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Reviewed by:
  • Grotowski's Empty Room
  • Dominika Laster
Grotowski's Empty Room. Edited by Paul Allain. Enactments Series. London: Seagull Books, 2009; pp. xix + 233. $29.00 cloth.

Grotowski's Empty Room, a collection of essays and texts authored by European scholars, artists, and critics and edited by Paul Allain, marks a significant contribution to the English-language literature on Jerzy Grotowski. Although the book's publication coincided with UNESCO's designation of 2009 as the "Year of Grotowski," the impulse was Richard Schechner's. Schechner, the Enactments series editor, initiated the volume well before the 2009 celebration. Encountering some of the texts during the fortieth-anniversary celebration of Odin Teatret in Denmark, Schechner initiated their translation and publication. The authors of the texts are Czech, French, Italian, Polish, and Swedish, and with the notable exceptions of Eugenio Barba and Zbigniew Osinski are largely unknown to English-language readers.

The volume is divided into three sections: the second and third sections are scholarly essays grouped geographically into Eastern and Western Europe, respectively, while the first section presents writings of a more personal nature. Part 1 opens with a short letter written to Grotowski by his former assistant Eugenio Barba on the occasion of the Golden Pegasus International Award presented to Grotowski on 30 May 1998. The letter, written eight months before Grotowski's death in January 1999, characterizes him as one who is active in his solitude, and positions him in relation to the award and his legacy: "For you now, although you appreciate recognition, all this is less than straw. All your thoughts and your energy are devoted to leaving your house in order so that your heirs, whether famous or nameless, may pursue your legacy: the invisible path on which we never cease to get lost and be led" (3-4).

Swedish film director and writer Marianne Ahrne wrote the second essay in this section. This beautifully crafted account, "The Man in Her Dream," is an excerpt from a novel by Ahrne, and while the larger work is fictional, this episode, recounting a young woman meeting Grotowski during a 1967 summer workshop at Odin Teatret, is based on her own experience. The ostensibly fictional nature of the narrative and its third-person voice liberates the text from the sentimentalism that often accompanies personal narrative, thereby bringing the reader close to Grotowski's private side.

A fragment of Osiński's meticulous historical account of Grotowski's early influences, the Polish antecedents of the Laboratory Theatre, opens the [End Page 482] second section. Osiński draws attention to the multiple points of contact between Grotowski's work and the traditions of the Reduta Institute, a laboratory for theatrical craft and pedagogy founded in 1919 in Warsaw by actor and director Julisz Osterwa and geologist Mieczysław Limanowski. These connections range from extensive methodological research into the craft of acting to ethical proclamations such as Reduta's designation of the "creative act as a 'disclosure-confession'" (42). Situating Grotowski's Teatr Laboratorium within the context of an already-existing indigenous tradition of an artistic or theatre "laboratory" delineates another, more localized, layer of continuity between Grotowski's work and the topography of Eastern European theatrical research from which he drew.

Performance anthropologist Leszek Kolankiewicz picks up this theme of artistic laboratory by tracing Grotowski's use of the scientific model in relation to the religious terminology that he deployed in his formulations during the early years of the Laboratory Theatre. Kolankiewicz asserts that, while Grotowski's work was not scientific sensu stricto, it nevertheless attempted experiments that were "not compromised and demanded the total involvement of the researcher" (61). Kolankiewicz proceeds to carry out a fascinating analysis of Grotowski's relationship to Kabbalah and Gnosis, demonstrating that Grotowski was interested in the two traditions as an active practice. Kolankiewicz further draws an analogy between Grotowski's research and alchemy, which he argues has always been closely tied to one mystical tradition or another. Kolankiewicz characterizes this research model as the empirical work on the alchemist's psycho-physiological life, and aligns the work undertaken by Grotowski on the transformation of energy with the alchemical process of transmutatio, which is triggered...

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