DOI:10.19915/j.cnki.fls.2019.02.

001

Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview

with Maria Shevtsova

何成洲 Maria Shevtsova

Abstract: Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), a Polish theatre director and theorist, was widely
respected as one of the most influential figures of experimental theatre and actors’ training
in the world in the latter half of the 20th century. Among his most enthusiastic admirers,
supporters and followers are such renowned theatre directors as Peter Brook, Richard
Schechner and Eugenio Barba. This interview with Maria Shevtsova, Chair Professor of
Theatre Arts from University of London and a specialist on Grotowski, addresses some key
issues in Grotowski studies, such as the political and historical contexts of his theatre career,
his concepts of “poor theatre” and “art as vehicle,” his cosmopolitan ethics, his indebtedness
to the Oriental theatre and other different theatre and performance traditions, his influence on
dramatists, actors and theatre directors, and his inspiring impact upon the theatre world today.
Key words: Jerzy Grotowski；Polish Drama； theatre； performance
Authors: He Chengzhou, PhD of Oslo University, is Yangtze River Chair Professor of
English and Drama, Dean of the School of Arts, Nanjing University, and Foreign Member of
Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe) （Nanjing 210093, China）. His research areas
include modern drama, performance studies, comparative literature, and critical theory. Email:
chengzhou@nju.edu.cn; Maria Shevtsova, PhD of University of Paris III, has since 1999
been Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts and Director of the Sociology of Theatre and
Performance Research Group, Goldsmith, University of London. She is currently serving as
the permanent editor-in-chief of the international journal, New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge
UP). Email: M.Shevtsova@gold.ac.uk

标题：格洛托夫斯基与波兰戏剧：玛丽塔·谢福特索娃访谈录
内容摘要：耶日·格洛托夫斯基（1933-1999）是波兰戏剧导演和理论家，被公认为 20
世纪半后期在实验戏剧与演员训练方面最有影响的人物之一。其最虔诚的的崇拜者、
支持者和追随者包括著名戏剧导演彼得·布鲁克、理查德·谢克纳和尤金·巴尔巴。
玛丽塔·谢福特索娃是伦敦大学戏剧学讲座教授、格洛托夫斯基研究专家，本文是与
她的学术访谈，主要讨论格洛托夫斯基研究中如下问题：其戏剧生涯的政治与历史语境、
2 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

“贫困剧场”观和“艺乘”观，世界主义伦理，对于东方戏剧等世界不同戏剧和表演
传统的借鉴，对于其他戏剧家、演员和导演的影响，以及对于当下戏剧的启发意义等等。
关键词：耶日·格洛托夫斯基；波兰戏剧；戏剧；表演
作者简介： 何成洲，南京大学艺术学院和外国语学院教授、长江学者、欧洲科学院外
籍院士，主要从事现代戏剧、表演艺术、比较文学、批评理论研究；玛丽亚·谢福特索娃，
巴黎第三大学博士，伦敦大学戏剧与剧场艺术讲座教授，戏剧社会学与表演研究系主任，
《新戏剧季刊》（剑桥大学出版社）的终身主编。

CH（He Chengzhou）: Grotowski, born in 1933, had his secondary and higher
education after World War II, and he began to emerge as a theatre director in the 1950s after
Poland became a socialist country under the control of the Soviet Union. How did Grotowski
deal with the official cultural policies, under which socialist realism was the dominant trend?
Why did he attempt to give up the traditional theatre and instead pursue innovative experiment
in theatre, later known as the “poor theatre”?

MS (Maria Senvtasova): Well, first of all, I think it is too crude to speak of ‘socialist
realism’ as being the dominant trend in Poland in the 1950s. Poland is a different country
and a different culture from the Soviet Union. It has profoundly different literary and theatre
traditions from those developed in Soviet Russia in the years before World War II, when
socialist realism came into being. A tradition of what we might call ‘realism’ was native to
Russia at least from the eighteenth century and it became the major literary current in the
nineteenth, covering as well all areas of artistic life – fiction, poetry, drama, theatre (especially
the way of acting), the visual arts, opera and song. This was the very basis on which an
ideology of socialist realism could be grafted during the communist era without a major
cultural hiatus. I deliberately say ‘ideology’ of socialist realism because socialist realism was,
in fact, an ideologically motivated phenomenon. The term ‘socialist realism’ had begun to be
used some time in 1932, and it has been suggested that the people’s writer Maksim Gorky was
its actual architect. However, whether it was Gorky or not does not change the fact that the
very idea of creating art forms that we know historically as ‘socialist realist’ was turned into
dogma in 1934, with the backing of the communist government. Historians of various kinds
have recorded all this, including historians of literature and theatre.
This ideology remained active in the 1950s in Soviet Russia and it provided a blueprint
for how to compose artistic works. But let us now turn to Poland and see that this model could
not be grafted onto the Polish literary and other artistic traditions in the same way. So when
we talk about ‘dominant trends’ in Poland, we have to be careful not to confuse an exogenous
 Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 3

