Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
You hear a lot of things about Jerzy Grotowski. Some of them make sense. Others seem outlandishly contradictory. Or just outlandish.
I heard Grotowski speak in the late 1970s in a class of Richard Schechner's at New York University's graduate performance studies department. He was a wiry, bearded man in a black suit and black string tie, and he spoke, in Polish, steadily and without undue emphasis, with a translator standing off to one side. Critic Eileen Blumenthal tells a story about how Grotowski often prohibited smoking at his lectures, then proceeded to chain-smoke at the podium, but I don't remember him smoking, or whether he wore his trademark dark glasses.
The truth is that I didn't understand at the time what all the fuss was about, and nothing he said has stayed with me over the intervening years (although I'll wager there are notes I took that day stowed away in a box at the bottom of a closet somewhere). In retrospect, of course, that classroom hour has become a significant part of my theatrical education, if only in a symbolic way. It was through personal interaction with individuals (not classrooms packed with callow students) that Grotowski seems to have been best able to transmit his ideas and teachings. As Schechner noted after Grotowski's death in 1999 (AT, May/June '99), "Relating face-to-face with him could change the way a person experienced and understood the ground from which theatre grows."
That's clearly true for JarosŁaw Fret, the multitalented artistic director of Teatr ZAR, a Grotowski-inspired ensemble based in the Polish city of Wroclaw, and currently touring its extraordinary work in the U.S. Fret, who performs as part of the ZAR ensemble, does double duty as director of the Grotowski Institute, an organization that has been particularly busy during 2009, hosting scores of theatre artists, scholars and journalists for the "year of Grotowski" (AT, May/June '09). Fret speaks of his one-time mentor with a matter-of-fact admiration; outlandishness isn't part of the picture. In fact, those who knew Grotowski are prone to mention his humor and spirited impulsiveness, as well as his discipline and his courage.
Perhaps the name of Grotowski is for you, as it was once for me, a provocative footnote in world theatre history. Having the remarkable experience of seeing new work derived from his methods and theories—some of it performed in the very rooms where Grotowski trained his actors and created his trio of early masterworks—has transformed that footnote into a primary text, given it human and historical dimension, affirmed many complicated feelings I had about theatre art long before my muted close encounter with the man himself.
Writing about Grotowski is often vague, impressionistic, paradoxical. Not in this issue, we hope. Stephen Nunns reports on key historical aspects of his "laboratory theatre" concept, and I write about a company that may be near to achieving Grotowski's mission of transcendence in performance. Much else has been written and discussed in this "year of Grotowski," but the conversation is by no means over.
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