Speaking to theatre students in Delphi
Grotowski: The Body and Memory--Next Questions
On July 10, 2022, I made a presentation as part of a panel at a conference at the European Cultural Center of Delphi, in Greece. The panel ended a four day work session for 40 students of two Greek theatre conservatories with several theatre artists from Poland co-sponsored by the Grotowski Institute of Wroclaw. The daily sessions included physical training, voice work, singing, acting études, films from the Grotowski archives, and other creative and practical presentations. The final session’s panel included Jairo Cuesta and me along with Jarek Fret, director of the Grotowski Institute; Przemyslaw Wasilkowski, a Polish actor/director who had worked at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards from 1994-1999; and several Greek theatre scholars/historians. Internationally renowned Greek theatre director, Theodoros Terzopoulos, also participated in summing up the event. What follows is the text of my presentation:
First, for some context. I am here in Delphi after a one year sabbatical from theatre. After fifty some years of doing theatre, serving as Assistant to Jerzy Grotowski (one of the true masters of 20th century theatre), teaching university theatre, directing my own company (with Jairo Cuesta), New World Performance Laboratory, research and experimentation in what Jairo and I call Performance Ecology, singing traditional Shaker songs, guiding actors, and exploring a variety of performance techniques, I decided to take a breath.
And now I am here, in Delphi, the navel of the world, at the foot of the Temple of Apollo, where I am reminded of the three ancient aphorisms: Know Thyself, Nothing to Excess, and Certainty Brings Insanity
Know Thyself. I am not a theatre scholar, critic, or historian. I am a stage director. We find ourselves gathered here in Delphi just one week after the death of Jerzy Grotowski’s great friend and colleague, Peter Brook, one of the Sacred Monsters of the contemporary theater world. I was told that we are here to discuss Grotowski’s contributions to the field of theatre and his work with the body and memory. Perhaps to ask Grotowski some questions? We are gathered here in Delphi in a time of crisis for democracy (certainly in my country, the United States); where tyranny is on the rise and personal freedoms are being stripped away; where a young, unarmed Black man is gunned down by police for running from a traffic violation, shot more than 60 times, in Akron, the Greek-named city I called home for more than 30 years. My country, where in many states a woman no longer has control over her own reproductive choices; where children are routinely slaughtered in their classrooms; and where in some states a gay teacher cannot place on his desk a photo of his same-sex spouse or even say the word gay.
Where are we? What year is it? Are we really almost one quarter of the way through the 21st century? What would Grotowski say about these times we are living in? Grotowski, who himself lived through the horrors of Nazism, the brutality of Stalinism, and the absurdity of Soviet so-called socialism, who witnessed the revolutions of 68, the rise of Solidarność, and the fall of the Berlin Wall? What might he say about the world we live in now?
I think he might point out to us the cyclical nature of human history and then steal some words from his friend Peter Brook. (Because whatever we might say about Grotowski, I think we can all agree that he was a great thief). The passage I’m thinking of appears near the end of Brook’s memoir, Threads of Time, published in 1998. He writes:
Hunger, violence, gratuitous cruelty, rape, crime—these are constant companions in the present time. Theater can penetrate into the darkest zones of terror and despair for one reason only: to be able to affirm neither before nor after but at the very same moment, that light is present in darkness. Progress may have become an empty concept, but evolution is not, and although evolution can take millions of years, the theater can free us from this time frame. As the old saying goes, “If not now, when?”
Progress is an empty concept, but evolution is not. For Brook and for Grotowski, the theater functions as a laboratory, as a place where healing occurs, where (to paraphrase Brook) the process of life becomes more clear and the city, fragmented, is re-membered. This process of re-membering is a mystery. It goes back to the ancient Greek sources of theatre. The city’s population comes together to be healed and to find each member’s place in the community. Grotowski, in his laboratory, gave the actor the possibility to re-member him or herself. To find a whole-ness, an atonement (at-onement), in the action of re-membering—of putting together the various fragments, re-collecting moments from one’s past, imagining one’s future, dis-covering one’s ancestors. I think it’s important that Grotowski would never separate memory from body. For him, the body is memory. And all of this work of re-membering, drawing together the various fragments, the limbs of the dis-membered body, reuniting the whole, is the work of the actor—and the work of the director. Because, for Grotowski, in guiding an actor through this process of becoming “more human” he was able to accomplish the act himself through his intimate and trustful relation with the actor. Together they accomplish the Act.
And what is this Act? In his last period of work, Grotowski might call it the revealing of the essence. But Grotowski also described it very early in his research in the article “Exercises:” “It is you—unrepeatable, individual, you in the totality of your nature: you in the flesh, you naked. And, at the same time, it is you who embodies all the others, all beings, all of history.” Here is Brook’s light in the darkness. Here is the healing. The softening of boundaries between self and others, between person and environment. Totality. Essence. That which precedes social conditioning. Who am I? And there we have it, the first aphorism: Know Thyself
The second aphorism, Nothing to Excess, and its relation to Grotowski and his work is exceedingly obvious. The whole concept of Grotowski’s Poor Theatre can be derived from this principle. In fact, throughout his life and the different periods of his work and research, Grotowski embraced fully this second principle. He spoke about the actor arriving to a state of “passive readiness,” “a state in which one does not want to do that, but rather resigns from not doing it.” The via negativa, the stripping away of anything that is not necessary, the elimination of psycho-physical blocks in the actor’s body-memory, rigorous physical and vocal training, plus creative work on a role, when applied consciously over a long period of time allow the actor to achieve this state of passive readiness and to stand in the so-called “beginning.”
