I've been reading the most recent TDR which is all about Grotowski and is timely in my life. The first two bits in the journal, other than Schechner's introductory essay (which incorrectly identifies Stephen Wangh as being DEAD! This is NOT TRUE and a hell of a typo!), are two speeches of Grotowski's dealing with, largely, the validity of systems of theater work. Both the pieces were spoken in the same year, the first to a group of people many of whom who claimed to work "according to Grotowski" at the end of a seminar in Europe around the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the Laboratory Theater of 13 Rows. The second to a group of actors and directors at BAM in NYC. The first piece is a serious rebuke of much of the work that went on in the seminar and the second is an attempt to answer the question "Is Stanislavski Valid Today?" – a question which Grotowski immediately points out makes no sense as Stanislavski is either important for each person or he is not and that no one should attempt to answer for another. Essential to both speeches is the idea that a "system" of theater work as a transmittable entity (e.g. The Grotowski system, the Stanislavski system) is an impossible idea. He says:
We all know that we didn't arrive at final results, at products here. However, we can tell where we felt a seed, some impulses, some nourishment. Or, that there wasn't any air, any fertile soil. It is not a problem of "being faithful to some system." The problem is whether a seed of truth, a seed of a theater of truth, was there. That is the only problem. Because "system" in itself has no value.
And, later:
In fact, to work in my spirit means to work in one own's spirit. Nobody can work the way I do, because everyone is different.
Grotowski goes on to acknowledge that the closest thing to a Grotowski system or, as he puts it here "method", would be
To work without lying, without imitating the work, without hiding, without an easy way out; to go towards the actor, to go towards him fully, with all your being; to go until you forget about yourself, to expect the same from him and to meet him.
In the second piece, in reference to Stanislavsky, Grotowski touches on this same difference while admiring his predecessor:
The second reason I have a deep respect for Stanislavsky is his effort to think on the basis of what is practical and concrete. How to touch what is untouchable. He wished to find concrete paths to secret, mysterious processes. Not the means – against these he fought, he called them clichés – but the paths.
So, for Grotowski at this time the means, that is to say the methods or systems, were almost purely subjective workings while the more objective paths could be shared.
I have been since the last year I spent at NYU looking for a system and while I have been open to the idea that this system existed somewhere already and my work might be as easy as figuring out how to sign up, I have had a gut-sense that I was on my own to develop it, to cull it from the profound myriad sources I've had access to. 9 years later, I feel even more deeply that this is so, but I have begun having doubts about the validity of such a search. Landing here in San Francisco to work as a performer on a piece with a schoolmate (and, hopefully, fellow contributor to this conversation, Randall Cohn), I have realized that one of the major obstacles I am facing in this search for a system revolves around the more basic question of "What is the theater for?" I struggle with this question almost daily and this struggle takes on many nuanced shades. For this post, though, I want to focus on just one.
I like Grotowski's proposal of the purpose of theater illustrated briefly above and, because it bears repeating, printed again here:
To work without lying, without imitating the work, without hiding, without an easy way out; to go towards the actor, to go towards him fully, with all your being; to go until you forget about yourself, to expect the same from him and to meet him.
So, I take this, for now and now alone, as a satisfactory purpose for the theater. A problem is presented: if this is the purpose of theater, than all of our work, individually, is aimed at one point in the future. Each show is trying to do the same thing and it either does it better or worse. I'm not sure that that sounds like the most exciting season of theater for an audience, let alone a ten-year run of seasons. Further, if in our work we find that the theater becomes a blockade to our purpose, our intimacy, our shared revelation, than we must leave the theater and continue on our path without it. (As we know, Grotowski left the theater shortly after these speeches – is this why?) What does that say about the theater as entity outside of our work? That it is empty, a vehicle only and, when we are done, a vehicle in the woods left to the Kudzu? Why did we start in theater, then? Was theater chosen from the get go as the result of a careful consideration of the best way to implement our purpose? I for one found the theater first. And I still love the theater. I have particular aesthetic likes and dislikes and I am happiest when working in the theater. And I believe that the audience is crucial to the theater – I'm not at all into "process-oriented" theater. I love the purpose considered above, but I also fear that it leads inevitably away from the theater. Your thoughts, stalwart community?
