Poland, where over the course of three years they recruited a small company of six actors and mounted ten productions. From the outset the theatre was conceptualized as experimental and research-oriented in nature, with Grotowski as impresario, acting teacher, and director and Flaszen as dramaturge.
Kumiega characterizes Flaszen's role as critical in shaping the orientation toward research; as a practical matter he seems to have analyzed and given Grotowski notes on all aspects of production. Kumiega quotes Flaszen on his duties:
[W]hen I analyzed Grotowski's work for him, I tried to find all that had become merely a shell, the reasoned, or the artificial. I analyzed what could be rejected. When I felt my analysis was helpless, I knew I was dealing with something alive (Kumiega 191).
The Theatre's approach to theatrical production deliberately and programmatically sought to depart from the conventions of commercial theatre, which were deemed "synthetic" and were referred to as Rich Theatre, specifically, "rich in flaws." Gradually the focus of Grotowski and Flaszen's experimentation and research became twofold. First the intent was to "define what [is] distinctively theatre, what separates this category of activity from other categories of performance and spectacle," and second to reify the connection made between actors and spectators. Grotowski conceptualized the productions of the Theatre of 13 Rows as "detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship. That is, we consider the personal and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art" (Grotowski 21; emphasis in original).
In practical terms these ideas were enacted, so to speak, as intensive training of actors as physically embodied presentations of the unavoidable emotional moments of drama. Grotowski cited Stanislavsky as one among many sources of inspiration, including the highly physically stylized techniques of Asian t...