The Stanislavsky–Grotowski lineage: Part II

In 1963, Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland— an industrial town of 50,000 some sixty miles from Auschwitz— produced Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Not one word was changed in the script, but the text was reordered into a “montage,” as Grotowski calls it, drawing on all the Quartos and rearranging the sequence of scenes, creating new ones and eliminating some others. We are printing the program notes to this production, including the sequence of scenes as Grotowski conceived them,. Although the play was performed in Polish, Grotowski wrote the program in French. The Theatre Laboratory is small, seating only sixty, and productions are mounted only when they are ready. For Faustus the long, low theatre room—about forty by fifteen feet—was painted black, and the set consisted of two long tables running the length of the room and one smaller table at one end of the room. In a future issue, we shall have an article about the Theatre Laboratory's work and an interview with Grotowski by Eugenia Barba, who spent some months in Poland with Grotowski's company. We would like to thank Mr. Barba for sending us the program and photographs printed below. —The Editor

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.

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).

O presente artigo busca indicar influências orientais em alguns encenadores ocidentais do século XX, fazendo um levantamento de algumas características ditas orientais em métodos de atuação e encenação, sob o ponto de vista corporal. Conceituando primeiramente a denominação “Oriente”, procuro realizar uma abordagem com vistas a sinalizar pensamentos, técnicas e métodos orientais e sua influência em encenadores ocidentais, sendo estes: Constantin Stanislavski, Edward Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba e Luís Otávio Burnier.

ABSTRACTPedagogy and methodology for acting curriculum is consistent among universities in the United States. Students are introduced to acting principles formulated by Konstantin Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Benedetti, Lee Strasberg, and other experts in the field. This is not always the case for musical theatre acting courses offered by these same institutions. Musical theatre “acting” courses usually just expose students to a broad range of songs within the historical canon of musical theatre repertoire. Primary focus tends to be on the singing technique and vocal interpretation of the song. Musical theatre students in the academic setting must understand that acting technique represents the intellectual life of a character. The musical structure employs the emotional colour to the given circumstances of the character’s reason for singing the song. As a practitioner and educator of musical theatre pedagogy and methodology, I have experienced great success by utilizing Stanislavski’s “circles of attention” when coaching students through musical theatre song performance. The technique provides a clearer path of analysis for song text, activates given circumstances more clearly, clarifies moment-to-moment work, and links musical notation to language in order to achieve a more meaningful performance experience. It has become the most effective teaching tool in my musical theatre courses.

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.

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...

The article presents political interpretations of Hamlet in Poland in the turbulent period of politcal changes between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s. The author discusses the relationships between Shakespeare’s tragedy and Polish political context as well as the influence of audience expectations in the specific interpretations. The selected performances are: Hamlet by Roman Zawistowski (at the Old Theatre in Cracow 1956) and Hamlet Study by Jerzy Grotowski (at the Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole 1964). They both were hugely influenced by major commentators of Hamlet, i.e. Stanisław Wyspiański and Jan Kott. The author argues that up-to-date readings of Hamlet, which started with Wyspiański’s study in 1905, flourished in the mid-1950s and mid-1960s when concerning specific political events: the Polish Thaw of 1956 and March 1968, when the Jews were expelled from Poland. Thus Hamlet of that time was updated and must be seen through the prism of political events.

Until the late twentieth century, courses in voice and diction were a staple of the field of communication studies. Increasingly these classes are disappearing from departments around the country, largely over concerns regarding the prescription of strict speech standards. At the same time, an interest in vocal training has increased in BFA and MFA actor training programs. This study looks to the shared history of voice training between the fields of communication studies and theatre instruction to provide a critical pedagogy for vocal performance, specifically for the area of performance studies, but also for use in other disciplines. Informed by feminist and queer theory, this dissertation examines the history of vocal instruction in the U. S. from the publication of Dr. James Rush’s Philosophy of the Human Voice in 1823 to the present. The study examines the major works of the elocution and expression movements in the U.S., recovers the voice instruction of twentieth-century theatre practitioners Konstantin Stanislavski and Jerzy Grotowski, and explores training in the “natural voice” as described by Kristin Linklater. Grounded in such a lineage of vocal pedagogy, the study provides an outline for voice instruction that honors the unique vocal qualities of the student performer while providing the student with tools for being heard, understood, and for maintaining healthy vocal usage over multiple rehearsals and performances.

The issue of intentionality was posed anew in philosophy by Franz Brentano. However, it was Brentano himself who indicated that the source of intentionality-related problems dates back to Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The search for the original traces of this issue in the history of philosophy has led me to conclude that intentionality as an inalienable characteristic of consciousness is characterized by three-dimensionality, which is expressed in theoria, praxis and poiesis. Contemporary research focuses primarily on cognitive intentionality, examining in particular either the very subject-object relation or the immanent (intentional) object, in-existing in psychical experience (in the acts of consciousness). And yet, intentionality is a basic feature of the whole consciousness-anchored (mental) life of a human being. It determines the whole consciousness-based activity of the subject in abstract theorizing, practice and production. Therefore, it manifests itself as a mode of being of a conscious (mental) entity, i.e. an entity partially constituted by intentional content, relationality, reference, directionality, openness and conscious awareness , as well as determining the meaning and the creation of purely intentional beings. Intentionality is revealed as a primary factor in the awakening of consciousness, through the building (constituting) of conscious experiences that are poietic, practical and theoretical. Each of these three ways of categorizing the nature of experience, however, indicates only the predominant aspect of a given experience, for strictly speaking experiences are determined by all three aspects. Intentionality and – consequently – all conscious experience, are thus characterized by three-dimensions: cognitive, activistic and productive. Any act of consciousness is always a form of activity that is informed by its cognitive aspect and produces something transcendent with regard to itself. The recognition of the three-dimensional nature of intentionality allows us to understand the human being and the dilemmas concerning his actions, knowledge and creativity.

