In 1962, eugene Barba, who was a student at Warsaw’s Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Teatralna (PWST, the national School of Theatre), came to Opole as part of his internship. eventually, he became one of Grotowski’s closest collaborators and his most ardent foreign supporter. Shortly after meeting Barba, Grotowski participated in the eighth World’s youth Festival in Helsinki, where he also met Raymonde Temkine.
She visited Opole in 1963, watched a special performance of Akropolis, and was greatly impressed by Grotowski’s theatre. Those two contacts augmented international perspectives of Grotowski, but to reach wider audiences, Grotowski needed a concrete theatrical piece that would appeal to international tastes. As dariusz Kosiński notes:
Grotowski was becoming more ambitious and certain of his artistic direction. What he needed was a model spectacle which would showcase both his theory and methodology, but which would also be international in its character. The adaptation of Wyspiański’s Akropolis became such a spectacle. If we assume that Grotowski consciously constructed a spectacle to show the full range of his theatre’s possibilities, then we can also assume that he chose the play as well as its setting because they naturally interest both Polish and international audiences.140
As a showcase spectacle for a broader international audience, Akropolis fulfilled its function, but in Poland, initial reviews were mixed, to say the least. Puzyna notes that the production “provoked extremely tempestuous discussions.”141 One critic, Aunt Agnieszka, passionately argued that the “normal theatre goer is not interested in horror in theatre. He is overwhelmed, demobilized and weakened by such shows. […]
If we could put all of the tyrants of history together and show them Akropolis as part of their punishment, that would be all right. But us? What for?”142 She sarcastically called the show “an adventure of a construction company,” noting that “One man was sitting there with tears in his eyes, looking at the set. Apparently, as I learned later, he was remodeling his bathroom and he couldn’t find the much-needed pipes anywhere in the stores. The actors promised to give him the coveted pipes from the set once the show was over.”143 Although Aunt Agnieszka’s review wasn’t particularly sophisticated, it did capture the general sentiment of Grotowski’s Polish audiences.
Abroad, however, the situation was different. From 1962 to 1967, the Laboratory Theatre traveled with Akropolis throughout europe, including Holland, France, Belgium and Italy. The show drew predominantly positive reviews; Het Parool called
it “brilliant,” while Vaterland wrote: “The symbolism of the spectacle leaves the viewer with a long-lasting impression. The tension grows systematically thanks to the skills of the actors, who show remarkable control over their bodies, which they use as tools for emotions.”144 In Brussels, Akropolis was shown only four times, but Het Lasstse Nieuws was very much impressed, and Het Volk compared it to dante and Hieronymus Bosch.145 La Libre Belgique proclaimed the Laboratory Theatre “the most famous acting troupe in the world.”146 In Paris, the group received mostly positive reviews, with Bertrand Poirot-delpech of Le Monde writing, “…beyond hysterical glances, the slobbering and the shuddering of the muscles, is expressed the most spiritual resistance to order and violence.”147 Among all the positive reviews, there were also a handful who couldn’t decide what to think. C. van Hoboken of the Amsterdam newspaper, for example, asked philosophically, “Is Jerzy Grotowsky a genie or a charlatan?”148 In many european reviews from that time, the word “experiment” reappears, suggesting that many reviewers considered the show to be a work in progress. In 1969, Grotowski again took his troupe abroad, travelling to Great Britain, Mexico, and France. The group gave eight performances of Akropolis at edinburgh, thirty in Paris, and eighteen in Aix-en-Provence, cementing the role of Akropolis as the group’s signature show.149 In France, particularly, Temkine noticed “admiration was expressed by the very ones who were not always in agreement on the principles.”150
In late 1968, Grotowski and his Laboratory Theatre were planning their first visit to the USA. The trip, however, was cancelled following the revocation of American visas for the group. The revocation was a response of the American government to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which quashed the ongoing student protests.
