My Life in Art. by Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and Edited by Jean Benedetti

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My Life in Art. By Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and edited by Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge, 2008; 452 pp.; illustrations. $39.95 cloth. An Actor’s Work. By Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and edited by Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge, 2008; 693 pp. $35.00 cloth. There is no doubt that these volumes translated by Jean Benedetti will allow readers who cannot access Stanislavski in Russian to discover him at long last—not rediscover him, but actually come face to face with a practitioner whose reputation is marked by numerous misunderstandings.1 Stanislavski’s autobiography, My Life in Art, first appeared in the United States in 1924 in less-than-adequate English by J.J. Robbins. It was part of a publicity campaign for the Moscow Art Theatre’s US tour, and Stanislavski, who needed foreign currency to cure his tubercular son in Switzerland, went along with the deal, embarrassed by his struggles as a writer but doing his best to meet the publisher’s deadline. These and related circumstances are noted with humor in Laurence Senelick’s introduction to the Routledge publication. The original Russian text has long since disappeared, but Robbins’s translation was available in Methuen’s imprint as late as 1980, perpetuating the hastily constructed image of a figure who, by now, towered over the theatre of the 20th century, for better or for worse. On returning to the Soviet Union, Stanislavski wrote a completely revised and extended version that was published in 1926. As far as it is possible to gauge from the various Russian editions of this version, Benedetti’s editorial work stands up well to the challenge. The book is Stanislavski’s journey from childhood and adolescent devotion to amateur theatrics to the founding, with Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko, of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, its difficulties in the pursuit of a “new kind of art” (337), and its embattled position after 1917 when it was under attack from the revolutionary left, which had its own new art to offer. Stanislavski’s pages on his meeting with Nemirovich- Danchenko make for engrossing reading as they detail the current stage practices and substan- dard working conditions that the MAT intended to oppose; and they include the commercialism of the theatre, its reliance on star turns, actors’ stock-in-trade posturing and tricks, makeshift, unsanitary, and unheated dressing rooms with broken windows and gaping doors, and the lack

1. Although normally I would use the transliteration “Stanislavsky,” I am using the spelling as it appears in the book title, “Stanislavski.” Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 of respect shown to actors in society at large. The writing is immediate, passionate, and precise, focusing attention not simply because the MAT set its sights high against a prehistoric age, but because you find yourself thinking that that age has not yet vanished. There is much, still, to value in Stanislavski’s claims for the dignity and integrity of “art” (as distinct from what he called “convention”), actors, and the theatre profession. In many ways, these pages anticipate the chapter “Ethics and Discipline” that comes towards the end of An Actor’s Work and which is something of a credo on why doing theatre with principled seriousness could and should matter for self and others. Stanislavski’s focus throughout on the how and why of theatre—and his accounts of pro ductions are finely observed—leaves little room for personal sentiment in his observations on various key figures: Edward Gordon Craig whose innovations he admired; Nemirovich- Danchenko, with whom he was no longer on speaking terms (although you would not know it from the book); Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, his brilliant pupils, whose criticism of the psychological realism he had pursued down different pathways for more than two decades must have hurt him to the core. He is similarly discreet about his close friend and collaborator Leopold Sulerzhitsky to whom he entrusted the First Studio, founded in 1912. The First Studio was set up to test and develop the “system,” as Stanislavski called it—in quotation marks to indicate its provisional nature. Meanwhile, the established MAT actors, as Stanislavsky tells it, described it as “Stanislavski’s mania,” angrily complaining that he had “turned rehearsals into an experimental laboratory and that actors were not guineapigs” (257). Here, too, Stanislavski keeps his feelings to himself. What is striking, above all else, is his ceaseless probing, exploration, and experimentation; and, indeed, Stanislavski’s laboratory approach set a precedent for the entire 20th century. It is little wonder that practitioners as diverse as Grotowski, Barba, Vasilyev, and Dodin, who diverge as much from each other as Stanislavski’s pupils did, are indebted to him, as are numerous small-scale laboratory theatres barely aware of his pioneering endeavor. Benedetti’s translation is very readable, although it does not quite fully convey the emotional principle embedded in Stanislavski’s research. Thus, too frequently, he uses “mind” for Stanislavski’s dusha (meaning both “heart” and “soul”) as well as for dukh (“spirit”). “Mental,” then, covers the adjectives dushevnoe and dukhovnoe from the corresponding two nouns. Bene detti’s choices might be tidy, but they suggest that Stanislavski envisaged the actor as more rationally driven and in-the-head in his/her practice than is implied by his continual emphasis on the actor as a constantly developing emotional and spiritual being. These nuances are vital when it comes to An Actor’s Work, his lifelong elaboration of the “system” written in the style of Socratic dialogue to indicate that the actor’s search is ongoing and organic; and the search is for the embodiment, also in the heart, of skills and techniques commensurate with the actor’s tasks in specific playing contexts. Fundamental to this organicity is perezhivanie, which Benedetti systematically translates as “experience,” unlike his predecessor Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood who employed a wider range of terms. His solution is convenient, but “experience” needs the qualifying “emotional” to convey Stanislavski’s meaning fully. Sometimes this adjective is sorely needed to capture the idea of going through an emotion and coming through it in control of the action that, for Stanislavski, is theatre. It is essential here to point out that action (deistvie) rather than play (igra), which, in Stanislavski’s conceptual framework, connotes playacting and pretence or artifice, is the cornerstone of his “system” as a whole: this is especially so because deistvie also homes in on the notion of “taking action,” which is there in the verb deistvovat. In other words, deistvie is not about imitating anything, but creating it, here and now. Zadacha, another one of those words that has caused confusion, is appropriately translated as “task” (contra Hapgood’s erroneous preference for “objective”). The problems of translation are many, not all to be blamed on Stanislavski’s circumlocutions,