Tribute to Pasquale Montagna, 1950–2010

The present study suggests a reflection upon possibilities of interaction between the artistic ensemble (the group formed by the artists who propose a theatrical work) and the spectator ensemble (gathering of people who interact with the actors throught such theatrical works). This encounter between artists and spectators has been defined in its uniqueness as the essence of the theatrical phenomenon by the polish director Jerzy Grotowski, in the decade of 1960. We base our research upon Grotowski's proposition and proceed to investigate alterations on the relationship between the two ensembles on experiences of the Teatro Oficina since its creation in So Paulo in 1958, until the present day. There are three axes of research: the artistic ensemble's formation, the configuration of the scenic space, and interaction proposals. In the first axis, several theatre reformers who influenced Oficina's history will be explored to allow deeper understanding on the formation and development of Oficina's ensemble: Constantin Stanislavski, Vsevolod Meierhold, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Grotowski himself, also including Oswald de Andrade's concept of anthropofagy. For the second axis we rely on the concept of perspective, from its origins in the Reinassance until its contestations in twentieth century artistic vanguards and further developments on the constitution and transformation of the scenic space. As for interaction proposals through a work of art, besides theatrical references, we seek to also contextualize Teatro Oficina's actions during a period of important behavioural transformations incited by counterculture, within the political repression brazilian society was going through. Five plays of the company were selected as subject of study:

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.

Ludwik Flaszen was the cofounder and literary adviser of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, and a collaborator of Jerzy Grotowski. This Jewish kaddish and Dionysian dithyramb offers a glimpse of his life and work.

European Theatre and Performance Studies Christopher Balme I am writing this editorial in the immediate aftermath of attending a planning meeting of the newly formed but not yet officially registered organisation EASTAP (European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance). The idea for the new organisation was born out of both political and academic ‘shocks’ according to the driving force behind it, Josette Féral, currently professor of theatre studies at Paris 3 and before that head of the theatre department at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is also a former president of IFTR. The political shock was Brexit, the academic one a recommendation by a European-trained but US-based academic that a leading graduate school in the US for theatre studies should abolish its foreign-language requirements. This ‘call’ for disciplinary monolingualism masks another more pervasive disciplinary one where the linguistic dominance acts as a vehicle for mainly US trends being transported as the dominant intellectual ones. European theatre studies because of its linguistic multiplicity also feature a richness of perspectives and intellectual traditions that threaten to be obscured. Féral’s initial call generated a remarkable response from across the continent and the UK (there are currently 400 registrations) and in the course of two initial meetings various task forces have been formed to hammer out a constitution, establish a journal and perform all the other tasks necessary for such an undertaking. This work is still in progress but will hopefully culminate in a first conference this autumn in Paris. This initiative poses questions of a very fundamental nature regarding our discipline. The inexorable march towards English as the only ‘acceptable’ academic language for publication is a widely debated and highly controversial topic. Where English is concerned, pragmatism tends to rule (the meeting I attended was conducted in English although I was one of only three native speakers in attendance). The more interesting question concerns disciplinary multilingualism. Although I would be hard put to identify a particular German understanding of theatre studies (Theaterwissenschaft) which is not hopelessly out of date, this is not necessarily the case in other European countries. The Italian representative at the meeting insisted – and I think rightly so – that historiography is at the centre of the discipline there (although a few fringe elements may indulge in performance studies). A conference topic that only privileges contemporary performance would effectively exclude research perspectives from a whole country. From a German perspective it would probably be the opposite. Despite outside perceptions that German Theaterwissenschaft is indebted to the historiography of Max Herrmann, his research into mediaeval and Renaissance theatre finds little resonance in contemporary curricula and research agendas. The recent conference of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft on ‘Kritik/criticism’ was almost exclusively contemporaneous in its papers. The historical/contemporary divide is certainly one of the divisions running through our discipline but it does not appear to map exactly onto European cultural geography. In Poland for example there are strong ‘fortresses’ of historical research [End Page 103] and at the same time ‘progressive’ centres devoted to performance studies. France seems to be split somewhere down the middle, a division often going through whole departments. If Europe defines itself in terms of its cultural heritage (which most EU propaganda does relentlessly), then where does this position European theatre and performance studies within the global map? The famous immediacy of the theatrical event suggests a clear privileging of the contemporary (the scholar has direct access to the object of research), but cultural politics would seem to push us in a different direction. Respect for languages and cultural traditions is a central tenant of the European Union (all official documents are translated into all languages), and I am sure that the projected new association will endeavour to accommodate this multiplicity as best it can. But as an academic discipline engaged hopefully in proverbial ‘cutting-edge’ research, it would be counter-productive to define research trajectories along national-cultural boundaries. Otherwise we run the risk of foregrounding cultural specificity over theoretical and methodological perspectives. This would be a repeat of the mistake that IFTR fell into in its early meetings in the 1960 s and 1970...