Session Four: We Answer Grotowski’s Call to Witness and Betsuyaku Accuses Us of Forgetting What We Saw.

In session four we started the readings with two plays by prolific Japanese playwright Betsuyaku Minoru. Always exciting to get away from the old Western dudes the theater in this country is dominated by. We read some of The Little Match Girl and “The Corpse With Feet.” Both plays explore how cultural traditions and expectations can interfere with real connections among people and also how they can be so powerful they can help us cover up or confuse and forget traumatic events that affect our relationships. In the Little Match Girl an old couple’s comfortable teatime ritual is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman. The young woman tells the old couple of the hard life she has lived selling matches (and a whole lot more) to survive. She often queries the couple on how her life could have ended up this way and the couple replies politely that times are hard. She then reveals that she is their daughter. They reply that their daughter is dead. The rest of the play is the four of them, adhering to teatime ritual and the rules of polite conversation while discovering what their true relationship may, or may not, be. It is an achingly sad story, beautifully constructed by Betsuyaku. Just so that everyone didn’t think Betsuyaku was always such a downer we also read some of the short play “The Corpse With Feet.” In this piece a man and woman, strangers to each other, meet at a rail crossing. The woman has the body of the man she thought was her husband in a bag. The man interacts with the woman in the polite way in which it is expected you would interact with a stranger, which leads him to help her make all kinds of observations and decisions about how her husband’s death (upon her discovery that he had been lying to her for five years and was already married to another woman) was accidental, not murder or suicide, and how she must return his body to his real wife so the real wife will not be worried. In the end, she even convinces the man to carry the body over the tracks for her, with disastrous results. What? That doesn’t sound light and funny to you? Absurd to present such a story in such a dismissive way? Exactly the point Betsuyaku was making, I suspect.

Then we moved on to reading some of Ludwik Flaszen’s description of Jezy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis. It was a moment that made my heart proud when not only did one participant chime up, “but that’s what we do,” after I explained how Grotowski took texts that already had meaning for the audience and re-imagined them to mean some thing new, but also after I explained how Grotowski expected his actors to burn like a flame in front of the audience as the audience stood witness to the performance, chimed up again: “But that’s what we do too.” “I’m serious,” she added. Amen. After a fairly lively discussion of the description of Akropolis, we continued our exploration of Grotowski with an exercise designed to help the participants get a taste of the depths of emotion Grotowski expected his actors to reach. A brief exercise, but intense and hard to shake off. I am always impressed by the participants ability to just DO these things, just jump right in. Without that willingness and courage on their part the workshop could not work as it does.

In keeping with Grotowski’s ideas about the actors not needing makeup, but creating masks with their own faces, we played the mask exchange game, where one person wears a dominating mask and one a submissive mask and you interact, then switch masks and give it another try. This game can be both extremely satisfying because of the high level of improvisational give and take some pairs reach and because the technical demands of keeping your face frozen in a mask are very satisfying to achieve, but also a little terrifying, as it forces you to be domineering of one of your fellow participants, whom you always want to treat with respect. I got to participate in this one and when I had on my submissive mask my partner made me crawl under a chair and then she sat on it. We had to hug afterwards. I didn’t see this first hand, but I hear one of the other participants chose to have a smile on her face as part of her domineering mask. What an observant and terrifying choice. Makes me proud.

We tried a new exercise inspired by Grotowski’s production of Akropolis, which I was lucky enough to get to see on video a couple of years ago. I was struck by the rhythmic quality of the show, which it is hard to get a feel for as Flaszen describes it in the text. There was always rhythm, sometimes cacophonous but then suddenly coalescing into a moment of strong single rhythm and then falling apart again and coalescing again into some thing new. We explored the space, and we had only our bodies and the room, walls, floor, stage platforms, etc, with which to make rhythm. I gave the instruction to first explore for yourself, find your own acoustic sweet spot, and then once you did to listen to what everyone else was doing and make what you were doing fit into what was happening in the room. This was not terribly successful. It is always fun to bang on things, but I had a hard time fitting in with what everyone else was doing. I decided the space was too big, so we limited ourselves to half of the space and this time I gave everyone the instruction to listen to each other form the beginning, to be interacting as you worked to find your own place and rhythm. This time it worked. Nothing like a percussive jam session to get the blood flowing. So we discovered that even if we want to create cacophony that we all have to be working together and tuned into what everyone else is doing. Can I get another amen?