influence, that is to say, an influence coming from outside Poland, and an endogenous one
coming from within the country, which was still very strong in Poland in the 1950s, the time
when Grotowski studied the theatre in Krakow and began to practice it as a director.
What was the Polish literary tradition, which, it must be said, was very closely tied to the
country’s theatre tradition? It is important to be clear regarding this question because all of
Grotowski’s theatre productions during the 1960s, which is the period of his great evolution
and which shaped the Grotowski we know today, are based precisely on the nineteenth-
century Polish literary tradition. We forget this, particularly in Western Europe, because
students of Western European universities grew up thinking that language was not important
in Grotowski’s work. Therefore, nor were dramatic texts. They grew up believing – for this
is essentially how they were taught – that Grotowski’s was a physical theatre, separate from
what in Britain is called text-based theatre. Even as recently as last year, new students who
came into my MA class were shocked to discover that the sounds that they had heard on the
video recording of Akropolis were not just paralinguistic sounds happening beside physical
actions created by actors, but were actually spoken words with semantic meanings belonging
to a dramatic text. The text in question was Stanislaw Wyspiański’s Akropolis, which he wrote
in 1904. Imagine their shock when I told them that these were not made-up sounds but actual
words in Polish!
So, to come back to the question of what this literary tradition was (and still is) during
the communist era in Poland. It was alive and well and it was made up of three great writers,
who wrote in exile and were fundamentally poets: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and
Zygmunt Krasińsiki. Wyspiański, whom I have already mentioned, came in towards the end
of the nineteenth century as a fourth. They were the foremost figures of Polish Romanticism,
concerned with patriotism, nationalism, liberalism, heroism, notably of a sole individual
leader who was of messianic figure capable of freeing Poland from the tutelage of the
imperial powers – the Austro-German and Russian Empires that had controlled Poland for
several centuries. Add to this mixture the deeply rooted Catholicism, including its mystical
components, that bound Polish society together in the absence of political sovereignty and
independence. Add also the paganism – Grotowski frequently calls it ‘archaic’ culture – which
was at the heart of old peasant communities and the source of extremely important rituals
whose pagan characteristics melded with the canonical Catholic rituals. Ritual, as we know, is
fundamental to Grotowski’s work as a whole, and I will come back to this point shortly.
It cannot be stressed enough that Grotowski’s first extremely successful production
at the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole, which is where his 1960s productions were created,
gestated and staged, all relied in one way or another on Poland’s nationally revered Romantic
texts. Grotowski’s first major production in Opole was Dziady (Forefather’s Eve) in 1961,
4 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

