Jerzy Grotowski

Sep 8

Discover what the actor’s action can carry.

Life and work

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was a Polish director and researcher of acting and performance. His Laboratory Theatre worked first in Opole and later in Wrocław. The Grotowski Institute’s account places its productions within a career that later moved into other forms of performance research. The theatre period and the later research deserve distinct attention.

Approach and technique

Poor theatre asks what remains essential when you remove elements a performance can do without. Your body, voice, action and contact with spectators can carry transformations that might otherwise be supplied by decoration or technology. The question is practical: what can the actor make happen?

Towards a Poor Theatre, first published in 1968, records experiments and includes accounts of actor training from different years. Thomas Richards’s later firsthand account concerns work with Grotowski on physical actions and the research called Art as Vehicle. You can study the connections without treating several decades as one fixed exercise system.

Books and further study

Read Towards a Poor Theatre for the theatre-period record, and At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions by Thomas Richards for a later collaborator’s account. Use dates and named collaborators to keep the different phases legible.

Your acting becomes the principal material

What does a performance actually need? The poor-theatre question directs your attention to the encounter between actor and spectator. You examine what the actor’s body, voice, and action can make present. An object may change significance through its use. A physical relationship may establish a whole dramatic world. The economy makes the actor’s creative work especially visible.

Poor theatre therefore involves a demanding account of theatrical wealth. You may have few material elements and a highly elaborate performance. Your precision, coordination, vocal possibilities, and relationship to the space supply resources that expensive equipment cannot automatically provide. The inquiry asks what each element contributes to the encounter.

You investigate what interrupts an impulse

In Grotowski’s account, via negativa names an approach through removing obstacles to the actor’s creative process. The Latin phrase means a negative way: you investigate what prevents an action or response from becoming available. The idea belongs to sustained practical work with particular actors. It does not reduce training to passivity.

For your understanding, the distinction is useful. You may already possess an impulse to approach, speak, or respond, yet interfere by anticipating how the action will look. Adding another instruction can sometimes complicate that interference. Identifying the unnecessary effort may give you more freedom. This is an interpretive explanation of the principle, rather than a reconstruction of Laboratory Theatre training.

A score gives living action a repeatable structure

A performance score is an organized sequence of actions. You need enough specificity for the work to remain available across rehearsals and performances. At the same time, a sequence of positions alone cannot supply a living event. Your actions need impulses, relationships, and consequences within the work.

The distinction between form and impulse becomes central when you study physical action. You can reproduce the visible route of a movement while losing what makes it necessary. You can experience a powerful impulse without giving it a form that your partners can meet. The acting problem lies in developing the connection: precision that remains responsive, and responsiveness that can participate in a sustained structure.

The spectator’s position becomes part of the composition

If the actor-spectator encounter is essential, the arrangement of that encounter matters. You need to consider distance, direction, visibility, and the kinds of attention the performance invites. A spectator close to an action receives different information from someone observing a framed image at a distance.

For your acting, this means the space has to enter the score. You cannot assume that the same physical size or vocal relationship will carry identical meaning in every arrangement. Your performance participates in an event composed for particular spectators in a particular place. Economy sharpens that responsibility because fewer elements are available to explain what the action leaves unclear.

The later research has its own purpose

Thomas Richards’s At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions describes his practical work with Grotowski and connects it to the research called Art as Vehicle. Grotowski’s preface identifies Richards as a sustained collaborator. You encounter a later phase through someone who participated in it, with attention to physical action and impulse.

You need to keep that work distinct from the theatre-period record in Towards a Poor Theatre. The connections are important, but the aims and conditions developed over time. Reading both lets you see a continuing inquiry without treating every page as a lesson plan for a contemporary acting class. The durable demand is precision about what you do, why you do it, and what the action makes possible.