neologisms, repetitions, and frequently obsessive preoccupation with terminology—for the sake, Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 it must be said, of sense and meaning. The opus was in two interconnected parts whose published Russian titles are An Actor’s Work on Himself in the Creative Process of Emotional Experience, Part I (‘emotional’ here added because of the comments above) and An Actor’s Work on Himself in the Creative Process of Embodiment, Part II (‘himself’ because the noun for ‘actor’ in Russian is masculine). Benedetti has put them together in one volume for the continuity Stanislvaski is said to have wanted. His shortened title may have been presumed to be more attractive to readers, but it calls for some explanation in the foreword to the book. Hapgood, by comparison, opts for An Actor Prepares and Building a Character whose difference from the Russian titles is evident. Once again, as in the case of My Life in Art, there are two versions of Part I, a North Amer- ican and a Russian one. Hapgood’s translation came out in 1935, while Stanislavski’s unabridged text appeared in 1938. However, he failed to complete Part II before his death in the same year. Hapgood was to publish it (Building a Character) 12 years later from material provided by his son. Thus, in the English-speaking world, An Actor Prepares was taken as a stand-alone for long enough to do damage, not least to “embodiment” in its central importance, in Stanislavski’s eyes, in the creative process. Furthermore, An Actor Prepares is not only approximately less than half of its homologue in Russian, but it also loses the latter’s engaging dialogical structure. Discus- sion, some of it polemical, is replaced by the rather pompous or simply insubstantial dictates of a teacher-tyrant. Benedetti refers to the knot of difficulties involved in these variations in his foreword, as he has done elsewhere (1990); Sharon Carnicke has also teased it out in her book, keeping its Russian side well in view (1998:71–91). The idea of “process” is vital to Stanislavski’s idea of theatre as work in which intuition and inspiration become knowable, tangible elements. An Actor’s Work set out to be a manual, possibly one of the most ambitious for the theatre ever written. But, in fact, it was always a philosophy of creativity and of its rigor, as well as of its imagination.

—Maria Shevtsova References Benedetti, Jean. 1990. “A History of Stanislavski in Translation.” New Theatre Quarterly 6, 23:266–78. Carnicke, Sharon. 1998. Stanislavsky in Focus. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her recent publications include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (coedited with Shomit Mitter; Routledge, 2005), Robert Wilson (Routledge, 2007), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (with Christopher Innes; Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (QuiEdit, 2009). She is the coeditor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction. By John Keefe and Simon Murray. London: Routledge, 2007; 230 pp. £65.00 cloth, £18.99 paper. Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader. Edited by John Keefe and Simon Murray. London: Routledge, 2007; 283 pp. £65.00 cloth, £21.99 paper. During the 1980s and 1990s in the UK, the term “physical theatre” began to be used by critics and academics to describe a diverse body of work including DV8, Complicite, David Glass, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, tanztheater, etc. When first used, “physical theatre” seemed Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 to capture often edgy, alternative approaches utilized to create non-main- stream, non–textually based performances. Published simultaneously as companion books, the Introduction (CI) and Reader (CR) volumes of Physical Theatres attempt to “map out that complex network of propositions, actions, events and dispositions which arguably constitute—and have constituted—the landscape of physical theatres and the physical in theatre” (CI, 1). The books are “an investigation and interrogation of the principles, tropes, and practices that make up physical theatres/the physical in theatres” (CI, 5). Murray and Keefe note how today’s use of the term “physical theatre fails to enjoy the same cultural and theatrical resonance it had in the 1980s” (CI, 2). In his commissioned essay, Franc Chamberlain explains how the term began to exhaust its usefulness as an increasing “breadth of work covered” by the term expanded exponentially (CR, 120). Whether the term has exhausted its usefulness or not, so embedded has “physical theatre” become in the UK that it is part of a commonplace descriptive critical vocabulary, and many university/drama schools offer modules or complete programs in physical theatre. For Chamberlain, the institutionalization of physical theatre is a “sure sign that it’s reached a point of exhaustion” since “it no longer describes a movement of renewal in British theatre and performance, nor an innovative way of teaching or making performance, nor even a particularly useful critical term” (CR, 120). But given the importance of the phenomenon marked by use of the term “physical theatre,” especially in the UK, Murray and Keefe’s two volumes are a timely contribution as they attempt to wrestle with this slippery, problematic, awkward term and the phenomena it marks. Their two texts will no doubt become primary reading for the many modules in physical theatre offered in the UK and perhaps beyond. Murray and Keefe are sanguine about the problems they face in attempting to critically address the recent historical phenomenon of physical theatre. Their first choice is to emphasize the plurality and hybridity of the types of theatre/performance created and marked by this category—physical theatres. Rather than attempting to provide a fixed definition of “physical theatre,” they offer a “grounding premise: that ‘physical theatre’ as a term, idea or concept captures the aims of certain movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” that “con- front the continuing hegemony of a theatre defined by its literary and verbal dimensions” (CI, 6). Two of the most important observations Murray and Keefe point to are: the close relationship between devising and physical theatres; and the difference between the work of the actor as a collaborator/creator and the more traditional view of the actor in textually based theatre as an interpreter. Their second choice—to address the “physical in theatre”—is guided by an obvious truism: that all theatre/performance cannot but be physical. While in the abstract this second choice seems wise, and while I admire the ambition of their project, this decision creates a problem. Addressing the “physical in theatre” expands the scope of the volumes to cover not only the immediate historical past since the 1980s, but virtually all of Western theatre history. At times the authors attempt to accomplish too much. Sharing virtually the same “Introduction,” both books are organized into six main chapters (Critical Introduction) or sections (Critical Reader). The strength of the Critical Introduction lies in those chapters or sections of chapters that focus on the work of specific practitioners and/or

