Seagull Books

Month: February, 2011

Grotowski’s Empty Room

Marco de Marinis: Grotowski and the Twentieth-century Theatre’s Secret

The Twentieth-century Theatre’s Real Revolution
The revolution of the twentieth-century theatre was not exclusively or mainly aesthetic (nor technical). The true, great revolution of the theatre (after its sixteenth-century reinvention) consisted of the abandonment of the traditional way of entertaining and recreation, in its sociopolitically committed or highly cultured variations. Theatre also became a place where, for the first time, it was possible to voice (and in the end find satisfaction in) ethical, pedagogical, political, cognitive, spiritual and therapeutic needs. One of the basic instruments behind this contemporary transmutation of the theatre was research into efficacy: that is, the real action of the actor on the spectator, of the human on the human, and—primarily—as work on the self. We need to look in this direction for the doorway to the twentieth-century theatre’s secret, to which Jerzy Grotowski surely holds one of the main keys.
But Can the Theatre Save Us or Help to Save Us (Save Itself)?

In order to follow the path towards this secret and so get to the heart of Grotowskian research, i will start from this embarrassing and almost improper, but perhaps now unavoidable, question. This question can be reformulated in an apparently easier but—as we will see—more ideological way: does the theatre improve those who make it (and in the end, those who watch it sometimes)? Can it make them better, happier, or at least more aware, of the self, of others, of the world? a lot of clichés circulate around this issue, some of them even quite prejudiced (such as ‘actors are happy because they rarely think or read, and they are often not very intelligent’). But there are also some less obvious considerations, emphasizing the benefits of a profession which involves the continuous intertwining of physical and mental work, the permanent soliciting of the imagination and so forth.

The Stanislavskian idea and practice of ‘the actor’s work on the self ’ allows us to address this matter with more relevant and specific terms. In this way, we can reformulate our big (and improper) question: is the work of the actor on the self only for the self—exclusively or mainly aimed at self-improvement for both the human being and the artist? Or does it also have other functions and aims? And if so, what are these? We will have to go back to such questions in order to get closer to the heart of the secret, and because the actor’s work as work on the self is definitely one of the principal arterial routes that link together the different periods of Grotowski’s theatrical and post-theatrical journey. I believe, though, that first some preliminary considerations are needed, going back to my initial, naïve and adventurous formulation of the question: can the theatre save, or at least improve, those who make it (and ultimately those who watch it, or—better put—those who do theatre by watching it)? A lot of theatre that operates today (or has done so for years) in places of disadvantage, diversity and on the fringes of society would initially compel me towards a quick, short and positive answer. Instead, let us try to be more rational, avoiding taking anything for granted.

On the face of it, some facts are evident. If theatre means not so much watching performances but, rather, acting (even if only as spectators), it is having an experience with/inside one’s own body/mind/self—and the other from the self—which is an experience of fullness, wholeness, vital intensity: qualities that are no longer accessible in our everyday life. When the theatre becomes like this, then we can easily accept the idea that it helps us, that it can make us happy (at least as long as the experience lasts), even that it can cure us.

———————————————————————————————–

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) was a Polish stage director, theatrical theorist, and founder and director of the small but influential Polish Laboratory Theatre. Most of Grotowski’s theatre-making took place in this and similar small theatres and studio spaces, and as a result one of his central fascinations was the actor’s work within the context of an empty room. The essays in Grotowski’s Empty Room analyze how Grotowski’s explorations in the theater continue to challenge dramatists and directors. The contributors to this volume reflect with special insight on how theater scholars and practitioners can further Grotowski’s work and how his legacy will be developed in the theatre.

Among the contributors are Leszek Kolankiewicz and Zbigniew Osinski, his close collaborators; Marco de Marinis, Franco Ruffini, and Fernando Taviani, scholars who have followed Grotowski’s works from the fourteen years he spent in Italy; and Swedish filmmaker and writer Marianne Ahrne and director Eugenio Barba, who reveal the strong impression Grotowski left on all those who met him and express the challenge of those who must now work in the empty rooms he has left behind.