based on the 1823 play by Adam Mickiewicz, who is considered to be the ‘father’ of Polish
Romanticism. The second was Kordian in 1962 by Juliusz Slowacki (1834), who wrote it
in the aftermath of the failed Polish insurrection against the imperial powers. The Constant
Prince in 1965 was by Calderón de la Barca, so not part of the Polish dramatic heritage,
but the third important production referencing the Romantic writers was Grotowski’s last
production. This was his widely internationally seen Apocalypsis cum Figuris, which was
premiered in 1969 after earlier versions had been performed in open rehearsals in 1968. The
texts used for Apocalypsis included texts by Slowacki.
The ‘official’ culture of Poland in the 1950s was, it seems, far less constrained by such
ideologically motivated aesthetic categories as socialist realism than was the case in the
Soviet Union at the same time. Now, if we look back at the veritable Polish heritage that
Grotowski absorbs in his famous works, it is very noticeable that the theatrical language, or
what Grotowski calls the ‘scenic language’ of his actors and of his stage works as a whole,
was neither bound by nineteenth-century conventions, nor by those that could be called realist
theatre in the Polish style, since realism had developed as an aesthetic in Poland, regardless
of socialist realism. The question now is what constituted this language, and how did it differ
radically from what you have called ‘traditional theatre’? And the second question that follows
is, how did this become the language of ‘poor theatre’?
I would like to answer the second a little later because it is important to introduce
another important factor first. This concerns Grotowski’s visit to Soviet Russia in 1955.
Books in English about Grotowski usually say that he studied for a year in Moscow at GITIS
(State Institute of Theatre Art). This is not altogether true: he probably studied at GITIS
only for several months with Yury Zavadsky, who had worked very closely as an actor with
Stanislavsky from the 1920s until Stanislavsky’s death and who had originally come out
of Vakhtangov’s Studio. Vakhtangov was, of course, Stanislavsky’s favourite student, and
Vakhtangov was one of the first teachers of Stanislavsky’s System in the First Studio, which
Stanislavsky founded in 1912.
As we know, one of Grotowski’s most important concepts in the last ten or so years of
his life was the concept of ‘transmission’, namely, passing down knowledge directly from one
person to another as happens in ballet, for example, when a role and everything concerning it
is passed from dancer to dancer orally and through the body. Stanislavsky transmitted the fine
details of theatre making to Zavadsky, who transmitted to Grotowski and others among his
students. It is crucial to know this because Grotowski has always stressed that his only master
was Stanislavsky. So the question you ask about socialist realism becomes even more complex
once we bring the Russian cultural heritage, as developed by Stanislavsky, into the picture.
I should also add that Grotowski’s well-known interest in Meyerhold also stems from
 Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre : An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 5

the time he spent in Moscow with Zavadsky, who discussed the principles of Meyerhold’s
biomechanics with him and facilitated access to Meyerhold’s archives, which were still closed
during the 1950s. Meyerhold, it must be remembered, had worked with Stanislavsky in the
early years of the Moscow Art Theatre, and the myth that he and Stanislavsky were opposed
and enemies thereafter is purely a myth. These two practitioners worked in different ways, but
they were aligned as practitioners and friends until their dying days. From an aesthetic point
of view, Grotowski’s theatre work in the later 1950s in Warsaw, before he moved to Opole at
the invitation of his life-long theatre partner Ludwig Flaszen, concentrated on biomechanical
methods for actors; and biomechanical techniques had absolutely nothing to do with socialist
realism. No one censured Grotowski’s Meyerhold-style work and he worked with it precisely
because he was looking for a more expansive, freer, corporeal form of expression than the
theatre of characterisation and psychological truthfulness allowed in those relatively early
post-war years. Keep in mind, too that Grotowski was a member of the Communist Party for
a short time during those years. He may have joined for opportunistic or strategic reasons,
but he had joined, and his sense of national commitment did not necessarily die when he first
travelled abroad and then settled in the United States and, after that, in Italy. He visited Poland
in the 1990s, as Jaroslawl Fret, currently the director of the Grotowski Institute, remembers
only too well.

CH: In Akropolis, Auschwitz and the concentration camp were the focus of the stage.
Under the influence of the Soviet, the remaining Jews in Poland were not treated with respect
and most of them were even expelled in the aftermath of the 1968 movement. What motivated
Grotowski to adapt and stage this play? How could it be warmly received in many different
places both in and outside Poland? And along the line of your previous answers, does its
success have something to do with Grotowski’s theatrical innovations?

MS: Why did Grotowski stage this play? Consider that his point of departure was
Wyspiański’s play, and Wyspiański’s Akropolis refers to the Royal Palace of Krakow, in
which the Kings of Poland are buried, as are the national poets like Mickiewicz, and so on.
Wyspiański took this palace to be the symbol of the preservation of civilisation. It was, if you
like, symbolically comparable to the Akropolis in Ancient Greece. Grotowski asked himself
what a comparable symbol of contemporary civilisation might be, and came to the conclusion
that there was not a comparable, but only an antithetical one. The salient one was Auschwitz,
and it was the cemetery of civilisation rather than a glorious monument to it. It was where
civilisation was ignominiously buried. Grotowski, then, turned Wyspiański’s text into its
opposite, showing that it reflected his thoughts about the condition of society in the Auschwitz
6 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

