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Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski: Perennialism in Performance.

Conference Paper · June 2016

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ADSA 2016 Conference: Resilience, Revive, Restore, Reconnect

Brook and Grotowski: Perennialism in Performance

‘The greater ignorance of Modern Times, the deeper grows the darkness of the Middle Ages.’
Max Hasak, Leipzig 1913

In this paper I intend to firstly reconnect with Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, not to rehash

their well-documented professional lives but to highlight their connection with deeply

traditional theatre practices not only in development upon the work of Brecht, Stanislavski

and Artaud, but in sourcing ‘ancestral memory’ of their personal European heritage.

Secondly, to draw attention to a shared reverence as adherents to one of the principal spiritual

sages of the 20th century, George Gurdjieff. Lastly, to affirm Brook and Grotowski as

significant figures in the revolution of Australian performance in the 1970s.

‘The Empty Space’ by Peter Brook and ‘Towards a poor Theatre’ by Jerzy Grotowski, both

published in 1968, are widely recognized as the most influential books on theatre written in

the last 50 years. The influence of these seminal works has resonated for decades, becoming

as it were the theatre makers’ ‘organon’ – a call to arms for artists wishing to emancipate

themselves from what is perhaps conceived as the neurosis of naturalism and, as always

throughout history, the despotism of the salesman and the tyranny of deadly commercialism.

Until the emergence of Brook and Grotowski earlier 20th century theatre had been under the

sway of the Constantin Stanislavski and his Moscow Arts Theatre, and since WW2 the ‘Epic

Theatre’ of Bertolt Brecht and his Berliner Ensemble. By the mid-sixties the respective

concepts of ‘Naturalism,’ ‘Alienation,’ and ‘Epic Theatre’ had been thoroughly ploughed and

dissected by practitioners and academics alike. The Stanislavski-based system known as ‘The

Method,’ introduced by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler’ (The Freud and Jung of mid-century

American performance technique), affected everything from On The Waterfront to General

 2

Hospital.1 The methodologies specifically focus on character, emotional recall, action and

objective work gave actors the required observational practices for natural expression in

search of truth in initiation and response. These, however, conflicted with Brecht’s

perspective of discarding crude emotionalism, via the juxtaposition of forces within scenes, to

alienate the spectator from cheap sensation and initiate comprehension of themes on a deeper

level. However, this in no way contradicts Brook’s statement in ‘The Empty Space’: “What

Brecht introduced was the idea of the intelligent actor, capable of judging the value of his

contribution.”2

Strasberg and Adler had successfully migrated Stanislavski’s method from his Russian

origins making him seem thoroughly American, whereas what was received as the folkloric

Brechtian bleakness, however nuanced, could never really alienate itself from its Germanic

providence, and thus from commercial risk. American culture was strongly influenced by the

influx of liberal-minded Jewish émigrés, and particularly those who had fled Eastern Europe

and Russia in the 1930s and 1940s, eager to engage in the present moment of the American

Dream (however neurotic3) confronting the European horrors of authoritarian misrule and the

plight of proletarian victimhood through the very same lens. Even if this aspect is but a

partial rendering of the complete Brechtian oeuvre of a ‘socialist ideology’4 it clashed with

commercial enterprise, suffering a lack of box office appeal until the turn of the 21st century

when Berlin again became a cultural and performance hub, and the go to metropolis for

International Festival fare.

By the late 1960s Australia had remained largely untouched by the American school of

Method acting, with the notable exception of Hayes Gordon’s Meissner-influenced work at

1
General Hospital is the longest running American daytime soap opera. It premiered 1 st April 1963.
2 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon & Shuster 1996) 76
3 Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, described neurosis as “always an excuse for legitimate suffering.”
4
From 1975-2014 there was a Brecht Forum held at the New York Marxist School.
 3

the Ensemble in Sydney. We were thoroughly British in our established performance

enterprises; still in the thrall of ready-to-wear J.C Williamson imports from the West End. A

steady stream of washed-up stage and screen luminaries took one last spin around the block

by touring the colonies to maximize the last few squirts of their star power before the heading

off to the great Drury Lane in the sky. Locally, theatre consisted of small theatre companies

with repertoires of comedy, farce and Gilbert and Sullivan predominantly performed for the

purpose of social engagement. NIDA was still in its infancy as a globally recognized faculty

for the training of actors. As Katherine Brisbane noted in her platform paper ‘The Arts and

the Common Good’ quoting Colin Ballantine, Adelaide’s post war maven of theatre culture –

“There was an elocution teacher in every suburb.”

