1Grotowskiâs carnal prayer
Sri Ramana Maharshi â Grotowskiâs childhood hero, whom he had first encountered in Paul Bruntonâs A Search in Secret India and whose philosophy he would follow throughout his life (Grotowski asked that his ashes be scattered at the holy mountain Arunachala, where Maharshi lived and taught) â practiced and taught self-inquiry via an uncompromising examination of self-awareness. Maharshi approached this self-examination by asking himself the question: âWho am I?â Grotowski embarked upon his own quest of self-unveiling inspired by Sri Ramana Maharshiâs meditative practice. In his 1975 interview, Grotowski describes it this way:
But then, he continues: âFor me, there was lacking in it something human, the senses.â For Grotowski, âlacking something human,â does not mean âthe bodyâ â in opposition to âthe mindâ â interrogating the identity of the self, but rather, the âsensesâ: â sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, balance, but also intuition, consciousness, even clarity of mind â all of these meanings come into play in the Polish notion of the âsenses.â Hence Grotowski directs Maharshiâs question not to the mind, but rather to the whole person; and the answer is a deed that he would call the total or complete act. Grotowskiâs actor-as-person works on him/herself â as Stanislavsky would wish â by answering the Indian guruâs question.
To find a way into the contemporary Western imagination, Grotowski employed some Catholic vocabulary and gnostic narratives. The actor as a whole, undivided person asks him/herself who s/he is and confesses with his/her whole self in answer and, by means of this confession, sacrifices himself, becomes holy. In his search for this holistic, East-meets-West, theatre-meets-contemplative practice-meets-liturgy, Grotowski set out from that period of his work known as Poor Theatre, and gradually arrived at a philosophical and theatrical crossroads, which he called Art as Vehicle. Its realm is a deep encounter, carnal and mental, first with oneself, and then with others.
Grotowski first used the term carnal prayer in 1990, quite late in his life. He introduced the phrase in a speech dedicated to Ryszard CieĆlakâs legendary performance of Prince Ferdinand in the Laboratory Theatreâs production of The Constant Prince (1965â1970). Originally delivered in French, the speech was transcribed and later published in Polish in a translation by Magda ZĆotowska, edited by Grotowski. In Polish, the term is modlitwa zmysĆĂłw, literally, a âprayer of the senses.â Yet in his essay âFrom the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle,â which Grotowski contributed to Thomas Richardsâ book, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (1995), the English term becomes âcarnal prayer.â Grotowskiâs deliberate choice of words, among other factors, prompted me to propose the term soma in place of the body in my discussion of carnal prayer and the total act, as soma includes the sensual and âpoeticâ being that inhabits the body. âCarnal,â as used in this context, implies physical, mental, undivided.
It is during the formative period at the Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, two decades after the closing of The Constant Prince, that CieĆlakâs process was rearticulated as a carnal prayer and embraced as a major theme in the Workcenterâs research. At the time he coined the term, Grotowski had been pursuing practical research in Art as Vehicle, while simultaneously cultivating Thomas Richards as his artistic heir. Thus carnal prayer, while articulating something of key importance about a production developed in the 1960s, gained a particular meaning in the context of the work at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in the mid 1990s. In view of the fact that this concept emerged two decades after the close of the production to which it refers, during a phase of Grotowskiâs work far distant from that conducted at the Laboratory Theatre, it is only natural to conclude that the ideas resulted from newly evolving perspectives within Grotowskiâs artistic research.
In the body of over 1100 pages of Grotowskiâs Teksty Zebrane [Collected Texts], âmodlitwa zmysĆĂłw,â carnal prayer, appears just twice, both times in reference to CieĆlakâs total act. First in his 1990 talk:
And then in his 1995 essay in Richardsâ book:
Richards too speaks of carnal prayer twice in his book, which suggests that the term was gaining significance during the period of his work with Grotowski at the Workcenter (1986â1999). These four instances provide the only basis for assessing the significance of this term. Such a scant reference to the term might seem to render the concept insignificant in Grotowskiâs normally consistent philosophy. I will strongly argue otherwise, however, particularly in the context of the work Richards and Biagini do today.
