The Unwritten Grotowski: Theory and Practice of the Encounter by Kris Salata (review)

At the core of Jerzy Grotowski’s research is the encounter, understood first and foremost as a direct meeting. The substance of a meeting—be it theatrical or non-theatrical—depends upon the quality of presence of those involved. In this formidable and penetrating study, Kris Salata offers an extended rumination on and analysis of aliveness, presence, and encounter—the main undercurrents of Grotowski’s work. This ambitious project is not simply a deep consideration of the Polish theatre director’s praxis, however—although it does that too. It puts Grotowski in riveting conversation with key figures of continental philosophy and critical theory, most profoundly with Martin Heidegger, and to a lesser extent with Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze—among others. This unprecedented move is mutually illuminating; it sheds unexpected light on several important philosophical strands of the twentieth century and reanimates Grotowski’s research in performance.

The six chapters that comprise The Unwritten Grotowski proceed along dynamic, nonlinear paths in order to afford diverse points of entry and re-entry, deepening the subject matter upon each return. This structural strategy mirrors Salata’s own long-term engagement with the performance praxis of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, which is also marked by multiple returns. The book’s prologue consists of journal entries of Salata’s 2009 encounter with Thomas Richards’s opus The Living Room presented in living rooms across the world, and this time in Wrocław as part of the Zero Budget Festival. Richards, designated by Grotowski as his “universal heir,” is currently the artistic director of the Workcenter. Yet Salata’s systematic exposure to the Workcenter’s practice began much earlier in 2004. Salata’s scholarship on Grotowski and his legacy is therefore informed by repeated, embodied experiences—as a longtime, active witness of the work. Cognizant of his own subjectivity and the way it infuses his discourse, Salata largely resists describing his experiences of the work, instead writing “from them and towards them” (44, emphasis original).

Salata intervenes in contemporary debates on liveness by refocusing the discussion on the living nature of performance and asking what is truly alive in live performance: “The need to continuously examine our progressively virtual experience of life should not let us overlook the problem of deadness in a live performance […] there is a lot of deadness in live performance. Not all live encounter is alive” (46). He defines “true liveness” as an “exceptional surge and flow of vitality in performance” (47, emphasis original). Taking up Richard Schechner’s theorization of performance as “twice behaved behavior” or “restored behavior,” Salata suggests that considerations of aliveness and presence have been largely overlooked in discussions of acting as repetition. Salata’s keen analysis engages precisely with the “living drive” —or élan as Grotowski referred to it after Henri Bergson—underlying physical actions, consequently fleshing out and enhancing this dimension of performance theory (127). For Grotowski, liveness is intimately linked to what he considered the “morphemes of acting”: the organic flow of impulses that precede and initiate physical actions. A perceivable lack of vitality within a performance score indicates that the ligament between impulse and action has been severed. Salata further argues that the term “deed” is a more apt description of acting than “the objectified and neutralized notion of ‘behavior’” and—as a modification of Schechner’s formulation—proposes that “acting is a deed done again” (127).

Salata traces the notion of “deed” to the Polish Romantic tradition (c. 1822-1863) and its main proponent, the poet and dramatist Adam Mickiewicz, who regarded poetry as the highest form of doing. In fact, the entirety of his second chapter pivots around the relationship between Mickiewicz and Grotowski—a connection that Grotowski himself liked to accentuate in public and private contexts. Beyond the external resemblances, which include the fact that both men were political exiles and held chairs at the prestigious Collège de France, they shared...