Grotowski's Theater

In the last half of the 20th century, a number of avant-garde theatrical movements came to the fore and like a star burned brightly. For the most part they burned briefly, too, and faded, having exerted limited influence on the theory or practice of theatre. There were, however, two notable and not unrelated exceptions: (1) the theatre of the absurd, which developed more or less parallel with the philosophy of existentialism as promulgated by such playwright-philosophers as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and which has been characterized as having brought the avant-garde theatre of the 1920s and 1930s into the Anglo-American mainstream by the end of the 1950s (Esslin 289); and, (2) beginning in the 1960s, the work of Polish impresario, director, teacher, and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, whose experimental Laboratory Theatre and what he envisioned as a "poor theatre," also described as paratheatre, was markedly influential on Euro-American avant-garde theatre. Although Grotowski's career and discourse about it were touched by controversy and although his movement, like others of its type, had a limited life span, his reputation and innovative ideas about the creation and experience of theatre have garnered increasing respect since his death in 1999.

Born in 1933 in Rzesz�w, Poland, Grotowski studied theatre in Krakow at Poland's National Theatrical Academy for some eight years (1951-1959). His training as an actor and director was on the whole conventional and

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hetic" performance. It is possible to argue that in that regard Grotowski made a virtue of necessity, as the state-subsidized theatre organization had enormous budget constraints. In any case, Grotowski's explication of the Laboratory Theatre was characterized as a theory of poor theatre, where the accidentals of theatrical production were discarded in favor of simply dressed but extravagantly trained actors commanded audience attention to their performance, whether labeled experimental, improvisatory, or set solidly in the aesthetically concrete. Grotowski also valorized the concept of via negativa, which was characterized as "the non-technique of knowing what not to do, or how to eliminate the blocks separating the actor from his true nature" (Mennen 60). Even so, the poor theatre found itself in the position of having to maintain some version of Wagner's mystic gulf, inasmuch as the aesthetic artifice of distinction between performer and auditor-or perhaps the necessity of auditor to complete the activity of performer in order for theatre as an exercise in communication to be arrived at or legitimated-could not be eliminated, whatever the extent and nature of actor training. Similarly, Grotowski's original vision of el

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