Confrontation, Simulation, Admiration
The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater
Kermit Dunkelberg
The punning title of The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater, shown as a work-in- progress in the spring and late fall of at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York, invites many interpretations. Does it suggest the- atre that is: Poorly executed? Poorly funded? To be lamented? All of the above? Is this the Wooster Group’s retort to Grotowski’s “poor theatre” of reduced means and monastic discipline (Grotowski ), or their own version of it? The Wooster Group’s self-mocking, reverent/irreverent, high-tech/low-tech, nostalgic/derisive production questions the state of contemporary performance by trying on the styles of a vanished group (the Polish Laboratory Theatre, dis- solved in ) and a vanishing one (the Ballett Frankfurt, disbanded in August —half a year after Poor Theater had its first showing). My focus in this article is on the sections of Poor Theater that deal with Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre (–). I see the Wooster Group’s production in light of the history of reception/rejection/appropriation of Grotowski’s work in the United States. In the wake of Grotowski’s first American workshop at New York University in , Richard Schechner founded The Performance Group. In the mid-s, the Wooster Group grew out of The Performance Group, be- coming an independent entity in . Poor Theater is in part a confrontation with an ancestor. In the spring program, “The Director” noted the importance of ancestors:
The writers, the great writers of the past, have been very important to me, even if I have struggled against them. In facing up to Flaubert, Chekhov, or Racine it was like the struggle between Jacob and the Angel: “Reveal unto me your secrets!” But in actual fact, to hell with your secret. It’s our secret that counts, we who are alive now. But if I know your secret, Chekhov, then I can understand my own [...]. I’m speaking to my ances- tors. And of course I don’t see eye-to-eye with my ancestors. But at the same time I cannot deny their existence. They are my base; they are my source material. It’s a personal question between me and them. (Wooster Group a)
The Drama Review 49, 3 (T187), Fall 2005. © 2005 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg The words were Grotowski’s (:): or rather, an amalgamation of Grotowski’s and Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte’s. LeCompte had replaced the names of Sl-owacki and Calderon in the original citation with those of writers she has struggled with: as the director of Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (), Brace Up! (), and To You, the Birdie! (Phédre) (). LeCompte adopted Grotowski’s voice, in an act of ventriloquism and appropriation. In the perfor- mance, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and Scott Shepherd adopted the voices of the Polish Laboratory Theatre actors in the Grotowski/Szajna production of Stanisl-aw Wyspian´ski’s Akropolis (), as filmed in . Notwithstanding “ancestral” connections, LeCompte says she has never thought of Grotowski as a major influence. In the late ’s, she recalls thinking: “That’s interesting stuff, but it’s—you know, it’s ‘Polish drag.’ It was something weird. It was beautiful, and Catholic, and male, and ‘over there’ somewhere” (a). She remembers being struck by the intimacy of Akropolis (which she saw in New York in ), particularly “the incredibly big performances next to very un- comfortable people” and how “wonderfully skilled” and “musical” the actors were. When asked about The Constant Prince, she immediately recalls the experi- ence of “looking down” (a). The act of looking down—at a parquet floor— takes on unexpected resonance in Poor Theater. Still, “poor theatre” didn’t appeal to LeCompte as an aesthetic:
The “no technology”—that whole idea that the actor was at the center— for me it was like: “Everything’s at the center! Why say the actor’s at the center?” [...] I didn’t want to limit myself [...]. I wanted to find some new thing that wasn’t acting. I wasn’t that interested in theatre. (a)
LeCompte began as a painter. With other visually oriented directors of her gen- eration such as Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, and Ruth Maleczech of the Mabou Mines collective, she developed a theatrical language very different from the actor-centered, Grotowski-related Performance Group, Manhattan Project, and Open Theater that preceded them. The new directors often utilized flatter space and flatter, more distanced acting (even to the point of nonacting). They embraced technology. They explored the psychological subjectivity of the director and/or performers as subject matter, as in LeCompte and Spalding Gray’s trilogy-with-epilogue Three Places in Rhode Island (–). So why is LeCompte doing a performance about Grotowski now? “I don’t know,” she tells me. “No idea” (a). Poor Theater is subtitled “A Series of Simulacra.” The program offers these defi- nitions of “simulacrum”:
