stage communication, and the adaptation of classical operatic works to expanded visual possibilities. The research explores how robotic stage-design systems enable dynamic transformations synchronized with musical dramaturgy and how artificial intelligence creates adaptive scenic environments that respond to vocal characteristics and performers’ emotional states. The article identifies key trends that characterize the contemporary development of opera: the fusion of traditional theatrical forms with digital tools, the integration of audiovisual practices from other artistic fields, and the growing importance of multimedia dramaturgy in shaping production concepts. It also addresses the fundamental challenge of maintaining a balance between technological innovation and the essence of opera as an art form in which the singer’s voice remains the dominant expressive element. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of a new aesthetic of opera performance that synthesizes early twentieth-century musical-dramatic traditions with the capabilities of contemporary digital media, creating a postdramatic theater in which linear narrative gives way to fragmentation and polymediality. The article concludes that art technologies expand the director’s toolkit and contribute to the renewal of the artistic language of opera, shaping new approaches to the perception and interpretation of operatic works in the context of digital culture while preserving the essential characteristics of the genre.

Jerzy Grotowski (born 1933) came into contact early in his career with the work of Stanislavski (at the Polish State Theatre School in Cracow, and at GITIS in Moscow, where he did a one-year directing course, learning also about Meyerhold and Vakhtangov). Visiting France in 1957, he learned of the works of Jean Vilar, his teacher Dullin and Marcel Marceau (a pupil of Decroux, who was taught by Suzanne Bing). Thus, he was open to the traditions of Stanislaysky, Meyerhold and Copeau, in addition to those of Polish writers and directors (for example, Witkiewicz, Slowacki and director Juliusz Osterwa, who founded one of the first theatre communities, similar to Copeau’s and Stanislaysky’s experiments and prefiguring those of Grotowski himselfl).