In the book Towards a Poor Theatre Jerzy Grotowski explores theater as an encounter between the actor and himself, the creative team, and the audience. There are three key points directly related to the Bewilderments of the Eyes project. First, theater uses a sign system. Second, theater revolves around interaction and contact between people. Third, theater does not need to be "rich" to be successful.
What is theater and what is it doing?
What is theater and what is it doing?
It is, "linking the private and the public, the intimate and the crowded, the secret and the open, the vulgar and the magical. For this we need both a crowd on stage and a crowd watching - and within that crowded stage individuals offering their most intimate truths to individuals within that crowded audience, sharing a collective experience with them," (Brook 12).* | "He calls his theatre a laboratory," (Brook 11).* "It is the experience which we take upon ourselves when we open ourselves to others, when we confront ourselves with them in order to understand ourselves ... in an elementary human sense," (Grotowski 59). *Towards a Poor Theatre Preface by Peter Brook. |
Theater and Signs:
As discussed in my Theater as a Sign System post, Grotowski also looks into the use of signs in theatrical performance. He opens up about how his actors, "do not concentrate on the spiritual technique but on the composition of the role, on the construction of from, on the expression of signs," because "a personal process which is not supported and expressed by a formal articulation and disciplined structuring of the role is not a release and will collapse in shapelessness," (Grotowski 17). In other words if we do not compose our messages correctly in signs they will collapse and not provide the audience with the meaning. Grotowski states: "we compose a role as a system of signs which demonstrate what is behind the mask of common vision: the dialectics of human behavior...A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us," (18).
Theater, Connection and Poor Theatre:
As discussed in my Theater as a Sign System post, Grotowski also looks into the use of signs in theatrical performance. He opens up about how his actors, "do not concentrate on the spiritual technique but on the composition of the role, on the construction of from, on the expression of signs," because "a personal process which is not supported and expressed by a formal articulation and disciplined structuring of the role is not a release and will collapse in shapelessness," (Grotowski 17). In other words if we do not compose our messages correctly in signs they will collapse and not provide the audience with the meaning. Grotowski states: "we compose a role as a system of signs which demonstrate what is behind the mask of common vision: the dialectics of human behavior...A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us," (18).
Theater, Connection and Poor Theatre:
"Theatre is an act engendered by human reactions and impulses, by contacts between people. This is both a biological and a spiritual act," (58).
"By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, "live" communion," (19).
These parameters prove the set up of the first two performances function and act as theatrical performances regardless of their non-traditional approach lacking qualities of "rich" theater. Instead these two performances applied many of the theories explored by Grotowski in the sense that they were focused on the connections, impulses and reactions of the performers and the audience members.