Grotowski's Theater Exploration

In 1959, with drama tyro Ludwik Flaszen, Grotowski founded the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole, a provincial townsfolk in Poland, where over the course of three years they recruited a small company of six actors and mount ten convergenceions. From the setoff the sphere was conceptualized as experimental and research-oriented in nature, with Grotowski as impresario, playing teacher, and director and Flaszen as dramaturge.

Kumiega characterizes Flaszen's role as critical in shaping the orientation toward research; as a hardheaded matter he seems to have analyzed and given Grotowski notes on all aspects of production. Kumiega quotes Flaszen on his duties:

[W]hen I analyzed Grotowski's work for him, I tried to find all that had become merely a shell, the reasoned, or the artificial. I analyzed what could be rejected. When I felt my analysis was helpless, I knew I was dealing with something alive (Kumiega 191).

The Theatre's betterment to theatrical production deliberately and programmatically sought to depart from the conventions of mercantile theatre, which were deemed "synthetic" and were referred to as Rich Theatre, specif

The absence of formal text anchored Laboratory Theatre product in experimentation and improvisation as raison d'?tre rather than an musical instrument of a finished presentation. Even so, the presentation itself was finished indoors the commonsense importee of the word. The difference was that in the stylization of movement, emotion, and judgment that were evoked by the actors, the effect was a moving explication and research of the validity and even sense of the Christian myth and apprehend for salvation

Grotowski's perception of the nature of truth and reality was grounded in an idealism and essentialism of emotion and insight, and the purpose or function of theatre in relation to that perception was to evoke purely aesthetic and presentational rather than sociological and representational moments of art.

Thus a review of the Laboratory Theatre's production of Calderon's Constant Prince-created in the condition of heroic realism valorized by the Soviet interpretation of the bolshie aesthetic-stressed the "spiritualist and experimental" approach of Grotowski, wherein "the spirit of man transcend[s] and underl[ies] the individual's ego" (Brecht 184). This approach inquired liberal use of dramatic (some would severalise overdramatic) gesture, with gesture referring to stylized body movement that was meant to convey meaning and emotion. Accordingly:

Between 1965 and 1968 only two major productions were mounted in Poland: The Constant Prince, by Calderon, and Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, an original mystery story play whose title was taken from a series of illustrations by Albrecht Durer. Apocalypsis was not, strictly speaking, a play, but the evolutionary product of the experimentation of Grotowski's acting company. As one critic put it:

iodin of the major early experimental efforts of the Laboratory Theatre was to involve audience members in the performance as a mechanism of defeating the artifice of theatre. However, audience participation proved more to playact h
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