Growtowski
(1933-1999) and Poor Theatre
Jerzy
Growtowski is a Polish theatre practitioner who developed the notion of Poor
Theatre and Para-Theatre at his Laboratory Theatre in Opole in Poland during
the 1960’s and 70’s. He experimented with his actors on creating a physical,
spiritual and ritualistic theatre dependant on the relationship with the space
and audience, not the artifices of theatre like set and costume. This is where
he gets the concept of ‘poor’ theatre since his theatre centres on the skill of
the actors to create everything. Growtowski experimented with using non-theatre
spaces for performance and often had the audience situated on many sides or
actually situated amongst the action depicted by the actors.
Growtowski
is one of the most influential directors of the late 20th century on
the training of actors. He began his work in Opole in 1959 but moved to Warsaw
in 1965 to continue his work on ‘Poor Theatre’ with his Polish Laboratory
Theatre. His style of theatre advocated that theatre return to its communal and
ritualistic roots.
‘Poor
Theatre’ sought to strip the act of performances down to its essential elements
– the actor, text and the relationship to the audience. As a style of theatre,
‘Poor Theatre’ avoids all stage apparatus and reduced all spectacle down to
only that which could be created by the actors. As a director, he insisted that
actors wear no makeup and indicate changes in character or within a character
primarily through physical metamorphosis.
Although
well-known in the Eastern Block, the work of Growtowski did not become
well-known in the West until his company toured Western Europe in the late
1960’s. His work gained more acceptance with the publication in 1968 of a set
of his essays under the collective title ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’.
Actor
training was the focus of Growtowski’s work and the principles of his work were
about subtractive training, stripping the actor back via ‘inductive techniques’
to create a ‘holy actor’. He insisted that theatre had to return to its ritual
roots through embracing ritual, the ‘the holy actor’ and the relationship to
the audience. He insisted that actors remove their ‘life masks’ and embrace the
moments created in the performance space. Growtowski wanted to:
“…eliminate
from the creative process the resistance and obstacles caused by one’s
organism, both physical and psychic…” (Growtowski 1979, p.16)
For
Growtowski, the text was only a starting point for departure for the actors to
score their own piece with moments of connection through examination to the
text in terms of rituals and actions. To this end, much of the style of
Growtowski’s theatre comes across as textual montage, a technique which
involves re-arranging, re-aligning or re-ordering events to create a textual
montage or collage which may use elements of the original text or stimulus.
In the
1980’s, Growtowski sort political asylum in the United States. During this
phase of his work, he began to work on the idea of ‘Objective Drama’ where he
looked at the psychophysiological impact of
selected songs and other performative tools derived from traditional cultures
on participants, focusing specifically on relatively simple techniques to find
the origins of structure and culture. Ritual songs and related performative
elements linked to Haitian and other African diaspora traditions became an
especially fruitful tool of research.
Unable to secure funding and support in the United States, he
moved to Pontedera in Italy in 1986. He then explored the final phase of his
work where he embraced the concept of ‘Art as a Vehicle’. Brook, Schechner and
Richard worked with him during this period. He wanted actors to access another
level of perception which he believed only art could access. Richards
eventually took over much of the work. The performance structures centred
around Afro-Caribbean culture and songs. The film ‘Downstairs Action’ (Mercedes
Gregory 1989) documents this later work. Eventually, after prolonged illness,
Growtowski died in Italy in 1999. In his will, he left the copyright and care
of all his work to Richards and Italian actor Mario Biagini.
Acting in
the style of Poor Theatre places emphasis on the physical skill of the
performer and uses props for transformation into other objects, sometimes of
great significance. His style often involved:
·
physical movement done to the extreme or point of exhaustion
·
using the space to inform and help determine the way a performance will take
shape
·
intense exploration of the relationship between participant and spectator to
the point of eliminating the division
·
putting the audience all around and sometimes making the actors fluctuate
between sometimes being performer and sometimes being spectator
Exercise
• Begin by doing nothing. Avoid the ‘beautiful lie’ by
not feeling compelled to do anything. Choose an object in the room that you can
see and take one aspect of its shape and let your body transform into that
shape. Then come back to a neutral. Do the same with another shape.
• Roll the head. Use the open “ah” sound as you roll
the head. Increase the intensity of the voice. Bring in the arms. Raise them
when the head is up and the sound most open.
• Now choose a sound that you can hear and replicate
that sound. Come back to neutral. Choose another sound and do the same. Now
move around the room and when you see an object, transform into that object.
Then choose a sound and replicate that. Eventually try to transform into the
shape of one abject while creating the sound of something else.
References
and Resources - Growtowski
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