and post-Auschwitz worlds. What is said about Polish antisemitism, which was a well-known
fact in Poland, was just as relevant elsewhere. In other words, this particular instance applied
generally.
Let me come back to the question of how Grotowski’s language differed from that of
traditional theatre. It is known that Grotowski intensely disliked quotidian reality and the
commonplace daily life in the theatre. He described this as banal. The language he was
looking for was not illustrative or descriptive but visceral, hence profoundly incarnated in the
human body. And his emphasis was on the actor as an acting person and not as a borrowed
character set in the borrowed contexts of conventional theatre environments, such as drawing
rooms, kitchens, and so on. His actors in Akropolis did not wear costumes as such but sacks.
The objects they used were pipes from plumbing. The sounds of the words they uttered were
not conversational but exaggerated. The test they uttered did not attempt in the slightest to
construct psychological characters.
Objects in this theatre universe became symbols of people. Thus, the bride in
Wyspiański’s play was ‘represented’ by a plumbing pipe and not by a woman. Movements
were shuffles rather than steps; groupings were clusters rather than individual actors
silhouetted in stage space. This language was abstracted – expressionistic, even, in the German
style of the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the actors who produced everything that
they did. Nothing was dictated to them by scenographic exigencies and semiotic demands.
They invented their own semiotic sign processes. The actor and nothing but the actor was
central to Grotowski’s work; and this is what he discovered and shared very deeply with
Stanislavsky. Meanwhile, the angular gestures of movements, the thumping of the actors’
feet and the jigsaw montage of scenes indicate that Grotowski’s ‘outward’ language was
biomechanics.

Akropolis could be received warmly in many different places across the world because its
scenic language was unusual and corresponded to research being done in the 1960s elsewhere
on highly exteriorized physical action. The research in the United States, for example, on
dance, which was usually referred to as contemporary dance (although Martha Graham called
it modern dance) is a very good example of this research on physicality, on the expressivity
of the body, on how the body articulates meaning and can do so by minimising or completely
dismissing the semantic meaning of words. Grotowski did not dismiss the semantic meaning
of words. It is simply that these words were part and parcel of movement – not add-ons, not
parallels, not words that are interpreted but are completely integrated word-movement-sound
entities. This kind of theatre could travel across the world quite easily because it primarily
communicated viscerally. This kind of communication is visual and aural, and does not have
 Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 7

to rely on sense in the way in which language usually does.

It is also important to notice Grotowski’s experimentation with how actors formed space
rather than worked in already prepared space. This was evident in the ritualistic patterns of
moving around a central block in Akropolis. Kordian, designed by Grotowski’s permanent
scenographer Gurawsky, was spatially organised like a psychiatric hospital. Spectators for
The Constant Prince sat above the action, looking down on it, while the actors worked once
again, as in the earlier productions, in hemmed in, tight space. The latter had something to do
with the fact that the Theatre of 13 Rows was a very small theatre, as its name suggests, but
it is also connected to Grotowski’s idea of concentrated space, which is the best type of space
for intensely concentrated and focused physical work. At the same time, such physical work
calls up intensive internal and internalised work. These were as much characteristics of ‘poor
theatre’ as the lack of sets, costumes, make-up and other such aspects of ‘traditional’ theatre.
‘Poor theatre’ was, above all, the theatre of actors who, while they made actions, were
undergoing an internal journey – in something that we could call an ‘internal life’. Spectators
met this internal life as it journeyed, but it could only be communicated physically. Otherwise,
it would simply remain internal and static. How do you express what is internal? The risk is
that it forces actors to be immobile, as occurs in the tableaux, for example, of the Symbolist
theatre.

CH: In ‘From the Theatre Company to art as vehicle,’ Grotowski confessed that the
sources of the Oriental art had a direct impact on him when he was a child and adolescent.
He said the corroboration of the Oriental and the Occidental arts ‘often opens unexpected
perspectives and breaks mental habits’ (p. 130). How was Grotowski influenced by oriental
arts? Or what did he borrow from the traditional performances in the East?

