Grotowski: A Guide

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was a Polish theatre director, cultural innovator, and researcher, and one of the leading figures of twentieth-century theatre. Grotowski’s wide-ranging and original investigations into the performing arts became known internationally through his texts and training, participatory projects and studies of traditional ‘source’ techniques, and the world-renowned productions staged by his Laboratory Theatre ensemble, including Akropolis (1962), The Constant Prince (1965), and Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1969). In his preface to Grotowski’s influential book Towards a Poor Theatre, Peter Brook wrote that ‘no one else in the world, to my knowledge no one since Stanislavsky, has investigated the nature of acting, its phenomenon, its meaning, the nature and science of its mental-physical-emotional processes as deeply and completely as Grotowski’.

Grotowski: A Guide offers an accessible introduction to this fascinating and complex practitioner, tracing the artistic journey from his childhood in wartime Poland, through his leadership of the Laboratory Theatre and eventual emigration during the communist period, to his final lectures as a professor of Theatre Anthropology at the Collège de France and the transmission of his creative practice at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. Drawing together new and previously untranslated archival research, the book provides essential information and insights about the development of Grotowski’s work — and about the social and political contexts in which it evolved — that have been unavailable to many international readers up to now.

Dariusz Kosiński is Professor of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and Research Director of the Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Poland. From 2010 to 2013, he was Programme Director of the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, where he led and facilitated various research activities and educational programmes on, and inspired by, the work of Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre. In 2012, he collaborated with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards on the Polish edition of Grotowski’s Collected Texts — the first published in any language. His books include Polish Theatre of Transformation (2007, forthcoming in English), Polish Theatre Histories (in Polish 2010, in German 2012), and a monograph on Grotowski’s early performances, Grotowski: Profanations (in Polish 2015). He is a co-editor of the Routledge Icarus series on the theory and practice of ‘theatre as a laboratory’.