“Women, Transmission, and Creative Agency in the Grotowski Diaspora”
Book chapter:
“Women, Transmission, and Creative Agency in the Grotowski Diaspora.ˮ Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the 20th & 21st Centuries. Ed. Kathryn Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit. Palgrave Macmillan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 221-235.
Abstract:
Most theatre historians rank Grotowski, along with Stanislavsky and Brecht, as one of the most influential theatre innovators of the twentieth century. However, there is a comparative paucity of scholarly texts on Grotowski’s work, and most of this scholarship is limited to the early theatrical period in Poland and the final phase of Grotowski’s research at his Italian workcenter, thereby overlooking the post-theatrical research he conducted with his collaborators during the periods known as Paratheatre, Active Culture, and the Theatre of Sources. Within this relatively limited extant literature, very little attention has been given to the work of women. In this chapter, I examine questions that emerged from my embodied research on transgenerational and transnational modes of transmission among women in the Grotowski diaspora, and explore the implications of these questions for women engaged in the type of contemporary performance practices discussed in this edited volume. My own Grotowski-based performance training is grounded in the embodied transmission processes I discuss here: I worked for four years in Paris with actors who were students of Ludwik Flaszen and Zygmunt Molik, two founding members of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. Later, I went on to work directly with Molik, the voice specialist of the company, as well as with the leading actress Rena Mirecka, also a founding member. Several other encounters with women belonging to the Grotowski diaspora eventually led me to conceive of this project.
Overview of Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance:
This book explores the role and centrality of women in the development of collaborative theatre practice, alongside the significance of collective creation and devising in the development of the modern theatre. Tracing a web of women theatremakers in Europe and North America, this book explores the connections between early twentieth century collective theatre practices such as workers theatre and the dramatic play movement, and the subsequent spread of theatrical devising. Chapters investigate the work of the Settlement Houses, total theatre in 1920s’ France, the mid-century avant-garde and New Left collectives, the nomadic performances of Europe’s transnational theatre troupes, street-theatre protests, and contemporary devising. In so doing, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in A History of Collective Creation (2013) and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (2013), in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation and devising are revealed as central—and women theatremakers revealed as progenitors of these practices.