MS: This is a very big question and I can only answer it schematically in the context of
this interview. First of all, Grotowski was very much the son of his mother, who, when he
was a child, introduced him to A Search in Secret India by an English journalist called Paul
Brunton. This was his introduction to the spiritual and mystical practices of Indian culture.
His mother was deeply Catholic but eclectic in her approach to world religions – an attitude
that she transmitted to her son. As a child, Grotowski read the Gospels of the New Testament
and Alain Renan’s Life of Jesus, which brought him closer to the idea of the human being
reaching the divine, which underpins all of Grotowski’s work. Remember that he talks about
going upwards on the ‘vertical’ in his phase or period known as ‘art as vehicle’. Remember
also that this phrase is not Grotowski’s: it was invented for this particular stage of Grotowski’s
research by Peter Brook, who shared Grotowski’s interest in the spiritual journey that an
8 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

actor undertook while acting, as well as in the spiritual journey spectators are invited to
undertake as they watch this ‘holy actor’ whose movements take him/her upwards to divinity
or ‘transcendence’. Grotowski took the latter idea from Hinduism and possibly from yogic
practices. He also read The Zohar and the Qu’ran at an early age, which were religious texts
outside Christianity. By the same token he read the devoutly Russian Orthodox novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Jewish existential philosopher Martin Buber.
I am not sure that it is accurate to talk about Grotowski ‘borrowing’ from ‘traditional
performances in the East’. He discovered points of affinity between them and his own search
for the spiritual dimensions of humans incarnated in their body. It is precisely for this reason
that he became very interested in Haiti ritual, which was a way of communicating with the
invisible through song, chant and dance. Haiti ritual was also concerned with healing, with
expunging ‘bad spirits’ and other sicknesses from the body. He travelled frequently to Haiti, as
all books on Grotowski tell us. One of his collaborators in the early years in Pontedera in Italy,
that is, during the mid-to-late 1980s, was Maud Robart, who was a carrier and transmitter of
this kind of ritual.
Grotowski had travelled alone to India on several occasions in the early 1970s, during
the Paratheatre years (1969-78). These solitary journeys are shrouded in mystery, since very
little information is available about what he did in India. Did he spend months in an ashram?
Did he study with gurus? Did he simply travel as a ‘holy fool’, the image that he liked so
much for both the ‘holy actor’ and the human being who had stripped himself or herself of
the accoutrements, possessions and habits of social interaction? Stripped bare, such a person
could be completely open to exploring himself or herself unencumbered by the clichés of
everyday life. I think there is little doubt that the experiences he had in India within these or
similar terms were fundamental to ‘art as vehicle’ and so to the work Grotowski undertook
with Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini, which he called ‘Action’. ‘Action’ was exploration
within. It was what Grotowski called the ‘theatre of presence’ rather than the ‘theatre
of representation’, which, briefly put, is the theatre of characterisation, or the theatre of
conventional realism. The ‘theatre of presence’, by contrast, was the theatre in which the actor
sought and met whatever it was that constituted this internal ‘self’.
It is not accidental that, in the 1970s, when Grotowski crisscrossed between Oriental
forms, he came to know intimately the Indian wandering minstrels, the Bauls, who, like holy
fools, were dispossessed of earthly possessions. Thus they were economically poor, and,
in their travels, they encountered the transcendental states that song and chanting allowed
them to reach. I personally do not think that Grotowski was interested in mixing Oriental
and Occidental art forms. He was not like Brook or Eugenio Barba who made intercultural
theatre in their respective ways. Barba can be credited for making Grotowski widely known
 Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 9

outside Poland from which platform Grotowski could fashion his own reputation afterwards.
Grotowski was interested in finding and nurturing the kind of actor who could accomplish
internalized but physically articulated actions as if this actor were reborn every time that
he or she performed. From this, I believe, comes his rather difficult idea of Performer, who
dedicates his or her entire life to doing actions that are far removed from the acting that
requires pretending to be someone else, that is, a ‘character’. Performer can only be himself.

CH: Why did he choose to give up directing plays in theatre and focus on the theatre
workshops for training actors? What are his purposes in training actors?

