Rethinking Religion in the Theatre of Grotowski

Catharine Christof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351854610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

This book opens a new interdisciplinary frontier between religion and theatre studies to illuminate what has been seen as the religious, or spiritual, nature of Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski's work. It corrects the lacunae in both theatre studies and religious studies by examining the interaction between the two fields in his artistic output.

The central argument of the text is that through an embodied and materialist approach to religion, developed in the work of Michel Foucault and religious studies scholar Manuel Vasquez, as well as a critical reading of the concepts of the New Age, a new understanding of Grotowski and religion can be developed. It is possible to show how Grotowski's work articulated spiritual experience within the body; achieving a removal of spirituality from ecclesial authorities and relocating spiritual experience within the body of the performer.

This is a unique analysis of one of the 20th Century's most famous theatrical figures. As such, it is a vital reference for academics in both Religion and Theatre Studies that have an interest in the spiritual aspects of Grotowski's work.

1 Rendering Grotowski’s spirituality

Perspectives from performance and theatre studies

Because this text will hopefully be of interest to scholars of religion who are unfamiliar with Jerzy Grotowski and the scholarship surrounding his work, we begin this chapter with a broad overview of Grotowski’s life and work. Equally, the world of theatre and performance studies may not be up to date with movements from within the world of religious studies and some of its more recent research on embodiment and spiritual experience. An overview of the relevant details from within religious studies as they relate to Grotowski’s work is provided in later chapters, where appropriate.

We begin this chapter with a brief chronology of Grotowski’s life and work, recognizing the profound impact that both spiritual and religious elements had on the young Grotowski. Much theatre scholarship on Grotowski obviously acknowledges the influences and interests of his childhood and young adulthood. Indeed, many of the great spiritual texts and teachers made an impression on the young Grotowski including the Zohar, the New Testament, the writings of Martin Buber and Meister Eckhart, Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus, Paul Brunton’s writings and the life of the Hindu mystic Ramana Maharshi.¹ As a young student Grotowski organized and led a six-month-long series of weekly lectures on Oriental philosophies including Buddhism, yoga, Confucianism and Taoism in the student club at Krakow. He even travelled to the shrine of Ramakrishna and spent time in Pondicherry.² Grotowski later requested that his ashes be scattered in India, near Arunachala mountain,³ the site of which was considered sacred to Ramana Maharshi.⁴

Grotowski became a highly influential Polish theatre director whose innovative work in experimental theatre has had a profound effect on contemporary theatre throughout the world. His systematic investigations revolutionized concepts of theatrical staging, the performer/audience relationship and the craft of acting itself. Widely considered to be one of the fathers of experimental theatre as well as a cultural visionary, Grotowski’s training and work with his performers pushed them to their physical limits. The importance of Grotowski’s work was recognized and funded by a variety of supporters including the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Centre for Theatre Creation, the MacArthur Foundation and the University of California, Irvine.⁵He was appointed professor at the Collège de France in Paris and in 1997 took the Chair of Theatre Anthropology, a post which was created especially for him. Undoubtedly, Grotowski was one of the most original and provocative theatre artists in the twentieth century. His legacy continues to be celebrated today, with UNESCO declaring 2009 the “Year of Grotowski.”⁶

As is acknowledged by numerous theatre and performance studies scholars as well by the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards at Pontedera, Italy there are five distinct phases of Grotowski’s work,⁷ the first four of which were named by Grotowski himself. These distinctions have been made to explain the variety of trajectories of his work.

1. 1 Theatre of Productions (1959–1969). This first phase was given over to the creation of public theatre performances. Grotowski’s career began in the late 1950s; he became artistic director of the Theatre of 13 Rows in 1959. His productions based at this company included Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Shakuntala, based on a text by Kalidasa, Dziady (or Forefather’s Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus based on Christopher Marlowe’s text. The productions of Akropolis, Doctor Faustus, The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum Figuris brought Grotowski and his work into the forefront of theatrical and cultural attention in the twentieth century. Long-time collaborator and close friend of Grotowski’s, Ludwik Flaszen states that in Grotowski’s first productions he was a “metaphysical orator, a cosmic chatterbox babbling about the universe.”⁸ Grotowski’s public productions needed explanatory notes to draw the spectator’s attention to the deeper meanings of the performance. A brief chronological overview of his more important productions and the remaining four working phases follows.

