At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions by Thomas Richards.
This book is full of worthwhile techniques and ideas that are important in creating performance and shows the amount of work that Grotowski and his assistants put into their research of this art. It also demonstrates that a decent piece of performance does not come from a few improvisations and rehearsal but months and even years of patience with repetition while editing throughout the creative process. I am going to recall parts I have learned from reading this book that I feel could be essential for the place we have arrived at in our studies.
The first point that stands out is in the initial chapter; that we should not forget the construction of the 'stairs'. Grotowski used this from the later work of Stanislavski with consciously preparing a structure which should then be reinforced by 'truth and conviction'. To illustrate this point, Thomas Richards described a Russian proverb 'If you go to your porch, look up at the sky, and jump to the stars, you will just land in the mud. Often stairs are forgotten'. Therefore to get to a successful result you must not rush but build a performance patiently bit by bit. These are the stairs that need to be constructed.
The second is that it is essential to connect your body and mind with physicality. This helps clarify the work we have been doing on our course with it equally feeding our minds with the critical reading, and bodies with the physical explorations in class. Another key element illustrated in this book is improvising with a pre-construct or basic outline. This makes sure that the performer does not just perform in general terms and that the work is repeatable to be further constructed. In the chapter on Ryszard Cieslak At Yale, Richards articulates that it is important for a performer to 'do' without hesitation and having no fear to just mentally let go of the minds' hold over the body. Personally I find this very difficult as so far in my experience of being taught how to perform it seems that no-one has ever introduced this before. Consequently looking back at the first half of our course I can now see that my mind is always present in every exploration that we have carried out e.g. with the objects, my mind is second guessing whether what I am doing is 'correct' or whether I am getting it totally wrong.
In the chapter Grotowski Speaks at Hunter, Richards talks of how he learnt that with memorising either a structure of a piece or a piece of text (in his case a song), it should be memorised to the extent that the mind no longer has to think about it. If this is completed it will allow the body to take over also coinciding with our work on using text.
As well as trying to achieve a physical connection with the body and mind, Richards also expressed the importance of the voice and body becoming one entity in the chapter The Work at Botinaccio. This is another aspect which many people find difficult as it calls for the performer to be less self-conscious of the sounds made from their voice. We explored some of this body and voice work nearer the end of the first half of the course where we had two people diagonally across the space in an encounter with each other. Watching as a spectator it was evident that the members of the group that felt more comfortable ended up, knowingly or not, creating a character or personality resembling caricatures. When taking part I remember trying to concentrate on my breathing and trying to react on impulse with my partner rather than planning what I was going to do next. At this point it felt more comfortable letting go of the mind more than usual because we were performing with a partner so all of the attention was not on the individual but on the relationship between the two.
This chapter of the book also stressed the importance of not giving up too quickly on a piece before every avenue of the idea was exhausted. Richards demonstrated Grotowski's term for the 'touristic' artist going from one improvisation or first draft to the next, therefore never really exploring an idea in depth. If nothing else, this book makes the reader realise the patience required in creating and building in the rehearsal process to achieve the result of a successful piece.
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