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Notes
1 Part of this article was presented at the International Platform for Performer Training at the University of Kent, 9–12 January 2020. I would like to thank Barbara Fiołek for kindly agreeing to publish Jan K. Fiołek’s photographs without charge and Tobiasz Papuczys at the Grotowski Institute for helping find contact information for rights-holders. I am very grateful to Adela Karsznia for responding to early drafts and reviewing my translations from Polish-language sources, and to the issue and general editors for their helpful feedback. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of material not previously published in English – and any infelicities therein – are my own.
2 According to his brother Kazimierz (2000), Jerzy Grotowski took the ‘painful’ decision not to return to Poland while in Italy in 1982, after a Polish embassy clerk threatened not to renew his passport for refusing to participate in an official event boycotted by other artists. By the end of 1982, Grotowski had made his way to the USA, where he sought to reside and establish conditions to pursue his research – first in New York, where he taught at Columbia University that academic year, and eventually at the University of California– Irvine (UCI). During 1982–3, he also visited other institutions, including New York and Yale universities, and his friends and colleagues in the USA wrote statements in support of his residency. After his application for political asylum was initially rejected, Grotowski was granted refugee status on 15 July 1983, then on 28 July he signed a contract with UCI to host his new Objective Drama programme (1983–6). Back in Poland, the Laboratory Theatre, in agreement with Grotowski, issued a statement announcing the company’s dissolution on 31 August 1984.
3 The term ‘work-on-oneself’ – rabota nad soboy in Russian, praca nad sobą in Polish – was elaborated in the two parts of Stanislavsky’s book Rabota aktyora nad soboy [An Actor’s Work on Themself], published in Russian in 1938 and 1948. Grotowski sometimes recast this term as ‘work-with-oneself’ (2012: 647).
4 The ‘fire beneath’ refers to scene 7 of Mickiewicz’s play Dziady, Part III (1832), when the historical figure Piotr Wysocki, lead instigator of the November Uprising (1830–1), speaks of the ‘lava’ that ‘seethes inside’ the dry, cold, outer crust of the partitioned Polish nation. Grotowski remarked in 1980 that ‘in today’s world’, these words ‘should not be understood … tribally’ but extended to the individual: ‘splitting this shell’ to reach the ‘inner fire’ can be recast instead as an experience of digging into oneself, beyond the largely inert surface of the everyday (2012: 681).
5 Grotowski’s choice of przedstawianie in Polish is equivalent to predstavleniye (often translated as ‘representation’) in Stanislavsky’s Russian. Here Grotowski used przedstawianie to designate self-presentation or ‘acting in everyday life’ and referred to the possible ‘utopia’ of surpassing this mode of quotidian performance via certain non-habitual situations (2012: 618–23).
6 Around 1930, Stanislavsky made several drafts for an intended chapter of An Actor’s Work, collected in a notebook marked ‘Ethics’ and supplemented by material added in 1937. These were of great interest to Grotowski. Flaszen located the Laboratory Theatre’s ‘utopian’ aspirations within this Stanislavskian lineage: ‘The Laboratory remains [among theatre practitioners] as an ethical model … just like Stanislavsky’s “Ethics”’ (1994: 9).
7 For example, if Grotowski perceived the action was inorganic, he would say ‘I don’t believe’, while if no clear compositional structure emerged, he would say ‘I don’t understand’ (1998: 2/6/97).
8 See, for example, Grotowski’s adaptations of Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ (2012: 642–3), Ramana Maharshi’s ‘I-I’ (2001: 378) and ‘being in the beginning’ from the Gospel of Thomas (2012: 640–2). Such sources helped Grotowski find and test out possible correlates for elements of his practice.
9 Grotowski commented that terminology was ‘important insofar as it reveals our confusions’ (1970: 13/12/70) and that refreshing it was a matter of ‘mental hygiene’ (12/12/70).