Debuting in 1962, Grotowski’s Akropolis was a performance based on Stanisław Wyspiański’s famous dramatic, epic poem in the Polish romantic tradition. Created from a pastiche of themes from Polish history, the Bible and Homer, the play is meant to be set on a site considered central to the historical and cultural aspects of Polish consciousness. Grotowski upended these themes by relocating his version of the play to Auschwitz. One of the great successes of this production was the creation of a palpable sense of being in a concentration camp. In Grotowski’s production Jacob, the Leader of a Dying Tribe, was Jewish; his final monologue became a hymn in honour of a Saviour figure. Amidst ecstatic prayers for salvation, this Saviour figure (a rag doll) was taken down into the symbolic crematorium beneath the stage. Actor Zygmunt Molik as Jacob leads the others into a hole under the stage; in Grotowski’s production it is clear that Jacob is leading them into the gas chambers. This is confirmed when the original opening words of Wyspiański’s play are heard: “They are gone and the smoke rises in spirals.” Elements of Grotowski’s version of this play are explored in detail in Part I.

Based on Christopher Marlowe’s drama, Grotowski’s production of Doctor Faustus premiered in 1963. It, too, was radically different from the original and included numerous blasphemous references to Christian iconography. The audience became the guests at Faustus’s farewell party and were invited to listen to his public confession. Evil spirits were summoned through traditional Polish hymns, degrading references were made to the Virgin Mary and baptism, and after Faustus signed his bargain with the devil he donned a white Dominican cassock. Ludwik Flaszen, Grotowski’s close friend and collaborator at this time, called it a mystery play depicting the final hours of a “saint who is acting against God.”⁹ Grotowski’s Faustus was a very human one, because according to Flaszen, “a saint who is fully consequential in his sanctity has to rebel against nature’s creator.”¹⁰ This acting against God and the strategic use of calculated blasphemy was to become part of Grotowski’s arsenal and a solid means of challenging the spiritual authority of the Polish Catholic Church.

In 1965 the company moved to Wroclaw and in 1966 was re-labelled as a Teatr Laboratorium. The changing of the name reflected the concept that methodical work on the craft of acting was being carried out, in accordance with principles applied in academic research institutions. It was during this time that The Constant Prince was produced. Debuting in 1965 The Constant Prince, with actor Ryszard Cieślak in the title role, is considered to be one of the great seminal productions of the twentieth century, in part because of the extraordinary physicality that Grotowski’s actors demonstrated. Calderon de la Barca’s play in a translation by Juliusz Słowacki is respected as one the great works of Polish Romanticism, glorifying sacrifice, constancy and ultimately martyrdom.¹¹ Grotowski’s production of The Constant Prince ignored much of the famous play’s original plot, which focused on the fight between the Moors and the Portuguese. A theatrical realization of exomologesis (an early Christian confessional and penitential practice), as ascetic maceration exercised on the body was realized in this production, linking the body with the spirit in ways explored at length by Foucault in the years following 1976. Grotowski’s production of The Constant Prince demonstrated some key aspects of interdisciplinarity between theatre and explorations of the religious body. These elements in Grotowski’s version of The Constant Prince are examined in light of the work of Foucault and the religious body in Part I.

Grotowski’s 1968 book Towards a Poor Theatre (hereinafter TAPT), on the theory and practice of theatre, proposes that theatre should not try to compete with film and should focus instead on the uniqueness of the performer/spectator relationship and on the engaged physicality of the performer. In addition to being a philosophical summary of Grotowski’s work until then, it is considered a guidebook for the principles of the poor theatre. The notion of “poor theatre” was coined by Flaszen to define Grotowski’s work that makes maximum use of a minimum of props and set pieces, with none of the ostentation and spectacular stagings of its contra...