provides sufficient examples of work practices that ground their discussion of various aspects and Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 facets of physical theatre making. Chapter 1, “Genesis, Contexts, Namings,” begins with important discussions of the context and naming of “physical theatre”—where/how the term has been used, the relationship of physical theatres to processes of devising and mime. While devising has received considerable historical and critical attention of late, Murray and Keefe provide an important reminder of just how important a role practitioners of mime have played in inspiring new ways of approaching the physical in performance, both in terms of training for and making performance. The remainder of the chapter provides a brief overview of several critical theories—semiotics/kinesics, phenomenology, cultural materialism, feminisms, and reception theory—and how each illuminates aspects of physical theatre or the physical in theatre. While there is no doubt that these lenses can be helpful in understanding the cultural, philosophical, and sociological rise of physical theatres, the use of these theories teases out more questions than they answer. The section on phenomenology is marred by an outdated view of this branch of philosophy. Phenomenology is criticized for “its attempt to keep internal experience ‘pure’ and free of the social blemishes of language and experience” (CI, 26). Support for their criticism rests with Eagleton’s 1983 criticism of phenomenology as resting on “intuiting the universal essence” (26). These reductive views of phenomenology do not take account of recent, nuanced phenomenological methods that take gender, race, etc., into consideration (see Leder 1990; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). There need be no contradiction today between cultural materialist or ideologically sensitive consideration of context(s) and carefully examined phenomenological analyses of issues of embodiment and/or performance practices. Chapter 2 surveys the “Roots: Routes” that set the context for the physical theatres of the 1980s and beyond. Chapter 3, “Contemporary Practices,” and chapter 4, “Preparation and Training,” are written as a series of short case studies of key practitioners. Chapters 3 and 4 in particular are the most specific, informative, and insightful. They provide a wide-ranging set of examples that constitute both the contemporary practices of physical theatres and delineate how one prepares and trains to perform in physical theatres. The eight very short case-studies of chapter 3 are helpful in that each allows discussion of specific examples of physical theatre or the physical in theatre. The first four focus on the contemporary dance theatre of Pina Bausch, Lloyd Newson (DV8), Liz Aggiss, and Jerome Bel, while the final four focus on the work of those who physicalize narrative in a variety of ways—Ariane Mnouchkine, Complicite, Goat Island, and Dario Fo. The case studies in chapter 4 include the work of Lev Dodin, Eugenio Barba, Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Monika Pagneux, Philippe Gaulier, Joan Littlewood, and Étienne Decroux. Chapter 5, “Physicality and the Word,” and chapter 6, “Bodies and Cultures,” are less successful. In chapter 5 the authors argue the rather obvious point that what is necessary in word-based theatre is to achieve an accomplished state of “articulate stillness” (CI, 170). Their discussion points to key issues and examples, but never seems to land in a way that might point to potential solutions to the question of “how”—potential solutions to achieving a fully embodied, articulate stillness in performing, for example, the “silent scream.” Although the authors state that it is beyond the scope of their study to include an analysis of how non-Western theatres address the question of the physical, they make a gesture toward addressing “intercultural” and “intracultural” theatre in chapter 6, “Bodies and Cultures.” The examples and analysis here take up some of the obvious problems and examples that have been rehearsed and re-rehearsed in various debates about interculturalism and postcolonial discourse. The discussions of Meyerhold and Artaud are useful because of their particularity, but the contemporary examples are so brief that they do not provide sufficient information to be useful to the issues at stake raised by the authors. The Critical Reader shares both the prospects and problems of the Critical Introduction. Murray and Keefe’s commissioning of six new essays is the bright, and often wonderful part of the Reader. Phelim McDermott’s “Physical Theatre and Text” is a delightfully wry provocation. He begins the essay with the following: “Imagine a sign with ‘physical theatre’ written on it. It’s Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 in the middle of the stage. It’s pointing offstage left. There are some performers underneath the sign talking about it...” (201). McDermott’s simple statement—“The dream is not just of a physical theatre but of an embodied theatre that combines the body, the imagination, the emotions and the voice” (204)—summarizes the aspirations of many theatre makers whether identified with physical theatre or not. The other commissioned essays by McGaw, Pitches, Chamberlain, Marshall, and Williams offer a set of alternative readings of various aspects of physical theatres that keep the hybrid and diverse views of the subject open to future debate. While I admire these new essays and enjoyed following each author’s argument, I have problems with some of the editorial choices made in A Critical Reader as a whole. The breadth and scope opened up by examining “the physical in theatre” alongside “physical theatres” means that the editors have selected to include a very wide array of historically and critically variable materials. In making so many selections, they have severely edited and/or cut many of the original essays. In contrast to the six commissioned essays where the reader can follow a full argument by a specific voice, in the remainder of the volume we are left to read fragments rather than full arguments. Let me take one essay to illustrate the highly problematic type of severe editing that has taken place, and is, unfortunately, becoming the norm in certain edited collections of essays being published by Routledge and other presses, and being used for teaching in many UK modules. Ana Sanchez-Colberg’s “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre,” was published in Performance Research in 1996. In its original it was 17 pages (double columns) with 5 black-and-white photographs. In the edited version it is 5 pages, with no illustrations specific to the essay, and includes only 7 of the original 11 bibliographical references. If becoming a “critical reader” is the intention of this and other “readers,” is the best strategy to provide (student) readers with extremely short, almost crude “sound-bite” size edits of full arguments? Should not the reader rather encounter an argument in its entirety in order to understand how a particular author has constructed an argument, rather than having volume editors make these choices? In spite of the limitations and questions raised here, these companion volumes are important and helpful beginning points for reflecting upon and remaking contemporary performance practices.

—Phillip Zarrilli References Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanchez-Colberg, Ana. 1996. “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre.” Performance Research 1, 2:40–56.