Because Poland’s army, under the leadership of the meek and Soviet-friendly Gomułka, joined the Soviet invasion, the US government considered Poland to be an aggressor nation as well. Inadvertently, Grotowski’s group was swept up in the overall boycott of the eastern Bloc. The refusal of visas was met with protest in new york by 62 leading theatre figures, including Albee, Miller, Hellman, and Robbins, who wrote an open letter protesting the revocation of visas.151 The letter, published in the New York Times, proclaimed that “the performances of [the Laboratory Theatre] could be most important to the future development of the American theater.”152 Shortly after, the signatories formed the national Committee to Welcome the Polish Laboratory Theatre. Co-chaired by ellen Stewart and ninon Tallon Karlweis, the committee soon grew to over 100 members, and included the cream of the crop of new york’s cultural elites. Like many before him, Grotowski became a new favorite cause célèbre, a fresh symbol of the struggle against the repressive policies of the US government.
despite the protests, however, Grotowski’s troupe was not permitted entry into the USA, and the group went to London instead. Under the patronage of the Ford Foundation, Lewis Freedman – the producer of the Public Broadcast Laboratory – decided to record Grotowski’s production, believing wholeheartedly “that the loss [would] damage American knowledge of international theater.”153 As a result, in 1968, from 27 October to 2 november, Akropolis was filmed by James MacTaggart, a leading producer and director in his era, in Twickenham studios near London. As the legend goes, Grotowski never again agreed to the filming of any of his shows.
(years later, he did permit Italian television to record Apocalypsis cum figures, but never gave permission to release it. In 1989, he also allowed the Workcenter’s performance to be recorded.)154 Grotowski believed “that theatre is an independent art, and there is no need to use other technologies. Poor theatre should use its own resources, that is, actors and space; the relationship between the actors and the audience is the most important.”155 The use of the camera disrupts and denatures it. This time, however, Grotowski gave permission to MacTaggart to film Akropolis. Forestalling potential criticism of this decision, Grotowski spoke at length about the reasons behind it and the process:
We decided that Akropolis was almost impossible to present on television. The others were quite impossible. Akropolis, like our other productions, is organized in a certain area of space. It’s not broken up into the stages and the auditorium. It’s an osmosis of a place where there’s action, and a place where there’s the spectator. The action happens in the middle of the spectators, around them. each spectator makes a selection of what he will watch. [For television] we decided that we would do a reportage on our production of Akropolis. In the short time available to us for taping the television production here in London, we decided to observe both actors and spectators from outside, with the camera serving as observer. The man who’s the spectator in the audience brings the man who is at home into the theater. It’s now a production for a spectator who’s never seen one of our productions before, or how it works. We’ve had to make the choice of what to look at in place of the one the spectator would make in the theater. It would be dishonest to pretend the production was ever originally designed for television. It’s not elegantly done. It’s as though we had grabbed something quickly as it passed by.156
Reportedly, Grotowski discussed the production with MacTaggart at great length, but when the actual taping took place, for the first two days he is said to have just watched, rather like an author: “I could suffer like the authors of the plays we do, though of course, they’re dead! Suffer in silence. On the third day, as it were, I rose again and left the tomb, suggesting things for the details we were still recording.”157
Following the renewed appeal to American immigration authorities, Grotowski was finally given a one-week entry visa to the USA and permitted to travel to new york to help edit the film.158 The film was in Polish and without subtitles, but with a lengthy, half-hour introduction by Peter Brook that aimed to contextualize and explain Grotowski’s piece. Finally, after months of speculation and anticipation, spurred by the positive reviews from europe and the publication of Towards Poor Theatre, the American public was able to see the famed Laboratory Theatre. Akropolis aired in the USA on WneT (national educational Television) the evening of Sunday, 12 January 1969, immediately sparking vigorous critical debate, and cementing Grotowski’s iconic status among American theatre critics, scholars, and practitioners.159 Initial critical reviews of the film, however, were mixed and tended towards discussion of differences between the recorded and live versions. Mark Shivaslondon, for example, began his editorial about the film by asking, “how on earth any of Grotowski’s productions could be
transferred to television.”160 Leo Mishkin of the Morning Telegraph found the entire experience emotionally overwhelming:
Akropolis turned out to be highly stylized, strange and eerie work that pretty well bore out Mr. Brook’s words. It was the director’s aim, according to the notes I have at hand, to present a sort of Apocalyptic vision of the history of mankind through a set of figures building a crematorium at, of all places, Auschwitz. […] the total effect is of such size and stature as to leave you open-mouthed with astonishment. We have already had, on and off-Broadway, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, and more lately, the Theatre of Involvement. The Polish Laboratory Theatre apparently has now struck out in an entirely new direction, possibly to be eventually termed the Theatre of Mankind’s Guilt and Conscience.161
Jack Gould of the New York Times acknowledged that the TV recording
had to cope with such successive matters as explaining Mr. Grotowski’s methodology, overcoming the difficulty of the play’s being done in the Polish language, and televising on the small screen a work clearly designed for staging in the round. […] The TV version may have been unfair to the Polish director’s intent. The receiver itself represented an intrusive proscenium arch, and preoccupation with irrelevant close-ups tended to erase the totality of mood of the unorthodox staging. The succession of brief snippets defeated a sense of enveloping rhythm of the inmates remembering their past and reincarnating their Greek and Hebraic ancestors.”162
After having seen the live theatre performance in 1970, Stanley Kauffmann wrote that The difference between the theater performance of Acropolis and the PBL film was the difference between an event and the report of an event […]. The event was so utterly theatrical that the film was utterly irrelevant. To sit amidst those Polish actors at Acropolis, almost to smell them, to see them setting down the wheelbarrow an inch from my foot and find myself not flinching because I had confidence in them, knowledge that they knew I was there, were doing it all for me and at the same time that they didn’t care whether I was there or not… […] It was not merely the patent fact of their and my physical presence, it was a sense of not being acted on but of collaboration.163 Months later, when Grotowski’s group finally performed live in new york, Ross Wetzsteon of the Village Voice preferred the TV version to the live show, writing: “[T]he play seemed more moving when it appeared on television last winter, for in the theatre, the action has a kind of dimly lit and cluttered diffuseness overcome by the in-drawing nature of the TV image, by the use of close-ups in particular.”164
The New York Times reviewer, John Simon, however, wasn’t as forgiving as others, criticizing both the production and the TV version, and calling the first “a Keystone Komedy with a dash of bitterness,” and the second, “the reduction of a reduction.”165 In his second review of the live performance, Simon was even more derisive: “It is a
sad comment on our age that Grotowski should have become the most revered and sedulously emulated figure in world theatre.”166 Simon continued mercilessly:
esthetically, it looks like a cross between recreation period in an idiot school and an aboriginal blood rite in the rain forests of the Amazon. Morally, it is a combination of sadomasochistic agonizing with mythopoeic self-aggrandizement. This self-styled Theatre of the Poor is, in fact, just poor theatre. […] In all these productions there is so much carefully rehearsed movement, falling somewhere between second-rate modern dance and calisthenics gone berserk.167
In a rebuke to Simon’s review of the filmed version, William Kinsolving, also of the New York Times, accused Simon of not just misunderstanding the production, but of even failing to “cover up the fact that he did not understand what Grotowski was about.”168 Akropolis – Kinsolving writes – “is a vitally important development in theatre, and seeing Grotowski’s work put the Living Theatre and Schechner in perspective and in the shade.”169 Responding to Simon’s main complaint that the characters were homogenous and indistinguishable, lacking individuality and expressiveness, Kinsolving argues that their apparent homogeneity is a deliberate artistic decision, intended to evoke broader and more complex abstract concepts:
Simon should remember that the careful line drawings of character in our realistic/
naturalistic theater, no matter how beautiful or exquisite, are limitations. When one is dealing with whole concepts, ideas, beliefs, one can portray them in the theater with a device larger than the realistic. Concepts cannot be confined in careful line drawings.
Grotowski uses symbols for these concepts which, it is to be hoped, cause the audience to create the limitless in their minds. He purposefully seems to take away the individuality of a specific actress, not to reduce her, but to enable her to expand, to represent all women, all men, every concept, idea, belief, that might come up in the play.170
Kinsolving’s review implied that dismissing Grotowski’s work is a sure sign of bigotry and a lack of sophistication, thus dismissing Simon as something of a provincial simpleton.