Throughout his life, Grotowski regularly reflected on his work on past projects, from a perspective gained by a newly shifted focus. In his texts, he continually revised the narrative of his artistic path, rearticulating his approach through the lens of insights derived from new directions of work. Always moving forward in his research, Grotowski used this hindsight-based discursive perspective to provide a new outlook on previous work and clarify the aim of newly reconfigured practices.
For those who study his entire lifework, it becomes apparent that what he intuited, realized in practice, and theorized as a young director, he was able to rearticulate in the later stages of his post-theatrical research in ways succinct and profound, reflecting his new awareness and accumulated experience. Characteristically, in his analysis he would remain careful and reserved about his current work. For Grotowski, practical research and critical discourse were not compatible, and he thought that extensive theorizing subjected practice to conceptual restraints. His epistemology privileged the deed as a medium for creating, retaining, and disseminating knowledge. Favoring embodied (or pathic) knowledge, similarly to experiential phenomenologists, Grotowski proclaimed the primacy of practice in his studies of the human encounter. Therefore to read Grotowski often means to subject the meaning of his words to the authority of his developing insights that foreground the experiences of his new work.
In âFrom the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle,â Grotowski introduces the work on ritual songs as his practical approach to an actorâs work on him/herself. In the preface to Richardsâ book, he introduces Richards as his âessential collaborator.â4 The content of these two late texts was meticulously reworked and edited to leave a clear message about his legacy, and perhaps about the nature of theatrical legacies in general.5 With his health deteriorating, Grotowski invested the final phase of his lifelong research to work on âverticality,â and to cultivating continuators. Ultimately, he envisioned his legacy as disseminated through practical research in ritual arts.
Even though Grotowski conducted his work in distinct phases/projects, each radically different in approach, methodology, and objectives, his pursuit of the âwork on oneselfâ and on the potentiality of the human encounter was present throughout, a throughline in the embodied narrative of his investigations. With the accumulation of experience and the insights from his life-long pursuit, the choice of vocabulary that addresses this thread of research sheds new light not only on the earlier work it addresses, but on his entire lifework, and importantly, on the work that is continued today by Richards and Biagini.
The questions that matter for me are: What is at stake in this progression from total act to carnal prayer? What does the notion of prayer bring to the total act? How does it relate to Grotowskiâs research trajectory? What does it mean in regard to Grotowskiâs research in Art as Vehicle?
From Poor Theatre to the liturgies of Art as Vehicle
I see in Grotowskiâs last phase of work, though so radically different from his experimentations with theatre in 1960s, a deep connection with the philosophy that brought about the concept of Poor Theatre (which seemingly dissolved when he abandoned productions in 1970). Even if Art as Vehicle can be defined as a genre of performance in opposition to theatre â because it shifts the aim from producing a semiotic mise en scĂšne to serving the performerâs self-disclosure â it nonetheless shares a number of key features with Grotowskiâs early experimental performances, including the actorâs self-disclosure, the emphasis on the acting craft, and the simplicity of the external means. In my opinion, the essence of Poor Theatre did not so much disappear with the turning away from productions in Grotowskiâs practice, as, rather naturally, if gradually, find its place in new work.
In speaking of Poor Theatre in this regard, I do not intend the mundane meaning of the term â the ascetic reduction of the means of production â but rather its philosophical basis. The concept of Poor Theatre was inspired (if indirectly) by the writings of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, particularly by his discourse on the efficacy of rich and poor temporal means in liturgy. Maritain considered humble temporal means spiritually superior to rich temporal means (opulent, forceful, ornate, imposing, profuse). The latter tend to be more visible (spectacular) and wide-reaching, while the former create deeper, transformative impact. A good (non-Christian) example of a master of humble means would be Sri Ramana Maharshi. In Christian culture, perhaps the most potent model of the success of humble means would be Jesus. If Maritain suggests that the growth of the richness of liturgical means is a symptom of the deterioration of the original quest, and a compensation for the subsequent loss of efficacy of the liturgical practice, Grotowski understood this notion in practical, theatrical terms: growth of richness of theatrical means is symptomatic of the loss of the efficacy of performance. Perhaps they meant the same thing.
Grotowskiâs longstanding interest...