Oxford English Dictionary: . A material image, made as a representation of some deity, person or thing. . Something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing. b. A mere image, a specious imitation or likeness of something. Webster’s New 20th Century Unabridged: . An im- age. . A mere pretense or semblance; vague representation; counterfeit; travesty; sham. (Wooster Group a, b)
Simulation is far from the aims of Grotowski’s poor theatre, which sought to pen- etrate the conventions of representation in order to tap an existential core. The Wooster Group’s Poor Theater references neither an unmediated “real” (as realism attempts to do) nor a metaphysical “essence” (as Grotowski’s theatre did). The Wooster Group simulates video images of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. In do- ing so, they risk offering “a specious imitation,”a “sham.”This risk is inherent in
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1. Kate Valk and Scott Shepherd in Poor Theater, “Part One: Our Akropolis,” at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004. In a documentary video by Ken Kobland, Wooster Group actors watch and imitate a video of an early documentary film by Michael Elster of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. (Photo by Paula Court)
simulation, since “Simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as it- self a simulacrum” (Baudrillard :). Simulation implicates the simulator in an endless hall of representational mirrors. Poor Theater acknowledges its entrapment within the “edifice of representa- tion.”“Part One: Our Akropolis”begins with a documentary video (by Ken Kob- land) of Wooster Group actors watching a video of an early documentary film by Michael Elster of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. “We enter the theatre,” the En- glish voice on the Polish video announces. “There is the atmosphere of a mon- astery.” With apparent skepticism, bewilderment, and fascination, the Wooster Group actors imitate the young Zygmunt Molik, Ryszard Cies´lak, Rena Mirecka, and Zbigniew Cynkutis as they train. In Elster’s film, a very skinny Ryszard Cies´lak
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg utters a raspy, guttural, quadraphonic tone. In Kobland’s video, Scott Shepherd, seated in a chair, searches for the sound, and the facial expression, in his own body. In the video equivalent of a trompe d’œil, we see Mirecka (in Elster’s film) ap- proach an actor to correct his execution of the physical isolation exercises known as the plastiques. Kate Valk (in Kobland’s video) stands in an identical position to Mirecka’s. She “whispers” to Scott Shepherd. We see Valk’s lips move, we hear Mirecka’s voice. In close-up, the camera pans across the faces of the Laboratory actors, frozen in the haunting “masks” utilized in Akropolis as a sign of the internalized oppres- sion of the concentration camp. Each black-and-white image of a Laboratory actor’s face is complemented by a color image of a Wooster Group actor imitat- ing the grotesque pose. The Wooster Group faces draw laughter from the audi- ence. The Laboratory faces, on the nights I attend, do not. The narrator in Elster’s film characterizes the actors before us as a group of fanatics searching for answers to the question: “In what form can the theatre of today continue to exist?” Meanwhile, in Kobland’s video, the Wooster technicians painstakingly en- deavor to construct in the Performing Garage a facsimile of the parquet floor at the former Laboratory Theatre space in Wrocl-aw,Poland. The exact dimensions and compass orientation of the floor in Wrocl-aw are laid out in the Garage. On the monitor, we see the faux-parquet floor installed, but on the stage in front of us, where the monitor stands, we see only tape marks on a black floor. The video details how, using a system of weights and pulleys, the two flatscreen video mon- itors at the back of the Garage were adjusted to the exact height of the sound and light booth windows in the wall of the Wrocl-aw theatre, which were “added af- ter Grotowski’s time.” As the video ends, the Wooster Group actors enter the stage, to the sound of an invisible door being opened. The faces of the Wooster Group’s sound and video operators (Geoff Abbas and Iver Findlay) appear on the “sound booth” and “light booth” monitors. The voiceover on Kobland’s documentary informs us that in the summer of , the Wooster Group made a clandestine audio record- ing of their visit to the former site of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. The actors fan out in the space. Fliakos, Shepherd, and Assistant Director/ Dramaturg Sam Gold portray Wooster Group actors visiting the Laboratory The- atre. Gold conspicuously carries a large shoulder bag. When he “casually” reaches into it, the conversation is interrupted by a loud rustling, as if he is adjusting the hidden microphone. Sheena See plays “The Director” (LeCompte). Valk portrays a woman identified in the spring version as “A Longtime Associate of Grotowski’s” and in the fall as simply “the Polish Tour Guide.” Over earphones, the actors lis- ten to the clandestinely recorded conversation, speaking in synch with its pauses, inflections, and breaths. See/Director and the actors are immediately impressed with the parquet floor— quite a nice floor for “poor theatre,” they comment. In Manhattan, See/Director goes on, such a floor would