Volume 5 Issue 7                        Jill Place, Publisher                           jill@actingintuitive.com

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Jerzy Grotowski:  Acting as Bliss
Grotowski Part Two:  A Introduction to Acting Bliss

I'm STILL Lookin' for New Students for a BRAND-NEW Class!
Jerzy Grotowski Parts One and Two

Dear [[FirstName]]

Happy belated Easter and Passover.  I don't know how you celebrated Spring but I actually went to my first Passover seder in years last Sunday.  I'm a kinda lapsed Jew . . . proud to be but not practicing.  I'm also not really a seder fan because you have to stare at all that gorgeous food forever while going through this whole service.  But it blew me away that I remembered  all the songs.  And the food . . . which we finally ate . . . was great.  I missed my Aunt Jessie's chopped liver, though.  No one made it like her!

I know that Spring is here because my peaceful hill is thick with hummingbirds sipping sap from the multi-colored roses in my garden.  They especially like the Birds of Paradise. 

I was so busy last week that I missed the deadline on my own eZine.  So here are both of the Grotowski articles I wrote for Now Casting in one issue.  And I promise an advance peek at the third one, "The Compelling Corporels" next week along with something you won't see on Now Casting . . . my favorite Grotowski exercise that you can do at home. 

I Want MORE Acting Students!
My Saturday class is hoppin' and has only one more space left!
So I'm going to have to start a BRAND-NEW Sunday class.
There IS also still room in the Wednesday evening class.
Get better faster with small classes and top technique
. . . with a little psychic thrown in! 
To find out more, click here.

Have Acting Success with a SUCCESSact™ Intuitive Session!
You can't be an acting success
if your life is holding you back.
To read some inspiring stories of actors who have had SUCCESSact successes, click here.

BRANDact™ is BACK! Sunday, May 27th Click here for more details

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Jerzy Grotowski Parts One and Two

Acting as Bliss

It's fitting that I shift my exploration of Great Acting Coaches from Meisner, perhaps the best-known coach of our day, to Grotowski, who is so obscure that when I utter his name it often brings blank stares from actors. Be honest . . . have you ever heard of him?

This little-known Polish theatre director not only created a brand new theatre form but a brand new way to train actors. Grotowski, or Grot or G as his loyal followers often called him, envisioned and evoked a theatre deeply rooted and resonant in myth. According to Bill Reichblum, Grot "discovered the deep connections between our world and the world carried within us." The result was some of the most profound and poetic theatrical experiences of our time.

Grotowski was born in 1933 in Rzeszow, Poland. In 1955, he graduated from the State Higher School of Theatre in Krakow with a degree in acting. G went on to study directing at the Lunacharsky Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow and there became steeped in the acting techniques and artistic approaches of such greats of the Russian theatre as Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold and Tairov. Returning to Poland, he made his directorial debut with the production, Gods of Rain, which became controversial for his bold use of text. "In terms of my attitude to the dramatic text," Grot said, "I think that the director should treat it solely as a theme upon which he builds a new work of art that is the theatrical spectacle." Even this early in his career, G was driven by his concept of a Poor Theatre.

In 1958, Grot became Director of the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole. Here he began to assemble the company of actors and artistic collaborators that would help him realize his unique theatrical vision. Grotowski's career gained international recognition with his innovative productions of Acropolis and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. In these productions and others, he refined his concept of a Poor Theatre, which stripped away sets, props, costumes, lighting . . . even separate performance and audience areas . . . to explore the primal relationship beween actor and spectator. Without the luxury of props in his plays, actors' bodies were innovatively pressed into service to represent different objects. In a scene in Faustus where the pope is at dinner, for example, one actor played the chair and another played the meal.

In 1965, G moved his company to Wroclaw and renamed it Teatrum Laboratorium to avoid theatrical censorship. The Constant Prince, which debuted in 1967, is thought by many to be one of the greatest theatrical works of the 20th century. Ryzsard Cieslak's performance in the title role is considered the apotheosis of Grotowski's often brutal and always harrowing acting technique. Startling images of Cieslak in this role can be seen in Grotowski's seminal book, Towards a Poor Theatre. 1969 saw the theatre's last professional production, Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, which also widely regarded as one of the best theatre productions of its time.

Grotowski could not have been lauded as one of the greatest threatrical visionaries of the 20th Century, however, without also creating the rigorous acting training that allowed these productions full fruition. My mentor and teacher, Lee Strasberg, said that G "made the most thorough effort to rediscover the elements of the actor's art . . . To Grotowski, the actor is a man who works in public with his body, offering it publicly. The work with the actor's instrument consists of physical, plastic, and vocal training to guide him toward the right kind of concentration, to commit himself totally, and to achieve a state of 'trance'. The actors concentrate on the search for 'signs', which express through sound and movement those impulses that waiver on the borderline between dream and reality. By means of such signs, the actor's own psychoanalytical language of sounds and gestures is constructed, in the same way as a great poet creates his own language."

This trance-evoking acting training metamorphosed into a vehicle for personal growth when, in the 1970's, Grotowski abandoned the conventions of theatrical form and broke down the barrier between actor and spectator in what was called the "Paratheatrical" phase of his work. Communal rituals and group seances went on sometimes for days in an attempt at a new form of interpersonal understanding based upon heightened bodily impulse and mental sensitivity. Grot and his now 20 year-old ensemble conducted these rituals all over Europe and North America. If you've ever seen the cult favorite, My Dinner with Andre, G's long-time friend and colleague, actor-director Andre Gregory, describes in great detail one of these post-theatrical events.