When ‘The Empty Space’ and ‘Towards Poor Theatre’ were published both Peter Brook and

Jerzy Grotowski were already celebrated directors, known for their innovative approach to

traditional theatre. The challenge, as they saw it, was not to eliminate tradition itself but

smash the meaningless shell in which it had been ‘mummified’:5 tradition devoid of life. The

very word ‘tradition as noted by Basarab Nicolescu in his essay ‘Peter Brook and

Traditional Thought’ derives from the Latin ‘Tradere’ meaning ‘to restore’ ‘to transmit’

“The actor searches vainly for the sound of the vanished tradition, and critic and
audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony.”6

Brook developed his practice on the heels of Brecht as much as Grotowski7 built upon the

foundations laid by Stanislavski. In essence these two men were two faces on the same coin:

both motivated to awaken the awareness of the actor as a protean being, full of wonder,

rigorously reimagining the human as a truthful presence. In this enterprise they shared a

5
Basarab Nicolescu, "Peter Brook and Traditional Thought." Peter Brook and Traditional Thought. Web. 17 Aug. 2015.
http://www.gurdjieff.org/nicolescu3.htm
6 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon & Shuster 1996)
7 Grotowski quote on Stanislavski
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common influence and experience, as sincere acolytes of the Armenian mystic and teacher

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. The impact of Gurdjieff and his teachings on theatre

practitioners and actors over the last half century has been severely neglected by academics

and critical analysis within the performing arts. This is what my paper is aiming, as a first

step, to readdress. While Brook is regarded as a pioneer adherent to Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way

teachings, both playwright, Sam Shepard, and actor, Bill Murray, are amongst other well-

known figures deeply involved in the Gurdjieff work. 8

While Brook is quite transparent about his relationship through the direct teachings from one

of Gurdjieff’s close pupils, Mme De Saltzmann, who co-authored the script for Brook’s film

‘Meeting With Remarkable Men.’9 Grotowski was far less forthcoming in acknowledging

Gurdjieff as a source of influence publicly, or even to his students who spent years with him.

Though Grotowski only became familiar with Gurdjieff after writing ‘Towards a Poor

Theatre’ he stated that he was: “struck by the similarities in the terms he used."10

During the course of their lives all three men initiated centres of research into the human

condition or in Grotowski’s case, a laboratory, from where they attempted to develop a richer

understanding of our spiritual, mental and physical capabilities, and more importantly his

relationship with the world and the living organisms which inhabit it. While Gurdjieff was

not specifically a theatre director working with actors, there is no question that the Prieuré

Chateau in Fontainebleau where he ran his Institute for Harmonious Development, was

perhaps as radically shocking in its transformative effect on people in the two years of its

operation (1922-24) as was Grotowski’s laboratory in Poland in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They

each applied non-linear techniques in training their respective students in physical, mental

8
Sam Shepard, Lie of the Mind.
9
George Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men
10 Sacred Theatre: Ralph Yarrow and Franc Chamberlain -" Scribd. Web. 26 Sept 2015.

<https://www.scribd.com/book/19159979/Sacred-Theatre. 182
 5

and spiritual exercises which to a casual observer and even to those who participated seemed

at times pointless, like digging giant holes for no apparent reason or exposing themselves to

extreme physical exertion. As Carol M Cusack writes in her essay: An Enlightened Life in

Text and Image: G. I. Gurdjieff‟s Meetings With Remarkable Men (1963) and Peter Brook’s

Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979)’ “In the Gurdjieffian universe everything is alive

and seeks to feed itself to achieve a higher level of being” which is exactly what Brook and

Grotowski were attempting to do with their respective actors. These demanding physical

trials supervised by Gurdjieff were interwoven with disciplined dance movements to piano

music scored by Russian musician and aristocrat, Thomas De Hartmann, a great friend of

painter, Wassily ‘The Spiritual in Art’ Kandinsky. De Hartmann and his wife Olga fled St

Petersburg with Gurdjieff after the Bolshevik revolution and lived at the Prieuré where De

Hartmann and Gurdjieff composed music based on ancient hymns from the Orient and Slavic

folk songs.