represent “mucho money.” In the old days, Valk/Tour Guide tells them, there was no money at all:“so [it] was really poor theatre.” She laughs at her own joke. The company asks a few questions about Grotowski, but is continually drawn back to the parquet floor—“like a Park Avenue apartment.” The scene focuses on this missed communication—the Wooster Group actors see- ing the space through their New York eyes, Valk/Tour Guide wanting to share her deep personal sense of the history of the place. In the next scene, the actors sit on chairs angled downstage toward a video monitor, where they seem to watch scenes from the Akropolis film (Taggart ), as a “Polish translator” (Fliakos) interprets what is said by Grotowski’s actors. We hear the sound of the video and see its indistinct, darkened image. Each line of
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2. Left to right: Ari Fliakos, Kate Valk,Scott Shepherd, Sam Gold, and Sheena See in Poor Theater, at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004.The actors sit on chairs angled toward a downstage video monitor,where they seem to watch scenes from the 1968 Akropolis as a “Polish translator” (Fliakos) interprets what is said by Grotowski’s actors. (Photo by Paula Court)
the Akropolis text seems to demand an in-depth explanation of Polish history and literature. The chasm of misunderstanding widens. The Wooster Group’s project begins to appear like a very tall mountain they will never succeed in climbing. See/Director bites her fingernails, twists her pencil. Fliakos/Translator translates a line: “He sedde thet [said that]: ‘Brothers, I see how suffering ate your face.’” The others stare at him blankly. “It sounds funny in English, I know, but in Polish ‘me˛ka˛ zz·arta twarz’ means suffering literally— ‘ate your face’—like ‘destroyed your face,’ or something.” The perfect timing of Fliakos/Translator’s efforts draws laughter from the audience. The Translator is stymied over how to translate another Polish phrase. In pref- ace, he explains that in Wyspian´ski’s play, the Akropolis was the “cemetery of the tribes.” For Stanisl-aw Wyspian´ski (–), the “cemetery of the tribes” meant Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, where the Polish kings and queens are buried. For Grotowski, the “cemetery of the tribes” was Auschwitz, where he set his stage production. Fliakos/Translator continues: “It would be like whole earth was covered with cemeteries. Like everywhere you step would be cemetery.” The Wooster actors nod, trying to comprehend. Fliakos/Translator talks of how “Poland lost our inde- pendence. [Pause.] That time.” For a moment, the unfathomable abyss of Polish political history opens up—the context for all of Grotowski’s stage productions— untranslatable to this st-century North American theatre group. The tape of Akropolis rolls: “Everywhere I step, there’s a grave,” the English narrator on the video intones. Fliakos/Translator: “Yes, he sedde thet now, what I said.” The chairs are rearranged. Gold and See/Director exit. Sometimes on their feet, sometimes seated, Valk, Fliakos, and Shepherd strive to simulate the images of Rena Mirecka, Zygmunt Molik, and the other Laboratory actors in the final minutes of Akropolis. Jockeying around a pair of microphones, they deftly re- create the video close-ups and shifts of camera angle, simulating what they see and hear. They do not—cannot—capture the full-bodied, raw presence of the Laboratory actors, but rather simulate the flat and partial image of their perfor- mance as captured on video, animating only those parts of their bodies that mir- ror their counterparts as seen within the frame of the monitor. “They’re not taking behavior so much as they’re taking form,” LeCompte explains. “They’re
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg seeing an arm move, so they’re moving an arm [...]. It’s more from dance [than from theatre]” (LeCompte a). But from this rigorously limited simulation, something powerful emerges. At this point, all English translation has stopped. The actors channel the Polish text that comes over their earpieces. For nearly minutes, we hear only Polish. The voices build to two climaxes: a tender lament by Mirecka (doubled by Valk) and the impassioned fury of Molik’s extended final solo (doubled by Fliakos). We see, darkly, the images of the Akropolis video on the monitor. We hear Mirecka and Molik’s voices just beneath Valk and Fliakos’s simulation. As in previous scenes, the focus is on the Wooster Group actors confronting/assimilating the material, but now the gap between the performers and the material narrows. Something happens to these actors, and to us. “Mere pretense” is transcended. The self- deprecating mockery of earlier sections falls away. Ironically, it is the recognition of “the whole edifice of [their] representation as itself a simulacrum,” that makes this powerful connection possible. In the final scene of Part One (as seen in the spring), See/Director converses with the video image of “a theatre critic and good friend of Grotowski’s”:
SEE/DIRECTOR: I want to do Akropolis. In Polish. CRITIC: You want to do Akropolis? Why would you want to do that? SEE/DIRECTOR: I don’t know. CRITIC: Well, I don’t get that at all.