In the last part of his life and work, the "Objective Drama" phase, Grotowski began to look at universal rituals from various parts of the world and find the common denominator between them to further redefine theatrical form. When martial law was declared in Poland, he moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of California, Irvine in 1983. There I was lucky enough to meet and talk with him. I gushed in this great man's presence about how his work had not only bewitched me but focused and amplified my already well-honed Method and improvisational skills to an incredible degree. Humbly, the great man thanked me.

In 1985, G closed his Theatre Laboratory in Poland and moved his company to Pontedera, Italy. The Work Centre of Jerzy Grotowski consisted mainly of students and interns that studied in isolation and performed for just a handful of spectators. At that time, G also worked closely with Thomas Richards, who assembled documentation of Grotowski's research with the intent of publishing his works. At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions was one of the more significant titles published as a result of these efforts. Grotowski died in 1999 in Italy. He was profusely mourned and profoundly praised for his uncompromising theatrical vision by theatre communities around the globe.

An Introduction to Acting Bliss

I'm old-fashioned. I believe that acting should move people. I also don't believe that the role of actor as shaman has changed much throughout history. Perhaps that's why Jerzy Grotowski thought of the actor as "holy". "The actor, by setting himself a challenge publicly challenges others and through excess, profanation and outrageous sacrilege reveals himself by casting off his everyday mask, he makes it possible for the spectator to undertake a similar process of self-penetration."

Grotowski also conceived of the actor as "a man who works in public with his body, offering it publicly." But he also cautioned, "if this body restricts itself to demonstrating what it is . . . then it is not an obedient instrument capable of performing a spiritual act." "All conscious systems in the field of acting," he said, "answer the question, 'How can this be done?'" Acting training, then, becomes a continual struggle of the actor to reveal his/her inner shaman so that s/he might transform the spectator.

To this end, Grotowski created a rigorous training based upon the following principles. "I can give you no positive techniques," he said, "no tricks or systems to use, only a negative training (which he called Via Negativa ) to remove personal blocks you night have in expressing creative acts". As a coach who feels that my primary task is to help actors to obliterate these blocks, I heartily agree with him. I also believe that "acting talent" should be redefined not as a nebulous thing that some have or some don't but instead as a capacity to purely express human truth through harmonious use of the voice, body, mind, spirit and heart. I also believe that this harmony can be created. And know that my acting found its harmony after spending a summer steeped in Grotowski . . . leaping, rolling and yelling on a daily basis.

The three other principles that Grotowski deemed "essential to the art of acting" are eloquently described by Stephen Wangh in An Acrobat of the Heart. Wangh explained that "the first was that the actor must use himself . . . his own feelings, thoughts, and opinions . . . in the work. The second was that all acting was to be thought of as a series of 'units of exchange', moments of listening and reaction that could be 'scored' as one might score music. The third principle was that 'the actor, if he is to reveal something significant, personal and profound . . . must reach into the depths of himself, through whatever psychic or physical blocks might impede such expression."

Call me crazy, but I've heard the same concepts from all my other coaches. Strasberg, Meisner, Hagen, Spolin . . . they all say the same thing about removing personal blocks so that you can use yourself profoundly. Those "moments of listening and reaction" also sound much like Meisner's repetition training. All these acting greats discovered unique ways to "answer the question, 'How can this be done?'" So did Grotowski.

Where Strasberg favored seated relaxation and sense memory, however, Grotowski formulated a very physical approach that was anything but armchair. Where Meisner repeated, Grotowski's actors shoved each other across the room with the power of their vocal virtuosity.

Grotowski's training consisted mainly of exercises corporels, yoga-like exercises geared to reconnecting the actor with the vitality trapped in their lower bodies, exercises plastiques, what Wangh calls "an external key to an internal door" and vocal work to rediscover the connection between our bodies, emotions and voices. Grotowski noted in Towards a Poor Theatre that "the most elementary fault, and that in most urgent need of correction, is the overstraining of the voices because one forgets to speak with the body". I'll cover these major aspects of Grotowski's training in greater detail in further articles in this series.

Grotowski work is not for the faint-hearted. This very specific athletic and vocal routine goes on for hours and assaults your entire being. We trained three hours a day five days a week for three months. Grotowski explains, "the more we become absorbed in what is hidden inside us, in the excess, in the exposure, in the self-penetration, the more rigid must be the external discipline . . . Here lies the whole principle of expressiveness." Like any great training, this structure serves as the springboard where the actor can address the specific needs of their own instrument and do everything necessary to finally realize their "acting talent".

And the results are astounding! As William Shephard discovered through his work with Grotowski, there are "elements of contact between the actor and the role which ultimately result in the creation of a third presence that is neither actor nor role but a unique recombination of the two. . . . In addition, I experienced a key principle of performance work at the Theatre Laboratory: the conjunction of opposites, or struggle between spontaneity and form. At times, the tension caused by this struggle produced a sort of creative vacuum which could then be filled by impulses and associations from the actor." To me, Shephard is describing the apotheosis of great acting. Wangh's experience was equally profound. "I was working so hard with my body and with my imagination that my thoughts and emotions seemed to take care of themselves. Moreover, the exhilaration of the bodily exertion seemed to spur my emotional courage. For the first time in my experience onstage, I felt fully "present" in my body and in the work."

But, after all, Grotowski, defined an actor as "a person who, through his art, climbs upon the stake and performs an act of self sacrifice." And along with this sacrifice comes ultimate acting bliss.

In the Next Issue:  The Compelling Corporels

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