‘For Grotowski, theatre itself was a kind of religion. He described himself not as an artist, but as a craftsman, a spiritual instructor.’—Wojciech Krukowski

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Guillaume Apollinaire: Letters to Madeleine

18 September 1915
My love, my Madeleine, my thought was indeed badly expressed and you have rectified it with the good sense of the exquisite lover that you are.
…
You understand, do you not my darling, that we two have a secret, the secret of our love, for the sake of which a special language has come into being between us, though it is not yet beyond the stammering stage. We already have ‘the Big Event’ and your ‘intimate being’, vague terms in themselves but very clear to me. And I like the fact that there is this secret between us, this language agreed upon that has yet to be refined. ‘Innermost being’, as vague as it may be, is too precise—not for us, certainly, but for what you call, by virtue of the deep intuition within you, ‘the modesty of our love’. Our lexicon could well be borrowed from flowers or from something else.
To get back to the original subject, the rites of love are of great purity because they are natural but not because they are necessary, it is love itself that is necessary—and our love in consequence is absolute, but its rites are not all necessary. For instance, your hips might conceivably have been narrow, in which case I would have loved you just as much as I do love you but obviously your hips would not have received the same passionate homage that I pay them now. Thus your hips that I adore and that I adore in a thousand ways constitute a factor favourable to refinements of our love but a factor that was a necessary condition of that love, which came about independently of it, as completely natural as such circumstances are and so conducive to refinements of all kinds that the Greeks erected altars to a Callipygean Venus. It is also conceivable that were I not so experienced I might bestow no more than a purely aesthetic admiration upon my love’s feet. That would entail the loss of another form of refinement, as likewise in the event that I held my wife’s intellect to be unnecessary considering that so
many men love women without intellect. I am pointing all this out to you without describing the refinements themselves since our secret lexicon is not yet extensive enough to address them. Moreover they cannot be addressed save in the form of passionate indications designed to refine your sensitive mind and dissipate your scruples. But I love for my slave to be also my equal—and have you not already surpassed my own refinement with the exquisite bonbon-kiss that you devised in Narbonne? In the passion proper to the Duty that we love (do we not speak of conjugal duty?) lust is permitted, but beyond the limits of this passionate duty one descends rapidly into lechery, which is a vitiated, nauseating form of love.
…
Yes, you are my dream of dreams. There is nothing above you and even above that there is only you, you alone, always you. Your wonderful plumpness that you speak of my darling, knowing full well how this will affect me, puts me in mind of all the masterpieces of Praxiteles and certain perfect nudes of Rodin not to mention Albani Fragonard and Ingres and I believe you have much in common with the Venus de Medecis and most of all, most of all with some of Titian’s nudes. I may be mistaken, but I rather think not. But what a joy it is to forget war by talking with you about your beauty.
At bottom, you see, you are the only thing that counts for me, for you are everything—beauty, love, poetry, in a word life. How can you ask me whether your duty is to love me. It is, absolutely. How could you belong to me otherwise and how could you be my wife if you did not give yourself utterly?
…
But I adore you, my Madelon, I take you all of you, I inhale your breath, kiss your mouth and knead the flesh that you offer to me.
I love you.
Gui