On the video screen, we see images of Wooster Street in the snow. There is some- thing unbearably sad and nostalgic about these falling snowflakes. As though from the window of a cab, we see images of people on the sidewalk, going about their daily business. We hear the Critic’s voice. In increasingly angry terms, she ex- presses her consternation with the Wooster Group’s attempt to create “their” Akropolis, concluding:“That was one great piece that was done. Just leave it alone. Don’t try to imitate it, don’t try to revive it. Just leave it alone.” The dialogue with “the Critic” is a dialogue between generations. When I first saw Poor Theater, the Critic was recognizable as one whose articles and commen- tary had helped to introduce Grotowski to Americans in the s and s. But the Critic, who had been videotaped clandestinely when she came to the Garage to talk to the company, objected vehemently to the appropriation of her words and image. Later in the run of Poor Theater, the Critic’s voice remained, but her image was replaced with that of a lip-synching actress. Still later, LeCompte her- self appeared on the video screen, mouthing the Critic’s words. In the fall, this section had been completely deleted, replaced by a new seg- ment in which the German dada and surrealist artist Max Ernst (–) re- flected on his practice of frottage—placing paper over an object and rubbing with a pencil or charcoal. We hear See/Director’s voice, ventriloquizing Ernst, over the snowy images on the video screen: “Parquet, parquet, parquet... I got from the parquet a series of drawings by dropping a piece of paper on the floor. I be- gan to rub the parquet...”A male, English voice (“Ernst”) interrupts to tell of the necessity of overcoming his lifelong “virginity complex” when faced with a blank white canvas. Frottage, rubbing, gave him a way of overcoming the impasse. On the screen, numerous images of parquet rubbings blend into one another, becom- ing more abstract, as See/Director’s voice continues to narrate LeCompte/Ernst’s thoughts:
I was becoming obsessed by the sight of the grooves in that floor. The floor itself stayed completely alive [...]. [A]s soon as I started rubbing, it instantly wasn’t parquet anymore. I mean, as soon as I started rubbing,
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Poor Theater suddenly I had these shapes. And I think these are the forms that were the source of my obsession in the first place. This must have been what I was seeing before [...]. [T]he floorness of the floor was gone, and the images were so clear: and it dawned on me: “My God!”
Off to one side, Ari Fliakos announces simply: “That’s the end of Part One; there’ll be a five-minute intermission.” The two sections work in very different ways. The dialogue with the Critic, which had seemed so central to the meaning of Poor Theater in the spring, at least to me, had called the entire validity of the piece into question, reproducing a ten- sion felt within the audience: Why are they doing this? The Critic had the last word:“Just leave it alone.” But as the Ernst section suggests, there was something there that LeCompte couldn’t leave alone. The new section doesn’t resolve the ambiguity of Poor Theater, but reflects on it in a different way. The obsessive act of rubbing is an apt metaphor for LeCompte’s rehearsal process. “It takes me a long time to figure out why I’m doing something [...],”she says. “A lot of times I don’t know what I’m looking for until a long time in” (b). LeCompte’s directorial rubbing often takes the form of recomposing visual el- ements. To create the set for L.S.D.: Just the High Points (), for instance, she “took the Nayatt [School] set and inverted it so that the audience is on the floor looking up at the table” (LeCompte in Savran :). In turn, the set for Nay- att School is described by Jim Clayburgh as:“just Rumstick [Road] dropped through the floor” (in Savran :). LeCompte has compared her directing/designing process to that of “a painter, where I have certain objects that I keep bringing back into the work—or certain color schemes—that shift [...] over time” (a). LeCompte insists that the change in the final section of Part One came about, not due to pressure from the Critic, but because once she understood why the parquet floor was in the piece, she “didn’t need the questioner any more” (b). It is clear from the gradual changes that occurred throughout the spring, though, that the “dialogue with the Critic” was not relinquished easily. In Poland, the questioning was displaced from the performance and taken up by the audience. When Poor Theater was shown at the Teatr Dramatyczny during the Festival of Theatre Festivals in Warsaw in October, it created what one com- mentator called the festival’s “greatest scandal” (Pawl-owski ). Another, Janusz R. Kowalczyk, averred that the presentation of such a performance was a “dis- credit” to the festival producers. Speaking “in the name of those people who had the opportunity to see Grotowski’s group live,” Kowalczyk declared Poor Theater merely a “faded carbon,” an “embarrassing” example of “artistic hutzpah” (). LeCompte regarded the audience response as merely “a low-class scandale.” And yet, she continued, “it wasn’t enough of a scandal to make everyone get to see it” (LeCompte b). LeCompte, who habitually sits among the audience, night after night, to watch the Wooster Group’s work, recalls that on the first night in Warsaw the audience was “frozen—absolutely frozen still [...]. I couldn’t interpret [their response] at all” (b). In the volatile discussion that followed, the director sensed a split along generational lines:
It seemed to me that the people that were over basically said it was— not “blasphemous,” they said that in Germany—but: “Why do it? Why are you copying? Why don’t you copy something else?” Or: “Why do you copy anything? Why don’t you make up your own thing?” They tried to talk about what it was like for them [...]. And we tried to explain where we were coming from. Basically, it was just a terrific divide, where [...]—I think [...]—the older people, just couldn’t understand why we were doing
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Kermit Dunkelberg this. The younger people, though, talked to me, even privately, and said to me they enjoyed it, it was wonderful. But they didn’t speak as much, they were really more reticent, and would come afterward. So it was very di- vided [...]. (b)