MS: He was in search of the ‘holy actor’ and the Performer who were authentically
themselves. The theatre was about pretence and adopting masks. What I need to add now is
that Grotowski was not interested in training actors per se. He was not interested in giving
them skills or bags of tricks with which to show off and perform. As I see it, he was interested
in discovering what it is to be human in a kind of primal state, for it is precisely this type
of unadulterated human who can be a ‘holy actor’. This same type of human can also be a
Performer, dedicated to what might be called the ‘ritual of being’. I think Eugenio Barba,
who worked closely with Grotowski from 1961 to 1964 in Opole would call this the pre-
social state, and if Barba does not actually call it this, I think this it is what he means. Perhaps
it could be said that Grotowski was looking for a new kind of human being, one who had to
shake off what was learnt socially and undergo a transformation by returning to a pre-social
source. This is a difficult area to seize concretely, but the Theatre of Sources (1976-82), which
is frequently taken as Grotowski’s East-West mix, is really about the search through sources
of whichever culture that might trigger the transformation of the self that constitutes a human
being. Yes, this is a difficult area for discussion.

CH: After Poland was placed under martial law, Grotowski refused to cooperate with the
government. Since the 1980s, Grotowski had mainly lived and worked in the US and Italy.
During the years of his exile, did he keep in contact with theatre circles in Poland? Was he still
influential in his home country while his fame spread widely in the world theatre?

MS: Don’t forget that Grotowski’s Paratheatre encounters took place in Poland in
Wroclaw and Brzezinka, which is the forest dwelling not far from Wroclaw in which many
of Grotowski’s national and international participants worked. A good number of Poles were
involved in these encounters, for example, Wlodzimierz Staniewski, who became the leader of
the group known as Gardzienice. Then there was Anna Zubrzycki, who, of Polish origin, grew
10 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

up in Australia, where she first undertook workshops with Grotowski. She travelled to Poland
for the Paratheatre events, and, after working with Gardzienice, formed Song of the Goat with
Grzegorz Bral who was a Gardienice performer, too. Later, Jaroslaw Fret worked with Anna
Zubrzycki and, in his turn, formed Teatr ZAR. I write about this Grotowski lineage in the last
chapter of my book, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, and it may help your
readers to see what these connections are and how and why they occurred.
As far as I can see, Grotowski had little connection with the national theatres, whether in
Warsaw or Krakow. The Krakow Stary Theatre is where Grotowski started his theatre career.
I suspect this is just one of those phenomena typical of the theatre world, regardless of the
geographical location in which this or that theatre is to be found. Theatre groups gather with
common interests and tend to stick together.

CH: Grotowski worked with actors from many different countries in the world, who
brought into the workshop a wide array of performance cultures. Did Grotowski intend to
mix them together in training the actors so that they became familiar with other performance
cultures? He is very receptive to different performance cultures, including rituals from
relatively primitive communities. Does that prove that Grotowski is a cosmopolitan artist? Is
there a core pursuit of his that all cultures seem to share?

MS: Yes, of course he wanted people to become familiar with other performance
cultures. His purpose, however, was not to create intercultural theatre of any kind. He was
not a cosmopolitan artist, crossing from one culture to the other with prowess. In my view,
he was interested in other cultures, not as cultures as such, but in what they could help him to
discover about Performer and the Performer’s actions.
When Grotowski started his Pontedera work with Richards and Biagini, he no longer
spoke of spectators but of ‘witnesses’ and, in doing so, he indicated his distance from standard
theatre practice. What do I mean by that? His emphasis was now on the individual journey
that outsiders were invited to observe and perhaps even to share. In this respect, witnesses
were observing something akin to ritual action of which they were not participants, as
believers are in, say, a church congregation. Instead, they witnessed an event, which could
become a miracle. I think it would not be exaggerated to say that they witnessed the events of
a person who was on another level of existence as Christ might be said to have been for those
who witnessed his intimate contact with God.
His interest in rituals from cultures other than his own, Polish culture, has to do with his
receptivity to the riches that the world could offer him, but not as a visitor or a tourist. These
rituals taught him how energies emerged from movement and song and created connections
Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 11