Phillip Zarrilli is a director, actor, teacher, and writer. He is the author of Psychophysical Acting (Routledge, 2009), and is Professor of Performance Practice within the Drama Department, Exeter University, UK.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 Skills for Actors: Body Language Skills. Produced by First Light Video Publishing, 2008; 47 minutes. $99.00 (DVD). A Moving Presence: Ruth Zaporah and Action Theater. Directed by Kent De Spain. Insight-Media, 2009; 69 minutes. $65.00 (DVD). Are acting instructional DVDs completely bizarre? For those who have never enrolled in an acting class, perhaps acting instruction makes as much sense in DVD format as yoga instruction, do-it-yourself home repair, or cooking lessons. For trained students of acting, however, the DVD medium may appear nonsensical since the television screen fails to transmit the somatic specificities of an acting classroom, such as the interpersonal energy produced by live bodies. Yet, one could apply this same comparative logic to the numerous books published every year on the art of acting. Does The Actor’s Art and Craft, by William Esper and Damon DiMarco (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), truthfully convey the week-by-week progression of Sanford Meisner’s training program if you can read the book in roughly two hours? Can Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, even with its guide to physical exercises, help an actor reproduce the boot camp of the theatre laboratory? Regardless of their ability to transmit embodied knowledge to students of acting, acting manuals in book form serve the purpose of translating a physical practice into discursive form. In this form, the art of acting becomes packaged for use in an academic classroom but, through that act of translation, it loses its relation to the body, which, arguably, is the art’s most complex dimension. Acting DVDs retain this relation, despite the digital reproduction of the body on the screen. Thus, while acting instructional DVDs produce a low-grade alienation effect because of the present absence of live class- mates and an instructor, an effect that one might accurately term bizarre, the DVD medium allows for the possibility of reproducing an acting lesson that emphasizes the embodied component of stage acting and offers easy-to-follow, repeatable exercises for students with or without prior acting experience. Two recently released acting DVDs showcase some of the positive and negative aspects of this medium. Body Language Skills belongs to a series, entitled “Skills for Actors: Master Classes in the Media Arts,” produced by First Light Video Publishing. This 47 minute instructional video guides viewers through a series of body language exercises intended to help performers to develop character types and to communicate more effectively with gesture and movement. Choreographer and body language specialist Patti Columbo acts as the lesson instructor for three on-screen actors and, by extension, for the video’s spectator(s). The structure of the video lesson loosely resembles the structure of a live class. Columbo and an actor run through a simple upper and lower body warm-up before launching into the meat of the lesson, which deals with characterization. After a brief introductory exercise consisting of little more than toe-touching and light stretching, the actors work to develop specific characters from the outside in, i.e., by constructing the semblance of drunkenness, arrogance, frustration, timidity, exhaustion, fear, and pensiveness through the manipulation of their postures and precision of their gestures. The lesson culminates in a section on “Situational Exercises” where Columbo and her actors analyze the body language dimension of speaking at a podium (public speaking), auditioning (acting for stage, film, or television), and casual social environments (flirting). It is in this section that the intended audience of the DVD broadens from actors to students of public speaking, but also to any person seeking to increase his or her confidence in social situations. Whereas Body Language Skills presents one slice of the actor’s craft in a no-nonsense, expos- itory manner, A Moving Presence: Ruth Zaporah and Action Theater offers something completely Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 different by welcoming viewers into the Synergia Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a montage of footage collected during one of Zaporah’s intensive workshops. Roughly one hour in length, the short film showcases Zaporah’s process for building actors’ skills in the art of improvisation by way of her unique system that develops acute bodily and spatial awareness. The director intersperses interviews featuring Zaporah and workshop attendees with footage of in-class activities. These activities aim at retuning the body’s awareness to the exigencies of improvisation’s temporal dimension: each passing moment. “The training,” Zaporah tells us, “dismantles habitual ways that we process information,” which, for the most part, means dismantling the logic of theatrical performance constructed from text and linear narrative. Without text and story to guide the performers, impulsive movement and abstract sound are the primary building blocks for workshop attendees to push beyond their personal boundaries and refine their technique while also collaborating with others. In one scene, for example, Zaporah produces sporadic noises with her mouth and instructs the group to respond kinesthetically. Only moving when they hear sound, the students synchronize their bodies to the external stimuli and learn to compose scenes through movement as opposed to spoken language. In another scene, two students speak simultaneously and receive instruction to continue speaking while also repeating key phrases picked up from each other’s stream-of-consciousness mono- logues. As in the first exercise, the performers focus less on logical linguistic construction and more on the clash of simultaneous speech, which produces sound that the body can respond to, thereby propelling each actor into dynamic scenarios with other bodies. Zaporah tells us that her system does not eliminate narrative completely from the performers’ palettes, but rather mixes what she calls the “urban” with the “jungle.” The former is the space ordered and controlled by conceptual, language-based thinking and the latter is the more incoherent and wormhole-ridden space produced by the body’s improvised movements. In addition to the difference in content between the two DVDs, the method of presentation makes a significant impression. The shortcomings ofBody Language Skills arise from the stylistic elements of the video and from the video medium itself. The single-camera set-up, the bland television studio in which the lesson unfolds, and the business-like formality of Columbo result in a stiff, demonstrative presentation of skills rather than a pedagogical experience capable of offering the video’s viewer a range of exercises to deploy after switching the DVD player off. Instead of presenting acting as an artistic practice, this DVD treats it as a skill set that anybody can master through the repetition of simple exercises. In contrast, the documentary footage of A Moving Presence presents a friendlier face to Zaporah’s training process. The eclectic assortment of workshop participants and the feedback from those participants in the film’s interviews offer at least a semblance of the dialogic mode that performance involves. Zaporah’s improvisational technique may be rigorous, but it comes with a seasoned professional, Zaporah herself, whose pedagogical methodology trumps Columbo’s embodied Power Point presentation of body language skills. That said, instructors of classes such as “Acting for Non-Majors” or any course that brings together a number of students from different academic disciplines may findBody Language Skills helpful in drawing students’ attention to the simple fact that body language supplements oral communication. A Moving Presence occasionally reads as nothing more than a smart marketing tool for Action Theater, which, according to its website (http://www.actiontheater.com/), raises revenue through workshops such as the one presented in this film and the sale of books and DVDs. Overall, however, the dry repetition of exercises in the former treats body language as a facile compilation of tricks, whereas the range of group and partner exercises in the latter offers a more flexible program capable of introducing actors to a process-based mode of honing skills. A Moving Presence provides something that books on acting do not: instead of viewing one method of acting through an idealized viewpoint created by a master of that method, we see a diverse set of bodies and personality types struggling to break free of acquired habits. Books may

contain images of actors involved in the learning process, but the moving images in this film Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 relay the dynamics of the training, the sweat, the failure, and the modest breakthroughs that occur during an intensive workshop. As such, the DVD creates a richer experience more closely approximating the in-class environment than any acting manual. While nobody will find it easy to transfer Zaporah’s skills to the field of professional auditions, Action Theater’s DVD is a more innovative instructional apparatus than Body Language Skills and could function as a launching pad for actors seeking to study improvisation or for teachers of ensemble-based work.

—William Daddario

William Daddario is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on Baroque Venetian theatre historiog- raphy and critical theory. He trained as an actor at New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing.