The most sympathetic review from the Warsaw performances to come to my at- tention was that of Piotr Gruszczysn´ki, in the Kraków weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. For Gruszczyn´ski, the performance occasioned “a new look at Grotowski, per- haps long needed or at least long expected.” Gruszczyn´ski saw the performance as an attempt to return to the methods of Grotowski, an attempt doomed to fail- ure “on the grounds of that which is untranslate-able, and that which is inex- pressible.” (I find the ground of this untranslate-ability and inexpressibility to be the very territory the performance negotiates.) While Gruszczyn´ski, in contrast to other commentators, acknowledged the “moving devotion and impressive skill” of the Wooster Group actors, he concluded that the performance led only to “a distortion of the ideas of Grotowski” (Gruszczyn´ski ). In Poland, as in New York, there had also been hurt feelings over the clandes- tine taping. The “Tour Guide”Valk portrays was originally a much more central figure, but LeCompte scaled it back, in deference to the woman’s feelings, and directed Valk to make the character more “her own” (a). Nonetheless, after the group’s Polish appearance, the actual tour guide contacted the Wooster Group and requested that her character be removed, as much as possible. “We’ve done our best,” LeCompte says, to fictionalize the character (LeCompte b). The actual American critic told LeCompte that by taping secretively she was “operating like the C.I.A.” LeCompte conceded, “In a way, she’s right,” but in- sisted that the taping was not unusual because “we tape all our rehearsals,” and that she had “contacted three lawyers, and nothing we did was illegal” (Zinoman :E). The Wooster Group’s use of such “inappropriate” and inappropriately gained materials dates back to Rumstick Road (), in which Gray used the taped voices of family members and his mother’s (unnamed) psychiatrist to reconstruct the story of her depression and eventual suicide. The Group’s transgressive use of blackface in Route 1 & 9 () caused a furor that resulted in a substantial cut in funding from the New York State Council on the Arts (Savran :). Their deconstruction of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in L.S.D. was considered by Miller to be “a blatant parody” and an infringement of copyright (Savran :). LeCompte has long been fascinated by “the confrontation, the moral issue of the material” (in Savran :). This fascination produces the ambiguity of the par- ody, which can be seen as positive, negative, or both at the same time. After one performance of Poor Theater, I overheard a young Polish woman ex- plaining to an American friend how important Grotowski’s Akropolis had been in Poland, and, at the same time, how much she liked the Wooster Group’s perfor- mance. “Do you think they are mocking the original?” her friend wanted to know. The Polish woman answered: “I think it’s impossible to know.” On some level, the Wooster Group is mocking Akropolis, and themselves, too. Whether or not the mockery leads to something beyond itself is determined by each individual spectator. In my view, the mockery provides a necessary distance. The performance is irreverent, but not disrespectful. A “reverent” imitation of Akropolis could have been far more “specious” than the Wooster Group’s simulation. Why not, as the American critic and the Polish audience asked, just leave Akropolis alone? What can the Wooster Group hope to glean from their simula- tion? Inevitably some will find it, as I heard one audience member complain: “a complete cop-out and a fakery.” In other words, a simulacrum.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Poor Theater The accusations of “fakery” stem in part from the Wooster Group’s method of appropriating or copying material, and in part from the resultant nonlinear, non- narrative performance structure. The Polish Laboratory Theatre’s Akropolis pre- sented a clear progression of images reflecting the horror of the concentration camp. That is what Grotowski’s production was about. But that is not what Wyspian´ski’s play is about. In order to make “their” Akropolis, the Laboratory had to destroy Wyspian´ski’s dramatic structure. Grotowski advocated confrontation with a text rather than a subservient interpretation of it. Instead of a “faithful” rendering of Wyspian´ski’s play, he presented his autonomous directorial vision. By doing so, he influenced a generation of directors worldwide, not least in North America. In her work, LeCompte has followed in this tradition (with a different aes- thetic, to be sure), confronting such classic dramatic works as T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (in Nayatt School, ); Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (in Route 1 & 9, ); Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (in L.S.D., );Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones () andThe Hairy Ape (), and Racine’s Phédre (inTo You, the Birdie! [Phédre], ), among others. Her approach in Poor Theater is no different, except that it is the performance text of the Grotowski/Szajna Akropolis that is confronted, rather than a work of dramatic literature. Grotowski “treated the text brutally [...] as inspiration for his own theatrical creation” (Puzyna :). His productions of national classics were received with “consternation [...] indignation, mockery, and sharp critical attacks” (). In this sense, LeCompte is firmly in the tradition. The Wooster Group acknowl- edges that their work may produce “consternation” and “indignation,” that their simulation will be regarded by some as “mere pretense [...] travesty [...] sham.” “I’ve had so many people hate what I’ve done,” LeCompte tells me, “that if that had anything to do with anything I would have stopped working. It matters to me, but it’s not why I’m working [...]” (a). But Poor Theater is not only about mockery or confrontation. As “the Chore- ographer’s” (William Forsythe’s) notes to Part Two suggest, it is also about admi- ration:“I guess I, I’ve been more of an identifier, a tagger than a creator. I would say that my technique is a composite of admiration” (Wooster Group a, b).