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The Immaterial

by André Gorz – Excerpts

The crisis of the concept of value

If it is to be more than merely a metaphor, the expression ‘knowledge economy’ implies some fundamental changes to the economic system. It indicates that knowledge has become the main productive force; that, as a consequence, the products of social activity are no longer chiefly crystallized labour but crystallized knowledge; and that the exchange-value the crisis of the concept of value. If it is to be more than merely a metaphor, the expression‘knowledge economy’ implies some fundamental changes to the economic system. It indicates that knowledge has become the main productive force; that, as a consequence, the products of socialactivity are no longer chiefly crystallized labour but crystallized knowledge; and that the exchange-value of commodities, material or otherwise, is no longer determined in the last instance by the quantity of general social labour they contain but mainly by their content in terms of general information, knowledge and intelligence. It is now this latter, not abstract social labour, measurable by a single yardstick, that becomes the main social substance common to all commodities. It becomes the main source of value and profit and hence, in the view of many writers, the main form of labour and capital.
Unlike general social labour, knowledge is impossible to translate into—or measure in—simple abstract units. It is not reducible to a quantity of abstract labour of which it can be said to be the equivalent, the outcome or the product. It covers—and refers to—a wide diversity of heterogeneous capacities, including judgement, intuition, aesthetic sense, level of education and information, ability to learn and to adapt to unforeseen situations, which are capacities themselves brought into play by heterogeneous activities ranging from mathematical calculation to rhetoric and the art of persuasion, from techno-scientific research to the invention of aesthetic norms.
The heterogeneity of the work activities termed ‘cognitive’ and of the immaterial products they create and of the capacities and knowledge they involve, renders the value of both the labour-powers and their products non-measurable. The grids for evaluating work become a tissue of contradictions. The impossibility of calibrating and standardizing all the parameters of the required work gives rise to vain efforts to quantify its qualitative dimension and the definition of performance standards calculated to the second that take no account of the ‘communicational’ quality of the service—a quality that is, in fact, demanded.
The crisis of the measurement of labour leads, inevitably, to the crisis of the measurement of value. When the socially necessary labour-time required for production becomes uncertain, that uncertainty cannot but impact upon the exchange-value of what is produced. The increasingly qualitative and unmeasurable character of labour throws the pertinence of the notions of ‘surplus labour’ and ‘surplus value’ into crisis. The crisis of the measurement of value throws into crisis the definition of the essence of value and, as a consequence, the system of equivalences governing commodity exchange.

The arguments for a basic income

It is from this angle, first, that we should assess the idea of a universal, unconditional, guaranteed social income. The idea had been doing the rounds for a long time, but it was with the strikes and demonstrations of 1995 and 1997 that it became a plausible demand in France and, by contagion, in other countries. Its heuristic value is enormous (I shall come back to this), as is its capacity to unite a wide range of social forces in an anti-capitalist perspective. As Reiner Hartel writes,
What is so delightful and attractive about the call for a basic income is that it enables alliances to be formed that run from quasi institutional associations for environmental and nature conservancy, trade unions, the women’s movement and the representatives of charitable associations to workers’ opposition groups in factories, committees of the unemployed, welfare claimants and immigrant groups. This kind of alliance of ‘progressive’
social forces is precisely what makes it possible to conceive a political perspective transcending capitalism.
But to open up a perspective of this kind, the demand must involve, first and foremost, the guarantee of a sufficient income. The income must be sufficient, because any guarantee of an insufficient income functions as a disguised subsidy to employers—it justifies them in creating, and encourages them to create, jobs with inadequate wages and shameful working conditions. And the demand for an unconditionally guaranteed sufficient income must, above all, signify from the outset that dependent work is no longer the only way of creating wealth or the only type of activity whose social value is to be acknowledged. The guarantee of a sufficient income must mark the growing—and potentially preponderant—importance of that other economy which creates intrinsic wealth that is neither measurable nor exchangeable. It must mark the break between the creation of wealth and the creation of value. It must bring out the fact that ‘unemployment’ means neither being socially inactive nor socially useless, but merely being useless in the direct valorization of capital.
…
In short, the guaranteed income should make possible all those activities that take place outside of markets, accounting and prescribed norms and which are not themselves—and do not produce anything— exchangeable for anything else, or anything measurable or convertible into its monetary equivalent. This is why the principle of unconditionality is important—it has to remove the intrinsic value of unmeasurable activities from any social prescription and predefinition. It has to prevent these activities from being regarded institutionally as preconditions for the right to the basic income and thus being transformed into means of earning one’s living. It has to prevent voluntary work from becoming compulsory for the unemployed. It has to see to it that ‘the absolute working-out of [. . .] creative potentialities’ becomes ‘the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick’. And that this is pursued because people want to do so, not as a form of self-production under constraint, dictated by an imperative of employability.

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