Session 3: Grotowski and Foreman

By Gwethalyn
In the first part of session three we did a little of the exercise called lay/sit/stand, led by Chad. This is an exercise in which you can either be (you guessed it) laying, sitting, or standing, or moving between one and the other. It is about stopping and starting and precision in transition, and exploring all the different ways you can lay, sit, and stand with a chair. We do this with the aid of our trusty yellow chairs.

These chairs have really been in the MXTW trenches, 24 years of workshop participants have laid or sat or stood on these chairs. After the participants got the hang of things, Chad instructed them to continue exploring on their own and things were looking pretty good, but then he asked them to continue their explorations at a speed of one (one being the slowest you can move, ten being the fastest). This added layer of necessary concentration seemed to kick the entire group’s focus into overdrive and, as we have already experienced, when this group turns on the focus it is fierce. Even after Chad lifted the speed restriction they continued their explorations with the same high level of intensity and the results were fascinating. The watching directors could hardly tear our eyes from the stage. Their commitment to the work made it so compelling the directors started whispering about how maybe the whole group pieces should just be them playing this game on stage this year. It was one of those moments that suddenly coalesce with fiery brilliance from the work to give us a glimpse of the mesmerizing potential of even the simplest of actions when they are performed with precision, focus, and commitment. Flinn also led the group through the exercise called Word Jazz. Small groups take a sentence and explore a few possibilities for it as a full sentence, speaking in unison to get the ensemble mojo goin’, then they break it down and play with the words and sounds as they will, working individually while together to create an aural collage of word and sound. They used the sentences: “The hair like clouds upon the sun which hide the truth from everyone.” “But of course he wants to eat people, because his appetite is insatiable.” “Do you understand that if HE is rewarded, you are all rewarded.” and “Nobody has yet thought that knowledge could enter through the nose.” All taken from our later Foreman reading. In my opinion the most powerful exploration was of: “Do you understand that if HE is rewarded, you are all rewarded.” The sinister possibilities of the words understand and reward in myriad juxtaposition were clearly evident. The sentence “But of course he wants to eat people, because his appetite is insatiable.” brought on near hysteria among some of the participants and as we took our break just afterwards they all scrambled to show us why on their phones. They displayed a you tube song that involved Shia Lebouf and actual cannibalism. Very strange.
First in the readings we talked about Jerzy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis. In his version of  Akropolis Grotowski sets Wyspianski’s lyric meditation on the high accomplishments of Western Civilization amidst its most horrific folly, an extermination camp. We discussed Grotowski’s idea of Poor Theater that dispenses with any extraneous conventions and values the spectator/actor relationship as the essence of any performance. Grotowski believed performers should burn like a flame while the audience stands witness, and that the limitations of the body should be no impediment to any potential requirement of performance. We read some of Ludwik Flaszen’s extremely economically phrased and evocative description of Grotowski’s production. After reading  some of the description I asked the participants what they thought. There were several moments of silence and then someone ventured to say “I think . . . I want to see this.” Several other voices chimed in that they desired to experience such a performance as well. This is certainly not the reaction everyone has when faced with the prospect of a show that ends with an ecstatic group of prisoners singing in procession as they exit through a hole in the floor they have constructed by their own painful labors that we have witnessed. The hole is a metaphorical entrance to the gas chamber and the company’s exit is followed simply by the line “They are gone, and the smoke rises in spirals.” Brave, brave people to desire to witness such a performance.  We have included this piece in the reader several times in the past, but this year for the first time we were able to include also some excerpts of the actual dialogue, which I discovered in translation on The Wooster Group’s webpage. Apparently they used it for a show they did a few years ago called Poor Theater in which they recreated part of Akropolis.  Never before in this workshop have we been able to actually see the way the lines of the original play fit in with the structure Grotowski and his performers devised for it.  I think this new addition to the reader really helped the participants to understand what Grotowski and his company were up to.  Very exciting.

The phrase “And now for something completely different,” has almost never been so apropos as when you turn from the work of Grotowski to Richard Foreman’s Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation. Foreman eschews any kind of narrative plot and instead structures his scripts around his own musings on how we try to know things, how we create art, and how we experience theater as the artists or as the audience. His shows are full of interruptions, free associations and direct address to the audience and the performers which always brings our attention to the fact that we are in the act of perpetrating a theatrical event. His shows unfold in the mysterious ways our minds wander when we get distracted from our purpose, and therefore, they can contain anything of which you can think, or rather, anything of which Foreman can think. Hilarious stuff. Quoth the voice, which was Foreman’s voice recorded and then played back by Foreman in plain view of the audience: “Recapitulation: do you think using the associative method. Everybody does. Each thought is accompanied by overtones, which are images that may not be pictures but are, certainly.” Certainly.