“Part Two:For Billy” Part Two begins, like Part One, with a mockumentary by Kobland. The cam- era follows Shepherd up and down the stairs of the Performing Garage as, in the persona of “the Choreographer” (William Forsythe), he delivers an anxious tirade against corporate sponsorship and commercial pressure. As Shepherd/ Choreographer passes through the door to the performance space on the video, the real Shepherd, earpiece in place, strides into the room and asks if we are ready to get started. Shepherd/Choreographer delivers a nonstop, stream-of-consciousness lecture- demonstration about his choreographic process. His manner of expression is lyri- cal and philosophical, yet very down-to-earth. He ranges from abstract spatial theories, to his experiences as a father, to chaos theory. As a choreographer, he explains, he plays with the mind’s desire to find order. Meanwhile, his “dancers” (Valk and Fliakos) improvise behind, and at times, with him. Even as he jams with the dancers, he continues to spin adhoc theories of art, commerce, and the cosmos. See/Director poses questions from the sidelines. If Grotowski is an ancestor of the Wooster Group, Forsythe is a contemporary, a fellow traveler. Like the Wooster Group, Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt embraced technology. Their aesthetic was cool;Grotowski’s was hot. Forsythe and LeCompte
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3. To p to bottom: Kate Valk, Sheena See, Scott Shepherd,Ari Fliakos amid audience members in Poor Theater, at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004.The actor/dancers begin another Forsythe-like cowboy improvisation to the soundtrack of a Western, but the galloping horses and gunslingers morph into the procession of Jakob and the Tr ibe that ends Grotowski/ Szajna’s Akropolis. (Photo by Paula Court)
are playful, Grotowski was cathartic. Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt was not a “poor” theatre. An unidentified German businessman or administrator in Kobland’s video tells us that Forsythe requires “the resources of a big institution,”both tech- nically and financially. Nonetheless, “he’s afraid of it. Because he knows [...] that this institution has always a tendency to kill the art.” Grotowski’s poor theatre drew on “high” culture: the classics of Polish Ro- mantic and post-Romantic dramatic literature. “The Choreographer,” as we see him here, draws on “low” culture: American (and German) Westerns. The Chore- ographer’s work does not rely on grand themes or classic literature. A TV West- ern or the exact height of his two sons (which he can’t remember) can serve as the point of departure for new choreography.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Poor Theater Like Tristan Tzara composing a poem, Shepherd/Choreographer fishes in his pocket for precomposed titles of new dances—ridiculous titles such as “Injun Gonna Run Until He Gets Tired.” To a soundtrack of gunshots, hoof beats, and corny dialogue, the “dancers” improvise a new composition, using techniques bor- rowed from Forsythe’s choreographic process (LeCompte a). The Wooster Group actors spent some time training in these modalities with Forsythe dancers, including one day with Forsythe himself. This immediate, body-to-body connection was not part of their process with the Grotowski ma- terial. Of course, it was still too limited to result in any real mastery of Forsythe’s techniques, nor was that the goal: “We’re not dancers,” notes Fliakos. “It would defeat the purpose to have a real dancer in there” (Fliakos ). In Part Two and the Epilogue, the actors were improvising “with the modalities plus a wild card [...] that they have no idea about” (LeCompte a). The wild card is the im- age on the four video monitors in the corners of the stage. The video operators have complete license to use any image they bring in. “I use the TV in different ways for different pieces,”LeCompte explains. “This one I have no control over, and I don’t know what happens [in Part Two].” In L.S.D., the cast reconstructed their behavior from a rehearsal under the influence of the eponymous substance, using a time code to memorize their exact behav- ior down to the fraction of a second. The result was “some kind of reality on the stage that looked improvised, but wasn’t. Now this one [Poor Theater] doesn’t look improvised, but it is!” The actors’ movements are so precise that they appear cho- reographed, but in fact, LeCompte claims, “There’s never been [...] any three seconds in a row that’s the same [in Part Two]” (LeCompte a). The video monitors are angled so that only the actors, not the audience, can see what images the actors are improvising from. On several nights that I watched from a vantage point near the light booth, however, I could see that the Western scenes (for which we hear the soundtrack) are interspersed with other scenes (for which we do not). These include tapes of the Wooster Group actors working with the Forsythe dancers, and, most surprisingly, Torgeir Wethal’s documentary film of Ryszard Cies´lak’s fluid, virtuosic demonstration of the plastiques at the Odin Theatre in (Wethal ). Earlier, I had asked LeCompte why they didn’t use this tape in Part One, instead of Elster’s film. She replied that they felt it was more honest to use the earlier tape, when the Laboratory actors were at