10 Apophatic – meaning by way of denial or negation – or negative theology derives from a long lineage of religious and philosophical practice, dating back at least to pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and spanning diverse regional and intellectual traditions. As observed by the historian of religion Bernard McGinn, the mode of apophasis associated with the German Dominican theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327/28) prioritises ‘unknowing in the search for God’, forming a ‘negative mystical anthropology’ influenced by interwoven Christian and Neoplatonic strands of thought in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth–sixth century) (see Boesel and Keller 2010: 66). A premise common to variants of apophatic theology is that God or the divine cannot be comprehended, contained or expressed in positive terms, including through concepts and speech. Reactions to Eckhart’s heterodox teachings and use of language prompted an inquisitorial process in 1326 and he died while still under investigation for making allegedly heretical statements.
11 For example, Eckhart’s adroit defence against charges of heresy inspired the Laboratory Theatre’s concealment of their own unsanctioned practice of self-inquiry when it came under threat from different authorities centuries later, while fragments from his sermons were incorporated directly into Grotowski’s talks, even closing his final public lecture (1998: 26/1/98) and his key text ‘Performer’ (2001: 379).
12 Grotowski gave related examples at Janion’s seminar, including from ‘pre-orthodox’ Hasidic life-practices documented by Buber and the novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa (Rosiek 2018: §3, §8).
13 See, for instance, Grotowski’s comments on the apocryphal ‘Hymn of the Pearl’, where he read the embodied metaphor of ‘becoming enrobed’ or ‘engulfed’ as corresponding to the sensation of remembering something vital and authentic: ‘you perceive this all around [your] body … as if you find yourself in [a] cloud that surrounds you’ (1998: 6/10/97).
14 Grotowski characterized his early approach to directing as based on staging ‘many concepts’, ‘new forms’ and detailed plans for how actors should ‘behave or look at certain moments’ (1970: 14/12/70).
15 Grotowski used ‘body-memory’ from the late 1960s, before replacing it with ‘body-life’ to promote more ‘active behaviours’ over contemplative remembering (Flaszen 2014: 218).
16 These self-actualizing ‘needs’ included what Grotowski called the ‘secure partner’: a virtualized presence that ‘cannot be defined’ but ‘in front of whom [the actor] does everything’ (2001: 41).
17 Flaszen wrote that he and Grotowski translated Stanislavsky’s Russian term obshcheniye into Polish as obcowanie, to avoid the ‘colder’ translation kontakt. Translators of Stanislavsky into English have tended to render obshcheniye as ‘communication’ or ‘communion’. In Polish, obcowanie conveys co-participation, co-experiencing, co-relation and attunement, and is also used in the contexts of sexual intercourse and communing with saints. Flaszen read Grotowski’s understanding of obcowanie as ‘taking us out of the dimension of theatre’, towards something ‘Other’ (2014: 218).
18 Grotowski suggested the actor must give of themselves, but ‘not for God, who no longer functions for our generation’. Rather, they need ‘another human being’ who can ‘fulfil and understand’ them – which can be like ‘loving the Absolute or Ideal’ (2001: 40). While religion was ‘impossible’ for Grotowski, it had ‘a human significance’ since his childhood and he continued adapting certain religious terminology. However, he argued another person’s terminology should not mimic his but ‘must come from their life’ (1970: 13/12/70).
19 In another context, Buber called such repetition a form of ‘inner action’ that involved ‘accomplishing, over and over again’, a certain relationality ‘without forethought but also without habit’ (2002: 25).
20 In ‘Performer’ (2001: 379), Grotowski created a composite text on the ‘inner human-being’, adapted from Eckhart’s German sermons 22 and 27. Elsewhere in these sermons (1994: 202–9, 232–5), Eckhart says, for example, that someone is ‘poor’ who ‘wills nothing and desires nothing’, ‘knows nothing of the action of God within them’, does not consciously try to implement ‘God’s will’, is not ‘satisfied’ with ‘all his divine works’. He even implores God to ‘make me free of “God”’. In ‘poverty in its ultimate form’, there is ‘neither being, nor rational being, nor [knowing] either this or that’ – God ‘unbecomes’.
21 Grotowski described this phenomenon using Theophilus of Antioch’s phrase ‘Show me your man [człowiek], and I will show you my God’. This became a kind of motto for the company during their work on Apocalypsis cum figuris (see Grotowski 2008: 40–51).