In the book that Jairo and I wrote about Grotowski, we ask the question: Why privilege the beginning? What’s so great about being in the beginning? Doesn’t an actor need skills and personality? When I once showed Grotowski a book which analyzed his “method” and criticized him for leading his actors to a state of emptiness, to the brink of the Void, he laughed at how someone could so blatantly miss that the point was exactly to get to the Void.
When we were working in the Barn in Irvine, California, before moving to Italy, Grotowski was in a big crisis. He was looking for someone to work with one on one, intimately. And because of his health crisis, he needed to find the person fast—now. He had tried several of the members of the Performance Team, but something wasn’t right. Thomas Richards had rejoined the group very recently. His relationship with the work was troubled, to say the least, and Grotowski, having allowed him to come back, was not giving him much attention. One evening, after a run-through of what was then called Main Action, Grotowski and I were having dinner and he asked me: “What do you see at the end? When you look at each team member, what do you see?” I began to describe my impressions and when I got to Thomas, I said, “I don’t see anything. It’s like a hole is there in the space.” There was silence. Grotowski sat absolutely still. Thinking. The next day he began to work with Thomas one-on-one, apart from the rest of the team. I had seen something that Grotowski had missed. Thomas had been modestly working, doing what was required of him. He had given up trying to impress Grotowski. He had sublimated his ego and denied his social self from interfering. With my background and training in American theatre, I saw him as a cipher, a void. At the time, I didn’t even realize if this emptiness I saw was a positive or negative thing. But, when I pointed it out, Grotowski realized Thomas was exactly where he needed him to be in order to begin the work of transmission—he was in the beginning. Nothing to Excess.
We arrive to the third aphorism: Certainty Brings Insanity. When Jairo and I started our theatre company, New World Performance Lab, 30 years ago, we only knew that we wanted to work. I was teaching full-time at a university and Jairo taught part-time at different institutions and eventually also took on responsibilities as a yoga instructor. Our various jobs subsidized our work with the company. Besides our productions, we created a workshop structure called Performance Ecology, which allowed us to continue to explore some of the principles we had each encountered in our work with Grotowski. We are forever grateful to the company members, actors, workshop participants, and supporters who joined us along the way. In NWPL, we seek an eco-theatre, as opposed to ego-theatre, a theatre company that operates in the craft tradition, where art is not separate from life, and where we attempt to work in the realm of what cultural historian Morris Berman calls traditional creativity.
In preparing for this presentation today, I rediscovered one of my favorite writings of Grotowski. It’s actually an interview that was published in the Polish journal Kultura in 1975. It’s a “Conversation” with Andrzej Bonarski and the English version appears in the last chapter of Jennifer Kumiega’s book, The Theatre of Grotowski. I believe that Grotowski reveals himself quite intimately in this conversation. He talks about his personal obsessions, his fears, and self-doubts in a manner that is often disarming. As the conversation goes on, his disarming of himself disarms the reader. In some way, he is giving an example of the process of the paratheatrical work in the structure and content of the interview. As he describes different aspects of his work, in this article, Grotowski introduces the “egregor.”
Egregor is derived from a Greek term that means wakeful or watcher. In today’s popspeak, it might mean “woke.” Today, egregor is most known in the world of manga or as computer malware. Mythically, the egregor is “an autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people.” Grotowski speaks of using the egregor as a theatre director to help raise money and gain public support for one’s various projects. But Grotowski was always able to control the egregor. He never let it control him. He could move in and out of the egregor smoothly and at several points in his life and work, he completely turned his back on the egregor.
When you look around, you see that egregors have completely taken over our world. They are everywhere. They are in our machines, especially our telephones and computers. They’ve invaded our political systems, social systems, educational programs, and run rampant through social media and other media, especially television and film. Egregors watch over our sleep and dreams. They infect our bodies and contaminate our memories. Egregors are not necessarily bad entities. As Grotowski says, sometimes they are needed to help accomplish one’s goals. But when an egregor begins to believe that the truth it represents is the only truth, in doing so, it becomes grotesque, evil, and dangerous.
Currently, the American theatre is undergoing a great Reformation. I know that many Europeans sometimes look at what is happening across the Atlantic and shake your heads tolerantly. However, I do believe that the theatre everywhere needs a good housecleaning and that much good can come from challenging the archaic hierarchies of the theatre and outdated systems of creation, rehearsals, transmission, and compensation. Those of us from the older generation have to be willing to acknowledge the armor of privilege that each of us wears and strip it away. I also believe that certain egregors which are associated with popular slogans or social/political movements on both the right and left, as well as the egregors of Zoom Performances and TikTok Theatre, the industry and the marketplace—for those of you from the younger generations—these egregors, these monsters, are not the answer either. Don’t embrace them too quickly or carelessly. Don’t allow your own voice, your own vibration, to be overwhelmed by the swarms of egregors all around us. Take the risk. Turn your back on the egregors. As Brook reminds us, “If not now, when?” As Grotowski might say, “Just do it.”
Or are those sayings just another egregor? Have the Sacred Monsters themselves become egregors? I don’t know. Ahhhh! Certainty Brings Insanity. But what does uncertainty bring? Where does not knowing lead me? Into the darkness? To the brink of possibility? To the heart of creation? Next time—let’s meet there
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Beautiful posting Jim. I wish I could find words to express as eloquently as you have the "state" we are in. I have no words...just deeply moved by your communication.
Respect!!!