At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (review)

The ephemeral collaboration forged between directors and actors in rehearsal is always a source of great mystery. After thirty-seven years of work, the training methods of Jerzy Grotowski are still among the most mythologized and the least understood. Thomas Richards’s At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions is therefore an invaluable resource for actors and directors, as it demystifies some of Grotowski’s directorial techniques and offers rare insight into the daily mechanics of Grotowski’s theoretical and practical means of working.

Richards has worked with Grotowski since 1985, initially as a workshop participant at the University of California, Irvine and later as a workshop leader at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski at Pontedera, where he continues to serve as Grotowski’s collaborator. His ongoing relationship with Grotowski renders him an apt guide through a thorough examination of the period during which Grotowski developed his work with actors on physical actions. Since the writing of this book, Grotowski and Richards have turned their attention toward the role of “Art as Vehicle,” a topic which Grotowski briefly discusses in an essay at the end of the book, but Richards’s volume concerns itself exclusively with their foray into the study of physical actions.

Richards’s book is closely linked to that of a significant historical predecessor; both in style and theory, his account of Grotowski’s workshop and rehearsal processes mirrors the account of V. O. Toporkov in his book, Stanislavski In Rehearsal, The Later Years. Toporkov, who became a lead actor of the Moscow Art Theatre, worked with Stanislavski late in the master’s life, when he had turned his attention away from psychologically based acting choices toward work whose technique had its roots in physical action.

Richards makes frequent allusions to the Toporkov/Stanislavski collaboration and its relevance to his own work with Grotowski. In doing so, he reveals the intimate link between two directors whose work is commonly supposed to be diametrically opposed. Grotowski draws heavily upon Stanislavski’s method and continues the trajectory of exploration left unfinished due to Stanislavski’s death. Richards’s book illuminates Grotowski’s debt to Stanislavski while carefully charting his different applications of Stanislavski technique.

The cornerstone of the method of physical action lies in finding the truthful sequence of actions motivated by a character’s immediate circumstance. Only after the sequence of the actions has been set and an actor is fully able to repeat the structure he has created can spontaneous emotion flow freely: “Do not speak to me about feeling. We can not set feeling; we can only set physical action” (67), Stanislavski insists, in direct repudiation of his former method of setting an actor’s precise psychological score via emotional recall.

Richards reprints transcriptions from several of Grotowski’s lectures in which Grotowski, citing examples from Stanislavski’s work, defines the nature of physical actions. However, Richards is quick to remind the reader that Grotowski’s implementation of physical actions in rehearsal and performance differ considerably from Stanislavski’s:

In his work, Grotowski redefines the notion of organicity. For Stanislavski, ‘organicity’ signified the natural laws of ‘normal’ life which, by means of structure and composition, appear on the stage and become art; while for Grotowski, organicity indicates something like the potentiality of a current of impulses, a quasi-biological current that comes from the ‘inside’ and goes toward the accomplishment of a precise action.

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Richards makes all of his theoretical observations within the context of his practical work as an actor in rehearsal with Grotowski. Just as the method of physical actions relies on a careful building of steps, each grounded in a small truth, the power of Richards’s book lies in his willingness to share the struggles and painful setbacks he endured while striving to develop mastery of his craft. Richards nakedly offers up his own path of discovery for our use; he allows the reader to see the obstacles which led him to interpret...