Study a living investigation alongside its historical record.
History and work
The Grotowski Institute in Wrocław is a cultural and research institution carrying forward questions raised by Jerzy Grotowski’s work. It is distinct from the historical Polish Laboratory Theatre. The Institute’s published institutional account describes artistic research, documentation and the circulation of knowledge. The name marks a field of investigation; it does not mean every participant is being taught one unchanged production method.
Teaching approach
The Institute’s current programme includes performance, workshops, research activity and access to a reading room. Its earlier institutional account also records residencies, seminars and publications. You can enter the work through practical study or through documents that help you understand how a particular experiment was made.
That distinction matters because Grotowski’s projects changed across his career. The Institute’s account of Thomas Richards’s later work identifies the separate Workcenter and records its closure in 2022. You should not collapse that Italian research, the Wrocław Institute and the earlier Laboratory Theatre into one continuously operating school.
Applications for actors
You can borrow the discipline of asking what a rehearsal task investigates. What changes when you remove a familiar support? What remains precise? What becomes merely strenuous? Those questions let you examine an experiment without copying its outward intensity.
In JBAS practice, connect the investigation to the actor, the role and the day. A historical exercise is evidence of a particular artistic search. It is not a demand that you reproduce someone else’s conditions.
Context and limitations
Removing scenery or a habitual gesture does not automatically make acting truthful. Neither difficulty nor exhaustion proves artistic value. Ask what became more communicable to your partner and audience. Let that evidence guide the next choice, while keeping research into a tradition distinct from a claim that its tools suit every performance.
A history that makes inquiry possible
The Institute developed from the Grotowski Centre, which began its activities in 1990 and became the Grotowski Institute in 2006. Its founding work brought documentation and artistic inquiry into relation. You can study what earlier artists actually made while encountering new work that asks its own questions.
This combination matters because theatre leaves an incomplete record. A book can describe a practice, a photograph can preserve an arrangement, and a recording can show aspects of a performance. Each makes different information available. Practical study can raise questions that send you back to the record with more exact attention.
Research through performance
What does it mean to investigate through artistic work? You make a task concrete enough to repeat, observe what changes, and refine the conditions. The result may be a performance, a clearer working principle, or the discovery that an approach does not do what you expected.
This kind of inquiry asks for a definite subject. You might investigate how a song changes a sequence of actions, how attention circulates in a group, or how a repeated form can remain responsive. These are explanatory possibilities within performance research. A particular project needs its own purpose, method, and collaborators.
A contemporary example: The Inanna Project
The Institute hosted an open rehearsal of The Inanna Project by Theatre No Theatre, directed by Thomas Richards, in 2024. The project worked with ancient Sumerian stories in the performers’ contemporary languages and with sound forms informed by their singing and storytelling traditions. You can see a concrete relationship among text, inherited material, composition, and performance.
The artistic question concerns what happens when old material is made present through living performers. Translation becomes more than the replacement of words. Rhythm, vocal color, movement, and the relationships among performers contribute to the event. A story reaches the audience through a particular group’s work.
The project also illustrates why you need to distinguish institutions. Richards’s earlier Workcenter research and his later Theatre No Theatre work have their own histories. The Institute can host and engage with that work without becoming the same organization or claiming every practice as its own.
Reading alongside doing
Through the Institute’s publications and the online journal Performer, you can encounter accounts of productions, historical research, and practical investigations. These resources help you follow how a term was used in a particular period and how later artists interpret it.
For your own study, connect a term with an observable question. A score is a repeatable organization of actions. Contact concerns what actually occurs between people in the work. Composition concerns how material is selected and arranged. Those plain meanings give you a starting point before you investigate the different uses each term has acquired.
The Institute’s value lies partly in keeping that conversation open. You can encounter the historical record and current artistic inquiry together, allowing each to make the other more specific.
Related reading
Read Towards a Poor Theatre as a record connected with the Laboratory Theatre period, then consult the Institute’s publications and programme for later research. Date each source in your notes. You can follow a changing body of work more accurately when you know which period a term or practice belongs to.
Source for further study: The Grotowski Institute.