Alice Gardiner's book report

 

Jennifer Kumiega – The Theatre of Grotowski

 

In 1984 Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre closed down after twenty-five years of endless experimentation pushing at the boundaries of the nature of theatre. Their work had experienced extensive change, from rigid practitioners of 'holy art' working with little resources in provincial Poland, by the end of the sixties internationally renowned for their technical ability and supremacy of their acting. They were not received so well in their home country as they were in the west where Grotowski's influence spread to Europe and the United States, fuelled first by the international tours of his remarkable company and then by 'paratheatrical' participatory projects, which attracted adherents all over the world.

 

The commercial competition of the technology industry in cinema and television became a necessity with lighting and sound, worked against keeping the actor alive with the decline of theatre. Grotowski fronted his work and research into the vitality of truth in theatre, the relationship between actor and spectator. Eliminating the dependence on what is unnecessary in this communion, which resulted in the model of 'poor theatre'.

 

By 1970 he had abandoned his strictly theatrical context for his work and began experimenting with 'paratheatrical' forms. The laboratory theatre had not finished to allow themselves to transform and change and was closed in 1984, grotowski and laboratory theatre was somewhat frozen into a formed public image, work seen as inaccessible to some members of the public.

 

Laboratory theatre aim was to force theatre to redefine itself, Grotowki's incessant questioning directors and practitioners on their motives and work in theatre. This role of a watchdog peering intently to discover new forms in theatre in culture and country context is something that is necessary in the nature of theatre. 'Active culture' putting emphasis on the process rather than the product, self-questioning research and experiments to enlarge the accessibility of the creative process composes its heritage. To be used as an inspiration to evoke members of the audience in the issue of maintaining theatre as an arena, a space where living and creative have contact.

 

This book presents the development of grotowski and the laboratory theatre, providing the history, theory and post-theatre work of this most influential of theatre practitioners. The detailed description and analysis of past theatrical productions in the studies of Grotowski's and the Teatr Laboratorium's pioneering work up to the beginning of "Theatre of Sources". It also contains a detailed dramaturgical account of "Apocalypsis cum Figuris" including all texts and sources which is rare.