at a deep psychic level between the individual people who participated in them. But again, I
would say that his central intention was to understand this connection as such rather than to
grasp how it might generate community cohesion. He was much more interested in one-on-one
communion than in large-group or crowd communication; and there is a difference between
‘communion’, which is a deeply personal and intimate connection, and ‘communication’,
which imparts information and creates links on a larger scale such as a theatre audience, for
example.
His focus on communion is exactly why Grotowski chose to work in a one-on-one way
with Richards, in particular, in the ‘art as vehicle’ stage of his research. It also gives us a clue
to why Grotowski continuously spoke, during this stage, of the spectator as a witness rather
than as a member of an audience. Furthermore, he stopped speaking of ‘the spectator’ and
only used the word ‘witness’ – someone who was able to testify to and provide a testimonial
of an intimate and even very private experience which the Performer had experienced (in this
case Richards) and had opened out to this selected person. Brook, in his With Grotowski, has
pointed to the individual-to-individual thrust of Grotowski’s ‘art as vehicle’. Where was this
‘vehicle” to go? This personal communion is the means for travelling to the higher order of
being – of the divine that I have been talking about, however an individual undertaking this
travel may perceive the idea of the ‘divine’. In some ways, Grotowski avoided the problem
of explaining what it was by referring metaphorically to the ‘vertical’ (one of his key terms),
which is the axis that goes upwards. The image of an upward axis for movement is an image
of improvement in all societies originating in Christianity.

CH: In his article, ‘You are Someone’s Son’ (1985), Grotowski speaks of his politics:
‘I work, not to make some discourse, but to enlarge the island of freedom which I bear; my
obligation is not to make political declarations, but to make holes in the wall. The things
which were forbidden before me should be permitted after me; the doors which were closed
and doublelocked should be opened.’ How to interpret what Grotowski said in the above since
little attention has been paid to the political aspects of his art? Did Grotowski have anything
to do with the Solidarity Movement in Poland, especially since in May 1978 the Laboratory
Theatre went to Gdansk? This was the company’s first paratheatre tour within Poland and it is
significant that it happened in the birthplace of the Solidarity Movement, which changed not
just the future of Poland but also the fate of East-Middle Europe in 1989.

MS: In ‘You Are Someone’s Son’, Grotowski is concerned first and foremost with his
view that none of us comes out of nowhere. The work that Grotowski did in the 1980s in
Pontedera is close to his work in Theatre of Sources, which was, precisely, about finding your
12 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

origins in distant time, like tracing your DNA as far back as possible. How? In the way that
the journey inwards that I was talking about earlier is a return to something incarnated in
the body, which, as Grotowski says, could be your grandfather or an ancestor further back in
time to whom your body connects and with which it identifies. In this way, you come from
someone and belong to someone. Performer rediscovers that ancestral someone, which is
the source from which flows the creativity of performance action. This could be described as
physical liberty, and also the liberty of the self.
In political terms, Grotowski’s ‘island of freedom which I bear’ could be understood as
the autonomy of the self. It is a freedom from any form of constraint, whether the constraint
of social norms, or the oppressions of political regimes. This is why Grotowski speaks of
‘holes in the wall’ and ‘things that were forbidden’. For Grotowski, as for Stanislavsky before
him and Peter Brook beside him, theatre is the realm of freedom precisely because it can be
unrestricted in its search for the integrity of doing, which is the principal goal of Action.
As far as I know, Grotowski was not connected to the Solidarity Movement, despite
the fact that the Laboratory Theatre travelled to Gdansk. It may be significant in so far as
the freedoms explored by Paratheatre were transposed to Gdansk. But this significance is
indirect. Nothing in Grotowski is directly and openly political. It is incipient and it is indirect.
As Grotowski says himself, his ‘obligation is not to make political declarations’. He is not
an agit-prop practitioner and this might also well explain why he could not possibly take up
anything like politically ideological conviction of any kind at all in the practice of theatre.
I do not think that any great effort has to be made to prove that Grotowski had political
views. One can have political views but not speak them out, or act them out – or act upon
them, for that matter. They can be privately held and withheld. Grotowski was a notoriously
private, if not secretive, person. Very few people know, for instance, that he was a member
of the Polish Communist Party. He might have thought of political commitment for social
improvement when he was young, but, as the years passed, he thought more and more about
personal development. The notion of development is what he shared deeply with Stanislavsky
and helps to explain why he had always said that he continued Stanislavsky’s work.

CH: As we discussed previously, Grotowski had an interesting relationship with the

theatre tradition in Europe. Then, is he indebted to other theatre artists before him similarly
subversive of European theatre traditions? For example, in what ways did Grotowski both
inherit from Artaud and transcend him? Was Grotowski inspired by Samuel Beckett and the
Theatre of the Absurd?