Heart of Practice: Within the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. By Thomas Richards. London: Routledge, 2008; 216 pp. $99.00 cloth, $33.95 paper. The title of this latest book from Thomas Richards is missing its definite article. Why not “The” Heart of Practice? What happened to “The?” The omission, far from accidental, makes a wonder of the missing function of “the” and points to the difficulty of identifying, summarizing, designating, or otherwise pointing at the object that constitutes both the book and the daily practice of the “doers” at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. This book is hardly likely to reveal the secrets at the heart of the practice at the Workcenter, though it is certainly forthright in detail- ing both history and practice. It at once answers and denies satisfactory responses to questions of appropriation, of hermetic remove, and of the guru syndrome that have trailed Grotowski’s legacy. And it most definitely resists the chronic desire, especially among academics, to identify the practices of the Work- center in terms other than the work itself. What, one might still ask, are these strange locutions: organicity, verticality, Art as vehicle, doers, inner action, induction? The academic job, it often appears, is to translate, reify, define, identify, dismember, analyze, or critique, perhaps in the name of “doing justice,” but always presumably in service to greater understanding. What does one do with work that resists the very terms by which one understands “understanding?” In outline, the book is clear, apparently simple. Three interlocutors ask questions of Rich- ards, who responds in eloquent detail. Each is situated at a distinct point in the history of the Workcenter activity and each has a distinctive point of departure. The first, with largely historical reference to Richards’s work with Grotowski, is “The Edge-Point of Performance,” from Lisa Wolford (Lisa Wolford Wylam). This is a slight variation on her 1995 piece origi- nally published in The Grotowski Sourcebook, which she coedited with Richard Schechner (1997). The second, “As an Unbroken Stream” with Tatiana Motta Lima, took place at Pontedera in 1999 and was part of Richards’s doctoral dissertation for the University of Paris VIII in 2001. This deals largely with questions of training processes. The third section, “In the Territory of Something Third” comes from Kris Salata, with questions about the more recent public showings from the Workcenter. Whatever the distinctive elements of each section, the book as a whole resists sharp distinctions between history, training, and reception. Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 Wolford Wylam, Motta, and Salata were all part of the documentation team that followed the “Tracing Roads Across” project. Wolford Wylam has been something like the advance guard for American scholarship on Grotowski and the Workcenter and to a significant degree has helped set the agenda for study of the work. At one time a part of Grotowski’s work at U.C. Irvine, Wolford gives Richards the opportunity to provide something close to an historical context for the development of work between Grotowski’s Objective Drama at Irvine and that of Richards at the Workcenter. Implicit here is a concern with what happens when the master, the name that in some sense defines the practice, dies. If the work does not atrophy, how does it carry on and still retain the name? Richards answers his interlocutors with a kind of radical specificity that resists a useful handle for encompassing the work or distinguishing the differences between Grotowski present and Grotowski absent. Such specificity tends to preclude the well-developed habits of academic research and transmission. The difficulty does not keep scholars from trying. Taking up the question of the relationship between a teacher and an actor, Tatiana Motta Lima asks if there is a way to create the conditions for creative work, implicitly asking for a portable principle. Richards neatly deflects the question to focus on the position of a “doer” who knows and does not know, and who relinquishes not just technique but the projection of knowledge before practice. In this section, the understandable wish for a teacher to know or to have a method, sanctioned by “Grotowski,” keeps reappearing. In responding to and in a sense denying that wish, Richards offers another sense for “inner action” by aligning it with “heart” and eventually with a kind of anamnesis, Plato’s “un-forgetting”: “a kind of memory that isn’t necessarily a memory of some event from your life” (102). Neither an organ nor a metaphor, heart is the material core of ongoing “continuity” of presence: both an organ and an activity, “It’s a part that can feel a special longing, as if it remembers something that it lacks. It has a desire for plenitude. First, it’s necessary to find how this part in you can be uncovered, and how it can be given primary place, in order that some kind of ascension can unfold” (64–65). What kind of discourse is this? Quasi-religious? Mystical? Metaphysical? A-historical? All these (and more) have been leveled at both Grotowski and his followers. Here too is the Gnostic element of the practice, traced by Antonio Attisani in TDR’s Grotowski issue (2008:75–106). Both the work and the writing on the work face “Gnostic” difficulties: what can be known about it; what can be said? Attisani in the TDR issue points out the important distinction between doctrinal and historical Gnosis and “experimental phenomenology characteristic of certain other authors” (79). The experimental or experiential (Gnosis) practices of knowledge remain disturbingly open. What, in fact, can be known of the practice much less transferred? Motta Lima puts it directly: “What is the relation that one should establish with the discursive mind when it wants to control the work?” (67). Her question implicitly asks for more investigation into the conditions for knowing that are embedded culturally, historically, politically, and personally and it is exactly those conditions that Workcenter practice resists through radical, material specificity, through ongoing choice and change. What to do with the mind? Again Richards deflects: “What leads to a creative discovery is often a question. It’s not ‘This is the technique!’ but rather, ‘Does this help or not?’ A question is not a dogma, and it permits us to answer and judge for ourselves” (68). Even discourse—the “open” form of language—betrays a longing for a stable object, but practice at the Workcenter is fully committed to the paradoxical position of repeated and repeatable precision in the openness of a present, the openness of a question. No wonder, then, that the moment-to-moment reading of the three interviews makes perfect sense until one tries to summarize them. After two or three times reading through the book and failing to find an adequate description or summary, it occurred to me that my difficulty was not with the book but with my reading; that the book itself was resisting my reading habits. As an academic, what am I reading for? Information? History? Gossip? Method? At least as likely, I am reading for encapsu- Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 lation, summation, identification, and reduction to apt, insightful, portable morsels to carry in my basket: ideas. Certainly it is possible to historicize Grotowski and the Workcenter practice. The idea of “inner action” can be traced back to Stanislavsky, if not before. Yet the substance of such action resists discursive language if only because it is action. Not just any action whatsoever, but defined, controlled, disciplined, and rigorous. And not for the sake of exhaustion, but for discovery and full presence. Richards clearly describes the physical condition of such presence as “detached plenitude,” akin to diving into temperate water or falling asleep: “You are still conscious and just before you fall asleep a sort of letting go happens” (69). Staying awake in that state is the challenge of the work. Such a paradoxical position is implied again in the dialogue with Kris Salata, “In the Territory of Something Third.” This section deals initially with Salata’s reactions to witnessing part of “Tracing Roads Across” and returns to personal history and Richards’s dual paternity— his father, Lloyd Richards, and Grotowski. The questions here tend to belong to the context of the public showing and experiencing of the work rather than training. Salata articulates his own sense of the limits of language in his experience of the piece called Action: “These ideas of Grotowski or time are merely a mode of thinking or speaking, and they aren’t even close to describing what was taking place there” (129). Here is the crux of the challenge in writing about the Workcenter practice: ideas, words, language, comprise one mode, which is communicative, social; “what was taking place” com- prises another, which is present, material, specific, even historical, but defies the capacities of language to describe. The difference between those “modalities” has long subjected both Grotowski and now the Workcenter to suspicion, skepticism, even hostility, exiled from the name of theatre and even of performance. Recognizing the difference between their practice and the language of theatre and performance, Grotowski and Richards have fostered the distinctions with a distinctive vocabulary: participants are “doers,” not actors or performers; the pieces are “actions,” not ritual, or trance, or performance in the sense of being done for others. No pretending is involved, only “doing,” sometimes in the presence of witnesses; most times not. Stanislavsky too wrote of truth in performance. And just as Grotowski recognized the quality in Lloyd Richards’s realistic work, (125) the common practice is the “uncommon quality” that defies the notion of truth as an object, an idea, a discourse, an ideal, or a form. It was Grotowski who pointed out to Richards that the capacity for truth has no formal boundaries and can appear in “experimental theatre [...] on a Broadway stage [...] in your house working alone” (125). Such a sense of truth, however, is “Gnostic” in that language can always only point away from it or present it through a rear-view mirror, with awkward formulations, obscure vocabularies. Truth in doing is not portable, but rather, present. As a present event, it may be legitimately subject to complaints that it is incommunicable, asocial, a-historical, or even mystical. Yet in those moments of its appearance, it “expands” and becomes “no longer just a personal truth” precisely because it is not a datum but a presence, or more precisely, the haeccity, the “thisness,” of human presence: material, temporal, sonorous, sensory, communal, and conscious. The resistance of the Workcenter practice to an idea of practice explains the title of this book. Absent “The,” Heart of Practice opens on to the living, ongoing engagement, never perfected in an idea, never completed in a title, never designated by an object, never an homage to the past. The beat goes on. This is not a book likely to convince a skeptic if only because it makes no overt argument for the work. As a verbal corollary to the Workcenter activity, however, it combines a compelling specificity with an absence of generality. It makes no predictions about what is next for the Workcenter, though there are hints that it may continue to reach out beyond Pontedera. The book articulates a dimension of performance available anywhere, but concen- trated in the distilled and rigorous practices of Grotowski who, now with Richards, continues to resist deadly formulae and to demand the dedication of a living heart.

