Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...One of the most striking aspects of the visit to the U.S. of Jerzy Grotowski and his Polish Laboratory Theater is that it has forced drama critics to think about the nature of theater. The audience for the final play of a three-play series was limited to 40 people. This means that opening night was virtually a seminar in drama for the first-string critics of New York...
...actually about Auschwitz. The title is an implicit judgment on a civilization that plummets from its zenith to its lowest depths. The inmates of the death camp spend most of the evening dumping each other in and out of wheelbarrows, piecing together homely sections of stovepipe and finally, one by one, entering a crematorium. The playgoer's knowledge that the pipes that the members of the cast have strung about the stage will channel the smoke of their own burning flesh makes Akropolis the most powerful indictment of genocide that has been rendered in the theater...
...Grotowski, this consists of rendering states of being rather than moving in any given plot direction. The play contains stinging parodies of Biblical episodes such as the marriage feast of Cana and the death and resurrection of Lazarus. It also has the sexuality of a wet dream, with one character rubbing a loaf of bread against his groin until he achieves orgasm. Perhaps the most unsettling sight and sound of the evening is that of several characters in turn biting into the naked side of the Christ figure and sucking his blood...
...One reason for this is that both playgoer and actor are forced to divest themselves of casual everyday preoccupations and behavior patterns. As Grotowski puts it, he wants to demonstrate "what is behind the mask of common vision: the dialectics of human behavior. At a moment of psychic shock, a moment of terror, of mortal danger or tremendous joy, a man does not behave 'naturally.' " By attacking the whole concept of natural behavior, Grotowski divorces himself from the cult of psychological realism, as exemplified, in the Actors' Studio. The Actors' Studio idea is that the self...
...profanation, some sense of the sacred would be reborn and reconfirmed. Opposites imply each other. Grotowski shows an audience the passion of man, his agony, his desolation, his death, and above all the violation of his body and his spirit. By portraying the utter humiliation of man, Grotowski reminds one that no prouder being ever issued from the hand...