MS: Taking your second question first, No. Absurd theatre is a long way away from
Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre: An Interview with Maria Shevtsova‖ 何成洲 Maria Shevtsova 13

Grotowski’s practice and worldview. For a start, Grotowski was much more interested in the
fullness of language than Beckett, and much less interested in silence than Beckett. These are
not fruitful paths of inquiry to follow.
As for Artaud, a great myth has been woven about Grotowski’s indebtedness to Artaud,
and Brook has been instrumental in propagating this myth. Grotowski himself does not
claim an Artaudian heritage. It is significant that the only theatre heritage that he claims is
Stanislavsky. The question is: why has the doxa of Western theatre scholarship imputed to
Grotowski Artaud’s deep influence? It seems to me that the only thing that Grotowski shares
with Artaud is the idea of the actor-martyr who gesticulates through the flames; that is, who
sacrifices him/herself on the sacred altar that is the theatre. His reference to this is in his essay
‘Towards a Poor Theatre’.
The link, on this particular issue is possible because the Grotowskian actor/
performer/‘doer’ dedicates his/her entire being to the voyage of discovery that is a journey
within the depths and recesses of oneself. Grotowski is not a postmodernist. He still believes
in the concept of self, just like Stanislavsky did. And he believes, like Stanislavsky, that
the actor is not so much a martyr as a priest who embodies sacredness and can provide it
for others. This idea underlies Grotowski’s notion of the holy theatre and the holy actor –
concepts which are not shared by Artaud.
My personal feeling with regards to Artaud and Grotowski is that theatre scholarship
in Europe and the United States had to have something to hang onto to explain Grotowski.
Grotowski seemed completely strange, completely different from everything else that was
happening in the theatre. The early 1950s saw the first translation into English of Artaud’s
Theatre and Its Double, which extolled the virtues of liberation from established theatre
conventions and the possibility of unencumbered personal freedom. John Cage, for example,
was bowled over by Artaud’s book precisely because it gave great value to the artist who was
not only free, but was pure, having no other intentions than creating art itself. This art was, as
Grotowski himself argued later, a passage to a state other than the everyday state of banal life,
and this might be a connection between him and Artaud. Yet Grotowski was different from
Artaud because Artaud’s goal concerned art and the artist, while Grotowski, after ten years of
intensive theatre-making, became almost exclusively centred on the possibilities of developing
an open and completely free human being.
Essentially, Artaud was a secular thinker, while Grotowski was fundamentally a religious
one, in the most complete sense of the word ‘religious’. In other words, ‘religious’ means
being committed to a search for a dimension of life and living that was greater than your ego
and, so, greater than yourself. This is also the ‘transcendental’ that Grotowski was looking for.
In the process, the searcher connects with this something higher that can be called the divine.
14 外国文学研究 ‖2019 年第 2 期

This divine transcends religious denominations, but is religious in so far as it carries the
notion of doing and being in the realm of the sacred.
Here, precisely, is where Grotowski’s link with the Polish Romantic literature strongly
shows: in its heroic protagonists’ sacred mission to liberate Poland from imperial might and
the quest of these heroes for personal enlightenment, which entailed communion with God.
It can never be forgotten that this Romantic literature was steeped in Catholicism. Grotowski
might have thrown Catholicism overboard, but, as I have said before, he continued his journey
on the ‘vertical’. Even the trope of the ‘journey’ is rooted in Polish Romantic literature.

CH: What implications does Grotowski have for drama and theatre circles today? Or, to
put it another way, what can we learn from Grotowski today?

MS: Hmmm… What we learn depends on who we are, what we are looking for, in
what we believe, and to what we aspire. I know many actors, directors, designers and theatre
scholars who are not in the least bit interested in Grotowski. His work seems esoteric to them,
or too religious, or not rational enough. Or else they would rather make and study productions,
and not necessarily according to conventional theatre prototypes with characters, narratives,
plots, and clear-cut subject matter. What some of us would like to learn from Grotowski is
how to follow a path towards the development of our fullest potential as human beings. I am
hoping that the readers of this interview, having read it, will be able to ask your question, or
vary it, for themselves and start looking for answers to it for themselves in relation to those
with whom they live and work.

CH: Thank you, Maria. Your answers are extremely rich and substantial.

MS: My pleasure.
责任编辑：张爱平