The exchange between Simon and Kinsolving, however, set up an interesting dilemma:
which of the two critics, and for what reason, could rightfully claim a monopoly on understanding a work that, literally, neither of them understood?
Kinsolving’s review was an implicit challenge to the members of the new york avant-garde to embrace Grotowski based on the visual, while ignoring the textual and contextual aspects of his work. The challenge was promptly picked up by a number of theatre artists, including Andre Gregory, Joseph Chaikin and Richard Schechner.171 For Chaikin, “Grotowski was one of the people who went the furthest in their experiments.
In that sense, he influenced all of those who work in theatre, and all of those who go to theatre.”172 Chaikin, however, was against “mimicking Grotowski’s work,”
concluding that those who try to follow him “spend five, six years doing something that’s basically only an empty noise.”173 With Schechner, the case was different for number of reasons.
It has been suggested that “Schechner’s whole sudden rise to prominence as a theater director [has been] tied with the beginning awareness of [Grotowski’s] work.”174 Schechner’s “expertise” on Grotowski was initially developed from the collaboration between Grotowski and The Drama Review (TDR), which published three of Barba’s articles on Grotowski, even before the Laboratory Theatre arrived in the United States.
The articles were sent to Schechner by Barba, and their publication didn’t require any particular research on, or knowledge of, either Poland or Grotowski. TDR made an error, attributing one of Barba’s articles to Grotowski himself.175 Ironically, that 1964 article, “dr. Faustus in Poland” was published in a special issue on Marlowe. Based on these three articles by Barba, Flaszen’s description of Akropolis, Grotowski’s essay
“Towards a Poor Theatre,” and Henry Popkin’s article on Polish Theatre,176 Schechner became an expert on Polish theatre.177 Most importantly, however, the evolution of Schechner’s Grotowskian expertise appears to be a foundational turning point in the development of methodology and critical practice in the field of performance studies. Inserting himself in the critical debate between Simon and Kinsolving about Grotowski, Schechner proclaimed the supremacy of “gesture and nonverbal communication” over the “literature of theatre,” formulating for the first time the premise of performance studies as an artistic and critical method. In 1969, in an article he wrote for the New York Times, Schechner reframed the Simon–Kinsolving debate around Grotowski’s work by arguing that
The war has organized itself around two pivotal battles. One pits language – the
“literature of theater” – against gesture and “nonverbal communication.” The other argues the benefits of a participating versus a watching audience. […] Those who most effectively practice traditional theater are not very articulate. Thus we have the spectacle of articulate advocates of nonverbal communication ranged against inarticulate defenders of the literary faith; and practitioners against critics who – for what might seem to be obvious reasons – feel compelled to say that finally words are what matters in theater.178
Framing the debate in such simplistic boundaries, Schechner dismissed the “literature of theatre” and with it any contextual and historical considerations, thus establishing the critical trope that was to dominate performance and theatre scholarship for the next four decades. Posing the problem as conflict between those who cling to old notions of literary text and those who are brave enough to venture into the realm of their “self-exploration” based on “gestures and non-verbal communication” – between those who get it and those who don’t – Schechner defined a mode of critical thought that took pride – like Tyszka’s new york University (nyU) student – in not knowing. According to Schechner, knowing the text means not knowing the production. Likewise, being ignorant of the text is a key to understanding the essential core of the production.
Schechner presented himself as particularly versed in Grotowski’s work, having had special access to one of his workshops: “I was a member of one such seminar in which I learned (by doing) some of the basic Grotowski exercises and disciplines.”179 Thus, the argument successfully inverted epistemological practice: not knowing Polish, and being
unfamiliar with the Polish literary and cultural context that formed Grotowski’s work, meant somehow knowing the true – universal – Grotowski. This intimate, universal knowledge of Grotowski required absolute ignorance of the historical and cultural framework of his work.
To further solidify his point, Schechner drew what he considered an obvious equivalence between his work and that of Grotowski: “There is a strong, identifiable
To further solidify his point, Schechner drew what he considered an obvious equivalence between his work and that of Grotowski: “There is a strong, identifiable