—Alice Rayner Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 References Attisani, Antonio. 2008. “Acta Gnosis,” trans. Elisa Poggelli. TDR 52, 2 (T198):75–106. Schechner, Richard, and Lisa Wolford, eds. 1997. The Grotowski Sourcebook. London: Routledge.

Alice Rayner is Professor in the Drama Department at Stanford University where she teaches graduate courses in critical theory and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature, Shakespeare, stage on film, and humanities. Books includeComic Persuasion (University of California Press, 1987), To Act To Do To Perform (University of Michigan Press, 1994), and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (University Of Minnesota Press, 2006). Interest in Grotowski’s practice goes back to her research in the 1970s on acting and shamanism.

Gus´larz i eremita [The Guslar and the Hermit]. By Grzegorz Ziółkowski. Wrocław: Instytut Grotowskiego [The Grotowski Institute], 2007; 475 pp. €10.00. Much has been written and many brilliant (and not so brilliant) things have been said about Jerzy Grotowski since the 1960s, however, a decade after his death, theatre scholarship has yet to account for the full impact of his legacy. While “poor theatre,” “holy actor,” and “total act” made it into the theatre’s vernacular, few can recognize much less relate notions such as “theatre of sources,” “objective drama,” or “art as vehicle” to contemporary practice, or understand Grotowski’s post-presentational work (1969–1999) as nascent stages of ongoing research in and through performance. Charmed or puzzled, the generation directly influenced by Grotowski often proved unable to get past the power of his myth or apprehend his uncompromising and tireless investigation. Therefore, paradoxically, understanding Grotowski’s project as a whole may become a task passed on to those who have not seen the work, or at any rate to those able to demythologize Grotowski without degrading him. Grotowski himself would respect a thought that embraces his vocabulary without being crippled by it, one capable of “a high-level betrayal” towards him.1 Among the recent wave of “kiss-and-tell” testimonials published on Grotowski in Poland by some of those formerly close to him,2 Gus´larz i eremita by Grzegorz Ziółkowski seems at first an exception. The author belongs to a younger generation of Polish scholars and artists who, despite never having worked with Grotowski or met him personally, publicly position them- selves as bearers of his legacy, and consequently disseminate their own expropriation of the man and his project. “Can this man be someone close to us? To those who never saw him and never

1. “A true disciple betrays his master on a high level. [...] A low betrayal is spitting at someone with whom we were close. [...] But there exists a high betrayal [...w]hen it emerges from faithfulness to one’s own path” (Grotowski 2008:38–39). 2. To give just a couple of examples: “[Grotowski] was a narcissist, with a huge desire for recognition, admiration, and fame, a narcissist hungry for ruling the souls” (Dobrowolski 2005); “The great lesson that Grotowski taught me in his last period of life was that views and ideals have no meaning in the relationships with people, and that