It should be noted that Gurdjieff is a significant support character in the great cultural

blossoming of Hemmingway’s Paris during the 1920’s. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap

publishers of The Little Review who were the first to publish James Joyce Ulysses were

members of Gurdjieff’s ‘Ladies of the Rope’11 –a group of women who formed around him

after his car accident in 1924 that spelled the end of the Prieuré and initiated a new octave in

his teachings which he conducted in Paris. After meeting Gurdjieff for the first time,

Anderson described him as:

...a messenger between worlds, a dark man with an oriental face, whose life
seemed to reside in his eyes. He had a presence impossible to describe because I
had never encountered another with which to compare it. In other words, as one
would immediately recognize Einstein as a 'great man,' we immediately
recognized Gurdjieff as the kind of man we had never seen—a seer, a prophet, a
messiah?... What philosophers have taught as 'wisdom,' what scholars have

11
William Patrick Patterson and Barbara C. Allen. Ladies of the Rope: Gurdjieff's Special Left Bank Women's Group.
(Fairfax, CA: Arete Communications, 1999)
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taught in texts and tracts, what mystics have taught through ecstatic revelation,
Gurdjieff would teach as a science—an exact science of man and human
behavior—a supreme science of God, world, man—based on sources outside the
scope, reach, knowledge or conception of modern scientists and psychologists.

In the decades since his death in 1949 many of Gurdjieff’s techniques were appropriated by a

cavalcade of the sincere and the sham in the instruction of Eastern mysticism.12 Gurdjieff

himself had his detractors. D. H Lawrence wrote “I have heard enough about that place in

Fontainebleau where Katherine Mansfield died to know it is a rotten, false, and self-

conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt.”

The times in which these men appeared were fertile for radical cultural and social change:

Europe in the 1920’s was recovering from the devastation of WW1. The psychedelic 60’s

were witness to an escalating war in South East Asia countered by a peace and love

movement which spread worldwide from California as far as the hippy trails of Kathmandu to

the socialist student movements fermenting at Melbourne and Monash University. These two

decades of the 20th century provided the conditions necessary for societal readjustment,

where the values of progressive anti-materialism challenged the established class of

mercantile warriors. It is fortuitous in its coincidence that ‘The Empty Space’ and ‘Towards a

Poor Theatre.’ were published the same year as the student riots in Paris, Andy Warhol

getting shot, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King both assassinated.

What is truly extraordinary is the effect Brook and Grotowski had on the first and second

generation of baby boomers at the forefront of the revolution in the Australian theatre of the

late 60’s and early 70’s. A revolution which happened directly from the seminal texts of these

directors not from the experiential influence of actually witnessing productions of their work.

It wasn’t until 1973, when Brook toured his legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s

12
Osho, Scientology, New Age, the Enneagram, many Fourth Way schools and teachers who appeared in the decades after
Gurdjieff’s death in 1949.
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Dream, that Australia experienced his work live, and the following year when Grotowski

came to hold workshops and present his acclaimed ‘Apocalypsis cum Figuris’ in the crypt of

St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. The textural methodologies of Brook and Grotowski had

been influential before, now the effect of these productions was enormous on the dynamics of

theatre nationally, as director, John Bell, says in his autobiography of Brook’s Midsummer

Night’s Dream: “real theatrical magic could be created by words and by actors rather than

by scenic artists and lighting effects.”13

Unlike manifestos in the visual arts, (Surrealism, Dada, Impressionism etc …) Brook and

Grotowski provided methodologies for application in performance. These methodologies,

while appearing at the outset anti-traditional, were anything but.14 Brook and Grotowski

engaged the ‘ancestral memory’ of their Eastern European heritage: For Grotowski the

orthodox Eastern Church and Polish Catholicism; and Russian Jewish heritage for Brook to

reinvigorate traditional understanding of the human condition and translate it into a

vernacular for the times. In Towards a Poor Theatre Grotowski describes a simple

hand/finger exercise: “During the exercise one hand is continuously in full action. Thus the

left hand is the protecting one, and the right hand, the active grasping one.” This is identical

to the rules understood by actors in the Middle-Ages when the left hand acted as a shield

protecting the heart while the right was used as the sword of action and demonstration.15