4. Kate Valk at the end of Poor Theater at The Performing Garage, NYC, 2004.A trap door in the aisle of the second row of seating is lifted aside, and the Wooster Group actors, like the actors in Akropolis playing on the monitors, disappear through the narrow aperture. (Photo by Paula Court)
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Part Three: Epilog Abruptly but graciously, Valk announces:“That’s all we have time for tonight. Thank you.” But almost immediately, the actors reenter the stage, picking up where the “lec-dem” left off. Shepherd/Forsythe announces that they will do one more improvisation. He draws a title from his pocket: “Only the Smoke Re- mains.” The soundtrack to a Western comes over the sound system, and the actor/ dancers begin another of their cowboy improvisations. But the galloping horses and gunslingers quickly morph into the procession of Jakob and the Tribe that ends Grotowski/Szajna’s Akropolis, as the sound and image from that final scene are projected. For a few brief, frenetic minutes, the actors rapidly switch back and forth be- tween American Western and Polish apocalypse. The procession snakes toward the audience, past the first row. A trap door in the aisle of the second row of seat- ing is lifted aside, and the actors in Poor Theater, like the actors in Akropolis now playing on the monitors, disappear through the narrow aperture, closing the lid after them. (In Akropolis, the hole represented the entrance to the Auschwitz cre- matoria.) We hear the voice of the English narrator of the Akropolis video: “They went.And only the smoke remains.” Only the smoke. Or only a video. The audience sits, slightly uncertain if the performance has ended. On the soundtrack, the gentle rustling of the audience at Akropolis in registers sim- ilar uncertainty. A few seconds pass before a technician appears to announce (as the stage manager does on the videotape from ):“Ladies and Gentlemen, the performance is over.” The juxtaposition of Akropolis and Westerns draws uproarious laughter from some. But LeCompte is after something more than a simplistic parody or an in- joke. In the spring, the Epilog was continually changing. The first time I saw Poor Theater, there was no Epilog at all. The third time I saw it, Shepherd/Choreogra- pher translated the final line from Akropolis before the improvisation began. There was less laughter, a more serious response. This was also the case when I saw the piece in the fall. For me, the Epilog was effective and moving in ways difficult to sort out. In Poland, Gruszyn´ski wrote that it was “difficult to forget the American ac- tors intoning in Polish large fragments of ‘Akropolis,’” difficult not to be moved by the dual image of the Laboratory and Wooster Group actors disappearing into a narrow wooden chamber or box:
But the entrance to that world has become closed. The American artists deprived us of a series of illusions, told us something that we would never have admitted to ourselves. Jerzy Grotowski and his method is already a part of the great history of theatre. It can serve as inspiration, but one can’t enter that world again. From there we have been forever exiled. (Gruszyn´ski )
Like Gruszczyn´ski, I remain haunted by the weird double image of the Wooster Group’s “faded carbon” (Kowalczyk ). However, I don’t perceive the goal of the Wooster Group’s simulation to be emulation. I see the performance, not as an attempt to reenter the world of Akropolis, but rather as an acknowledgment of and
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742444 by guest on 25 September 2021 Poor Theater a confrontation with the Wooster Group’s cultural-historical distance from it. I asked LeCompte what she feels watching her actors simulate Akropolis:
It’s kind of sad, kind of moving. It’s moving for me about time [...]. [P]eople who never saw Grotowski—they’re seeing something totally dif- ferent. But the people who saw Grotowski must be looking at what I’m going through: “What was that? Why are we doing this”[...]? [There’s] also a certain kind of nostalgia [...]—with the microphones and everything— a certain: “Where are we now? What was that thing?” And the possibility of the relic—the pressed Jesus on the shroud. (a)
By approaching Akropolis through their own methodology—the microphones, the videos, the distance in the acting—the Wooster Group maintains the in- tegrity of the encounter. They create “their” (answer to) Akropolis.
