A repeatable action can remain alive. The Polish Laboratory Theatre asks you to investigate that relationship through the actor’s body, voice and contact with another person. Its history offers demanding questions about training while resisting a convenient formula that you can apply unchanged to every performer.
Training
Jerzy Grotowski began leading the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole in 1959, with Ludwik Flaszen as a central collaborator. The company moved to Wrocław in 1965. Its familiar Laboratory Theatre name covered changes in work and institutional form before the ensemble’s dissolution in 1984.
The Grotowski Institute’s historical encyclopedia dates the formal addition of “laboratory” to 1962 and the final dissolution to August 31, 1984. It also records members developing work independently of Grotowski. You should keep this historical ensemble distinct from the present-day Grotowski Institute and from his later research outside Poland.
Curriculum
The Institute’s account of Grotowski’s work describes a precise score of actions filled by fresh impulses. A score is an organized sequence that the performer can repeat. Precision and spontaneity are treated as complementary demands.
Via negativa, the negative way, directs attention to removing obstacles in the performer’s work. You can understand its practical question as: what interferes with an available action or response? It is different from accumulating impressive effects. The primary collection Towards a Poor Theatre is the central reading route into the training and production period.
Contribution and influence
The work invites you to distinguish the sequence you can specify from the life you cannot command into identical repetition. You may know where you turn, whom you address and what you need. The partner’s actual presence still changes the encounter.
That distinction matters in demanding performance. A reliable structure can support risk because you have something to return to. It can also help you notice unnecessary interference: a preparatory grimace, a habitual pause or an effort to prove that the moment is intense. Removing one of those habits may reveal more than adding another expressive effect.
Context and limitations
A historical company’s intensive research is not a ready-made curriculum for every actor. “Remove the obstacle” is a direction for investigation, not permission for a teacher to decide that any resistance must be broken. Your participation, physical capacity and judgment remain part of the work.
The history also changed beyond the production period into other forms of research. Treating every later activity as the same acting method obscures those differences. The Institute’s account explicitly resists a fixed system. Study the documented practice without making the founder’s reputation a substitute for evidence about what helps you now.
The productions give the principles form
You can understand the Laboratory Theatre more fully through its productions than through a list of training terms. In Akropolis, Grotowski and designer Józef Szajna relocated the world of Stanisław Wyspiański’s text to a concentration camp. The production brought speech, music, movement, and objects into a severe theatrical composition.
The audience and performers occupied the same space, yet the actors’ behavior created separation. This gives you an exact lesson about staging: physical closeness does not determine the relationship. Your attention, actions, and vocal world can make nearby spectators feel excluded from the world you inhabit.
Apocalypsis cum figuris, Grotowski’s final theatrical production, developed through an extended rehearsal process into a composition whose official public premiere came in 1969. Its history shows the importance of shaping material generated by actors. Invention and selection belong to the same artistic labor.
The score and the impulse
A score of actions gives you a form that can be repeated. Your impulse is the immediate movement toward doing something within that form. The relation between them is central to understanding the work. You can preserve the structure while renewing your contact with the partner, the space, and the action.
A score becomes inert when you merely execute it. An impulse becomes difficult to communicate when it has no form. The craft problem is their meeting. You need enough precision to know what you are doing and enough availability for the action to remain consequential.
You can recognize this problem even in a quiet scene. A turn toward the door has a known place in the sequence, but the reason for turning must remain active. Your partner may make leaving more difficult today. The action’s structure holds, while its immediate life changes through the encounter.
The voice within the whole action
The Laboratory Theatre’s productions make the voice inseparable from physical action and composition. Speech, song, rhythm, and vocal texture participate in the event. You can hear how a sound may establish a relation, transform a space, or carry an action beyond the literal information of the words.
This requires precision of listening as well as expression. A vocal choice has to meet the other performers and the whole sequence. Its force comes partly from placement and contrast. The actor’s resources become meaningful through how they are organized.
Reading a changing body of work
Towards a Poor Theatre brings together writings and records associated with the production period. You can study it alongside the documented productions and the contributions of collaborators such as Ludwik Flaszen. Later research took different forms and asked different questions.
Keeping those periods distinct lets you see the depth of the investigation. You are following artists who continued to reconsider what theatre could do and what preparation its performers required.
Related reading
Begin with Towards a Poor Theatre, edited by Eugenio Barba with a preface by Peter Brook. Compare its production-period material with the institutional chronology before extending conclusions to later work. Follow Improvisation, Action and Listening.
Source for further study: The Laboratory Theatre’s institutional history.