Brook and Grotowski served as antidotes to an onslaught of theatre excess as Brecht had

done for German theatre of the 1920’s. ‘Poor’ meant for each man to employ only what was

necessary in the service of stage narrative.16 Or as Brook writes “Grotowski makes poverty

13
John Bell, John Bell: The Time of My Life (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2003)
14
Basarab Nicolescu, "Peter Brook and Traditional Thought." Peter Brook and Traditional Thought. Web. 15 Mar. 2015.
http://www.gurdjieff.org/nicolescu3.htm.
15
Joseph R. Roach, The Players Passion (Michigan: University of Michigan. 1993)
16
Jepke Goudschmit Interview Grotowski
 8

an ideal …” and in doing so remained true to the words of St Augustine: ‘The artist may see

within what he can do without.17’

The theatre is so to speak the most human and universal art of all, the one most
commonly practiced, ie. Practiced not just on the stage but also in everyday life. The
theatre of a given people or a given time must be judged as a whole, as a living organism
which isn’t healthy unless it is healthy in every limb.18 Bertolt Brecht
While Gurdjieff, and his Fourth Way19 practices (based on esoteric Eastern mysticism)

attracted almost an exclusively white European following in search of self-development.

Gurdjieff’s influence was expanded through Brook’s engagement with the artists and living

mythologies of non-European societies. Performers from all over the world in Brook’s

company contribute particular cultures and traditions to assist in his unique and detailed

theatrical discipline. Brook’s intention was techniques that enables this collaborative

presence actively in every cell of their bodies in performance, and informs their approach to

the text.20In the 1970’s Brook famously undertook an extraordinary sociological and cultural

experiment by taking an ensemble of actors into Africa to tour his production of Ibn Attar’s

Conference of the Birds where they defined the stage by carpets set in the dusty squares of

the tribal villages.21 By far though, Brooks most significant intercultural production was the

staging of his epic 9-hour Mahabharata in the mid-80s. These symbiotic interactions with

concepts and techniques of foreign origin were instrumental in the awakening of actors and

audiences alike to the scope of a globalized language in theatrical possibilities.

A problem arises as a result of eclecticism and the totalitarianism of secular democratic

values and relative ethics. Grotowski’s application of Yoga ‘asanas’ as described in Towards

17
Ananda K. Coomaraswarmy, The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswarmy (Bloomington Indiana: World Wisdom Press
2004)
18
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen Drama 1974) 152
19
P. D Uspenskiĭ and Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. The Fourth Way; a Record of Talks and Answers to Questions Based on
the Teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff (New York: Knopf, 1957)
20
Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, The Invisible Actor (London: Methuen Drama 1997)
21
John Heilpern, Conference of the Birds (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1978)
 9

a Poor Theatre were then repealed by Grotowski as noted in The Grotowski Sourcebook by

Richard Schechner: “... we began by doing yoga directed toward absolute concentration. Is it

true, we asked, that yoga can give actors the power of concentration? We observed that

despite all our hopes the opposite happened. There was a certain concentration, but it was

introverted."22 Yoga is a complete system unto itself with its own centre. Common to our

concept of multiculturalism and dangerous in the hands of the ill prepared, this selective and

partial appropriation is particular to remarkable individuals like Grotowski, Cieslak, Mirecka,

and Jaholkowski. Grotowski drew ideas and techniques from a vast ocean of resources, for

his system lived in a perpetual flow of change.23 Were anyone a living example of In Search

of the Miraculous24 it was Grotowski. His work with actors was in a constant state of

evolution like a climbing scale, when one octave was completed he commenced the next

phase. First came his Laboratory work, then the Para-theatrical, then his so-called bee hives

with actual productions serving as the monument to what was already finished. Yet, as with

so many innovators, it is the power of their presence, as much as their practices, which drives

the chariot of a particular zeitgeist. For those who follow there is a treasure chest of

discoveries to dissect, and methodologies to analyse while remaining in search of their

shifting point of centre. This is where disagreement and discord between old and new

acolytes begins and often overlooks foundational traditions within the practices of the

revolutionary or avant-garde. The urgent question therefore arises: How can people (who

have not lived with traditions other than their own, in whatever state of ripeness or decay)

understand these methods except on a superficial level? The physical and mental conditions

which existed in 1960s Wroclaw [the contextual realities of Polish history compromised by

the horrors of WW2 and further eradicated by Communist rule] produced a body of actors

22
Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner, The Grotowski Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1997) Google Books. Web. 10
Feb. 2016.
23
Kerry Dwyer Interview on Grotowski 8th April 2015
24
In search of the Miraculous by P.D Ouspensky who was Gurdjieff’s right hand man until their final break in 1924
 10

like Ryszard Cieslak that we cannot expect students of performance studies in the 21st century

to replicate.