Notes . Poor Theater ran as a work-in-progress February to April . After touring to Cal Arts/Red Cat in Los Angeles (– September);Theater am Ufer/Hau II, Berlin (– Oc- tober) and Festival of Theater Festivals, Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw (– October), it ran again as a work-in-progress at The Performing Garage, with some alterations, in No- vember and December. During the spring run, its three parts were titled as I’ve titled them here; however, during the fall, the parts were retitled “Simulacrum #:Jerzy Grotowski,” “Simulacrum #: Max Ernst,” and “Simulacrum #:William Forsythe,” with an “Epilog.” My description is based primarily on the version seen in the spring, with some emendations reflecting changes made when I saw it again in December. . In January , Forsythe formed a smaller organization, The Forsythe Company as “a log- ical extension of the Ballett Frankfurt,” including many of the same dancers, technicians, and staff (Ballett Frankfurt ). The Polish Laboratory Theatre officially disbanded on August , exactly years after its inception. Four of the six actors at the core of that quarter century of work—Antoni Jahol-kowski, Stanisl-aw Scierski, Ryszard Cies´lak, and Zbigniew Cynkutis—have passed away. Grotowski died in . However, the group’s co- founder and Literary Manager, Ludwik Flaszen, and actors Zygmunt Molik and Rena Mi- recka (both of whom figure prominently in Akropolis and consequently Poor Theater), remain professionally active, as do others who were involved for shorter periods of time. . At the same time, Andre Gregory formed The Manhattan Project, with actors from Gro- towski’s workshop. . In the fall program, the citation was attributed simply to “Jerzy Grotowski,”and Grotowski’s original references to Calderon and Sl-owacki—rather than Flaubert, Chekhov, and Racine— were restored. Similarly the notes attributed to “the Choreographer” in the spring were now simply credited to “William Forsythe” (Wooster Group a, b). . All quotations from the performance are as I remember them, based on my notes jotted dur- ing the performance and revised after, and may not be exact. . In the fall version, a voice-over explained:“The company imagines what it might be like to adapt the Polish Laboratory Theatre’s daily routine.” . This particular effect was edited out of the video for the fall production. . Józef Szajna, an important Polish director and designer in his own right, was codirector and designer of props, scenic elements, and costumes for Akropolis. Jerzy Gurawksi designed the scenic environment. . The light and sound booth windows were added in the mid-s when Zbigniew Cyn- kutis, a former Laboratory actor, renovated the Laboratory space in Wrocl-aw to house the Second Studio. The “Polish Tour Guide” tells the Wooster actors later in the performance: “Grotowski was very angry when he saw these windows.” .I happen to know this to be true, since by coincidence I had arrived a couple of days before them to begin six months of research at the Centre of Studies on Jerzy Grotowski’s Work and of the Cultural and Theatrical Research, which occupies the former Laboratory The- atre spaces at Rynek Ratusz Wrocl-aw. I vividly remember the scene that follows.
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. Akropolis was filmed for TV by director James Taggart. The TV recording is comprised of the entire play ( min.), realized from October through November in the Twicken- ham studios near London, with spectators’ participation. The play is introduced in the film by Peter Brook (in English, min.). An English narrator translates key phrases of the text on the video. First broadcast on the New York cable TV channel , on December . Zenon Kruszelnicki assisted with translations for Poor Theater and participated in the creation of the performance. .From to , Poland did not exist as an independent political state. . This segment is based on my notes from the spring version. My notes from the fall indicate that the sequence and exact words may differ from the actual performance (or that it changed from spring to fall), but I have tried to accurately capture the spirit of the exchange. . At her request, I have omitted “the Critic’s” name from this article. I also omit the name of the “Polish Tour Guide” taped without her prior consent. . Rumstick Road takes on an added layer of disturbing poignancy in light of Gray’s own sui- cide in January . . Puzyna is referring here especially to Grotowski’s earlier productions of Forefather’s Eve () and Kordian (). Response to Akropolis () was less extreme, since critics and the public knew better what to expect. . The Wooster Group intended to take a workshop at Brzezinka, the rural workspace where much of Grotowski’s Paratheatre and Theatre of Sources work took place, but they were un- able to complete it (LeCompte ). I led a two-hour voice workshop with the cast (based on work I had done years earlier with Zygmunt Molik), in the spring of , during the first run of Poor Theater. . In Grotowski’s production, the words “our Akropolis” and “cemetery of the tribes” were re- peated “obsessive[ly]” (Flaszen [] :).
References Ballett Frankfurt “The Forsythe Company.”
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LeCompte, Elizabeth a Interview with author. New York City, March. b Interview with author. New York City, December. Pawl-owski, Roman “Bazar, a nie przewodnik.” Gazeta Wyborcza (Warszawa), October. Puzyna, Konstantyn “Grotowski i Dramat Romantyczny.” Dialog , (March):–. Savran, David Breaking the Rules:The Wooster Group. New York:Theatre Communications Group. Taggart, James, dir. Akropolis. Video, black and white. min. Polish. Produced by Lewis Freedman. Wethal, Torgeir, dir. Training in Grotowski’s “Laboratorium” in Wrocl-aw. Film, black and white. min. English. Produced by the Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark. Wooster Group a Poor Theater:A Series of Simulacra program. The Performing Garage, NY. Feb- ruary– April. b Poor Theater:A Series of Simulacra program. The Perfoming Garage, NY. No- vember– December. Zinoman, Jason “On Stage and Off: Candid Camera.” New York Times, March, late edition:E.
Kermit Dunkelberg is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU, and cofounder (with Kim Mancuso) of Pilgrim Theatre Research and Perfor- mance Collaborative in Boston.He has studied with Jerzy Grotowski,Zbigniew Cynkutis, Zygmunt Molik, and Rena Mirecka of the Polish Laboratory Theatre. He recently spent seven months in Poland as a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Associate for his dissertation on Grotowski and North American Theatre. He is currently a Visiting In- structor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
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