what counts are sympathies, antipathies, and business coming from them. I needed many years to begin to finally Books understand it” (Osiński 2008).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 received his charm? Who never worshipped him like a god? Who never were nor are his pupils?” asks Ziółkowski in the introduction by quoting Grotowski’s remarks on behalf of his own adopted artistic father, Juliusz Osterwa (9). Grotowski’s answer was affirmative both in verbal declaration and in his work, which, like Osterwa’s, functioned as a laboratory. Therefore the question is not “if” Grotowski can be close to us, but rather, “how”? What does it mean for us today to be close to Grotowski? What can we learn about him from the work continued at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards? Ziółkowski wrote and published Gus´larz i eremita during his tenure as the director of the Grotowski Institute (2005–2009).3 One of the pivotal publications foregrounding the UNESCO Year of Grotowski in Poland, Gus´larz i eremita deals with Grotowski’s last project based in Poland, Theatre of Sources, and the Objective Drama and Art as vehicle projects based in Irvine, California, and in Pontedera, Italy, respectively. Lacking direct experience with Grotowski, Ziółkowski reaches out to a vast assortment of Polish and international material, from well-known to obscure, with a particular focus on two pivotal lecture series given by Grotowski: at La Sapienza, the University of Rome (1982) and at the Collège de France (1997–1998), of which the former remains published only in fragments in Italian, and the latter exclusively as an audio recording in French (per Grotowski’s wish). Due to limited access to these and other sources, and more importantly, due to the fact that the period in focus is among the least known, Gus´larz i eremita has the potential to have a formidable influence on Grotowski scholarship in Poland, and thus requires careful analysis. Impressive archival research and laboriously collected references make Gus´larz i eremita one of the most complete scholarly resources on Grotowski. But, as much as one can admire the scope of the research, one can become disappointed by an often meager and sometimes ques- tionable outcome. Close comparative reading of the source materials in search of clues leads Ziółkowski to trace changes in phraseology in Grotowski’s consecutive edits of his texts only to contemplate, for example, the replacement of the phrase “my job” with “my obligation” (186). Similarly, Ziółkowski might go after a historical claim, arguing for several pages over a date, as he does regarding the actual beginning of Theatre of Sources (50–55). However, even if he does split hairs on some topics, Ziółkowski’s pedantry pays off particularly well in the more than 100-page appendix, which contains a detailed calendar of Grotowski’s activities (1982–1999) and a thorough bibliography of “published authorized and unauthorized materials of Jerzy Grotowski,” in English, French, Italian, and Polish. Nevertheless this investment in detail distracts the author from forming a larger independent argument—assuming that getting close to Grotowski can be accomplished with the magnifying lens of a philologist. Even if Ziółkowski does explain the etymology and provenance of Grotowski’s terminology and the reader becomes more equipped in pondering about “Art as vehicle” or “verticality,” the majority of the scholarly effort in the book goes into diminutive arguments rather than a dialogue with Grotowski from the independent perspective of a contemporary theatre scholar. Repeating Grotowski’s terms in the context of historical polemics, Ziółkowski fails to bring Grotowski closer to those who never “received his charm.” In a few occasions where Ziółkowski seems to promise a deeper perspective, he puts it in the language of an affected mystic rather than a diligent scholar: I perceive the lifework of Jerzy Grotowski in its nascent stages [...] as an attempt to turn into action the nostalgia for the luminous purity to which, after birth (read: embodiment), we no longer have access, because we are separated from it by the veil of illusion and forgetting. (23) Passages of personal musings may perhaps be acceptable in a book that aims to collect and order historical, biographical, and bibliographical material in a scholarly, objective fashion—which I

3. Formerly known as the Centre of Studies on Jerzy Grotowski’s Work and of the Cultural and Theatrical Research, the organization eventually inherited the Laboratory Theatre’s venue in Wrocław after Grotowski’s departure in 1982. There is no institutional continuity between the Laboratory Theatre and the Centre/Institute. Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 wish were the case, because as such it would be worthy of translation. However, in the introduction, Ziółkowski also proclaims: “Through my work on this book I tried to understand the nature of the experience that came upon me during the presentation of Action by the Work- center of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards on February 18, 1997” (24). If this indeed was his goal, then Ziółkowski-the-scholar in the end did not enlighten Ziółkowski-the-charmed- witness. In the book’s five-page epilogue, Ziółkowski finally lays his cards on the table and reveals his criticism of the current work of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards with the transparent narcissism found in the Grotowski “kiss-and-tell” genre. Judg- mental rather than analytical, Ziółkowski attempts to delegitimize the work of Richards and Mario Biagini,4 accusing them of lacking artistic courage and failing to take on mature chal- lenges, insisting that Grotowski made a mistake choosing his heirs (353). This highly subjective and unsupported criticism comes as a surprise ending to the book that devotes most of its pages to painstaking debates about far less important subjects than Grotowski’s legacy as ongoing research. Instead, Ziółkowski makes an effort to put closure to Grotowski’s project—something perhaps wished for by many Grotowskians. Transparent and unfortunate, the epilogue provides an explanation for the book’s otherwise cryptic (and anonymous) opening citation: “Are we dogs to be licking the leftovers thrown away by others?” (9). And with that thought, this laborious but rather low-altitude scholarly effort lands hard in the mud, yet another “low betrayal” Grotowski would pass over in silence.

—Kris Salata References Dobrowolski, Jacek. 2005. “Wspomnienie o Grotowskim.” Res Pubica Nowa 3 (March). Grotowski, Jerzy. 2008. “Reply to Stanislavsky.” TDR 52, 2 (T198):38–39. Osin´ski, Zbigniew. 2008. “Meetings with Grotowski.” Didaskalia 87 (October).

Kris Salata is Associate Professor of Performance at the School of Theatre, Florida State University. He focuses his research on phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological aspects of theatre practice. He has published on the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, and on Jerzy Grotowski, most recently as co-guest editor of a special issue of TDR dedicated to Grotowski (52:2, T198).

Jerzy Grotowski. By James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta. London: Routledge, 2007; 208 pp. $28.95 paper, $90.00 cloth.

