One Night in Motley Cow: Grotowski and Nietzsche

Abstract

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.

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