Exceptional cases such as Brook and Grotowski become targets for criticism, such as

missives from Indian director, Rustam Barucha25 levelled at them both in his 1990 book

Theatre and the Word: Performance and the Politics of Culture. With the post-colonial ire of

youthful insolence, Barucha castigates Brook for Imperialist hubris in the staging of the

Mahabharata, and having no internal understanding of the holy book, and traditions of a

10,000 year old culture and people while adapting it under the auspices of the text’s universal

message.26 Barucha goes on to call the production a “cultural salad” of which Brook is the

“… unacknowledged chef … The materials of this salad have come from all parts of the

world, but it is Brook’s house dressing which gives the salad its distinct taste.” He is

particularly brutal on Grotowski who arrived in India with his Theatre of Sources to conduct

classes in Khardar. Barucha ridicules him for his mystification of what to the Indian people,

and Indian actors, was commonplace and ordinary like sitting for hours in complete silence,

listening to the leaves, and telling them that grass is holy. “If you had not been Grotowski”,

he writes “you would have been treated like a madman and probably asked to leave.”

Among the visionaries of the 20th century performing arts who laid an open foundation for

practitioners to build upon, few are more significant than Antonin Artaud. Grotowski’s

reference to Artaud in Towards a Poor Theatre: “Artaud speaks of the ‘cosmic trance’. This

brings back an echo of the time when the heavens were emptied of their traditional

inhabitants and themselves became an object of a cult.”27

25
Rustom Barucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993) 81
26
The Mahabharata was adapted by long term Brook collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière
27 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1968) 119
 11

Using the tradition of fire to burn a new path towards a higher objective, Artaud inspired the

art of others more than the summation of his creative output by contributing a living

manifesto within his Theatre of Cruelty to serve as a guide for others to expand into a

methodology. “The actor is an athlete of the heart.”28 For the heart is the centre point of all

traditions. Artaud represented for theatre what Andrei Rublev meant to religious painting.

Brook acknowledged Artaud in The Empty Space: “What he wanted in his search for holiness

was an absolute: he wanted a theatre that would be a hallowed place.”29

Brook and Grotowski’s contemporary connection with theatre’s holy origins was shaped, in

part, by the reverence for Artaud’s concepts. Holy in the sense of symbols beyond words,

born of tradition, born of ritual leading back to religion, revelation, prophets and the divine

itself. Knowledge and understanding of this makes possible what Stanislavski strived for with

his concept of ‘invisible rays’ between actors as an “unseen emanation of creative will.”30 As

Perennialist scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy said: “What was demanded of the traditional

artist was first and foremost to be in possession of his art. That is to be in possession of a

knowledge rather than a sentiment.”31

It is that very word ‘sentiment’ which has vexed theatrical innovators from Stanislavski to

Brecht to Brook and Grotowski and their peers. What is ‘felt,’ or what is ‘liked,’ removes

both performer and audience member from a deeper understanding of themselves in

relationship to the world and the cosmos. Sentiment, in its many guises and forms, misleads,

corrupts truth, and leads to degeneration. C.E.M Joad a 20th century philosopher and

contemporary of Bertrand Russell, explains in his book Decadence: “the object is dropped”32

28
Antonin Artaud, Theatre and its Double (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958) 133
29
Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996) 53
30
Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (London: Penguin, 1967) 500
31
Ananda K. Coomaraswarmy, The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswarmy (Bloomington Indiana: World Wisdom Press
2004) 162
32
Joad, C. E. M. Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Faber and Faber, 1948)
 12

that what becomes valued in a decadent society is how one feels. Opinions are what matter

and the actual subject or object is never accorded its right to an intelligent analysis of what it

actually is. For Joad, this is the starting point of degeneracy and fracture, and why knowledge

disappears as the whole is subsumed by fluctuations of time, taste and temporal passions.

Peter Brook warned: “Tradition itself, in times of dogmatism and dogmatic revolution, is a

revolutionary force which must be safeguarded.” Indeed, this has always been the starting

point of art.

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