James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta’s Jerzy Grotowski is an introductory guide to the work of the Polish director. Intended for readers with little or no previous knowledge of Grotowski’s career, it places in a single slender volume a concise overview of Grotowski’s personal and professional biography, key texts, and approach to directing; and an introduction to practical approaches to that work as interpreted by Slowiak and Cuesta (artistic directors of New World Performance Laboratory). Slowiak and Cuesta’s decision to include their own acting exercises (developed from principles derived from years of tutelage under Grotowski) is at once the most controversial and refreshing aspect of the book. Books 4. Mario Biagini is the associate director of the Workcenter led by Richards.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 Slowiak and Cuesta do not come to this material casually. Cuesta worked closely with Grotowski in Theatre of Sources, and on the paratheatrical project “Vigil,” led by Jacek Zmysłowski. Both Cuesta and Slowiak were “Technical Specialists” in Objective Drama, and contributed to Grotowski’s early work on Art as vehicle in Pontedera, Italy. Direct experience yields telling details that lift their narrative out of the realm of the dry and impersonal, offering context without devolving into mere anecdote. For instance, the book’s opening depiction of Grotowski’s appearance at the International Theatre Festival of Manizales, Colombia, in 1970—where he first publicly announced his decision to leave theatre behind —immediately de-centers Anglophone narratives of Grotowski’s radical shift to paratheatre (which tend to focus on Grotowski’s later appearance at New York’s Town Hall). It owes much to Cuesta’s perspective as a Colombian actor whose career has taken him to Poland, France (where he worked with Peter Brook), and the less exotic Ohio (home of New World Per- formance Laboratory). The standard reference works for Grotowski’s personal and professional biography (Osin´ski 1986; Kumiega 1985) are out of date, having been published prior to the cataclysmic events of martial law that led to Grotowski’s departure from Poland in 1982, and consequently prior to his Objective Drama and Art as vehicle research. Grotowski’s own Towards a Poor Theatre can be daunting in its heterodoxy and soaring rhetoric, while The Grotowski Sourcebook is intimidating in its immensity. Jerzy Grotowski offers a skeleton key, summarizing key ideas of Grotowski (“impulse,” “contact,” “the score,” “associations,” “poor theatre,” “the holy actor”), and pointing the interested new reader to Towards a Poor Theatre and/or the Sourcebook, without attempting to replace them. Like other books in the Performance Practitioner series, Jerzy Grotowski is divided into four main sections addressing personal biography, explanation of key writings, description of significant productions, and reproduction of practical exercises. In the first, “Biography and Context,” the authors accomplish the difficult task of providing a concise and accurate narrative, while offering a glimpse of the man behind the many masks of Jerzy Grotowski. If their account tends to smooth over contradictions rather than exploring them, that is appropriate to an introductory synthesis (as opposed to a scholarly critique). The texts analyzed in “Grotowski’s Key Writings” are well-chosen, and their explication clear. The little-anthologized “Skara Speech” (drawn from Grotowski’s remarks to participants in an acting workshop in Skara, Sweden, in 1966) provides an excellent primer on his approach to acting during Theatre of Productions. Oddly, the section on “Grotowski as Director” is the least satisfying. Here, the book’s pragmatic “how-to” tone falls short. Slowiak and Cuesta’s analysis of Grotowski’s approach to the separate elements of text, space, costumes and props, actors’ facial mask and body, and soundscape in his landmark production Akropolis (premiere 1962) are adequate, but describing the parts of an elephant does not convey the essence of the living thing. Their accounts of paratheatre and Theatre of Sources are short, simple, and accurate, if limited by space. Grotowski’s research on Art as vehicle is also given short shrift in this volume. The unstated inference is that Grotowski’s legacy as a director still rests primarily on his theatre work: or at least that the intended readership of the book will chiefly be interested in his Theatre of Productions work. Another implied premise of Jerzy Grotowski is that theatre artists can adapt what they find in the book to their own search: adapting Grotowski’s model—daunting as it is—rather than engaging in futile efforts of emulation. Consequently, Jerzy Grotowski has been criticized in the pages of TDR for “includ[ing] various exercises and activities representative of the authors’ own independent practice alongside those actually derived from Grotowski, a blurring of boundaries certain to confuse novice students” (Wolford Wylam 2008:128). Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 The approach is potentially confusing. But is the blurring of boundaries necessarily bad? One need only look at Grotowski’s adaptation of training techniques from jingju (Beijing Opera), Delsartre, or Stanislavsky to realize that he was no purist, except as far as the inner logic of his own trajectory of work was concerned. The intention of Slowiak and Cuesta, it appears, is not to inculcate novices into the emulation of Grotowski’s work, but rather to inspire and liberate them in the creation of their own. This was the promise implicit in the 1968 publication of Towards a Poor Theatre, and although Grotowski was frustrated by the legions of Grotowski imitators who sprang up in its wake, the book also inspired many of the most original theatremakers of the 1970s, including many whose work bore little apparent resemblance to the Polish model. In this respect, the inclusion of New World Performance Laboratory’s adaptation of “Grotowski” exercises is not only valid but the most honest approach they could have chosen. If there is a problem here, it may be one of marketing, and perhaps the book should be titled Jerzy Grotowski (and New World Performance Laboratory). As it is, the authors clearly state that: “Some of the exercises described here come directly from our years of work with Grotowski, while other exercises grew out of our own work with actors around the world” (119). (Indeed, most of the exercises fall into the second category). The inclusion of their own work furnishes one example of adapting the principles of Grotowski’s work to the needs of one’s own. That is, after all, one purpose of a handbook: not to encourage the look back in awe, but the plunge forward into one’s own work. As Grotowski said of the great writers whose works he confronted by staging them: In facing up to Calderon or Slowacki it was like the struggle between Jacob and the angel: “Reveal unto me your secret!” 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, Calderon, then I can understand my own. (1987:30)

Jerzy Grotowski constitutes an invitation to a wrestling match with one of the most enigmatic and influential theatremakers of the 20th century.

—Kermit Dunkelberg References Grotowski, Jerzy. 1987. “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un [You are someone’s son].”TDR 31, 3 (T115):30–41. Kumiega, Jennifer. 1985. The Theatre of Grotowski. London: Methuen. Osin´ski, Zbigniew. 1986. Grotowski and His Laboratory. Trans. and abridged by Lillian and Robert Findlay Vallee. New York: PAJ. Wolford Wylam, Lisa. 2008. “Living Tradition: Continuity of Research at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.” TDR 52, 2 (T198):126–49.

Kermit Dunkelberg is currently working on a book based on his PhD dissertation on Jerzy Grotowski and North American theatre (in Performance Studies from New York University). He is the cofounder (with Kim Mancuso) of Pilgrim Theatre Research and Performance Collaborative, now based in Massachusetts. Books

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