Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory

Polish theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski’s lifelong research, while taking various forms and undergoing multiple transformations, is unified by a single underlying propulsion: the work on the self with and through the other. Domnika Laster’s book pulls together threads of various aspects of Grotowski’s broadly construed notion of self-development from various phases of the theatre director’s research in order to approach the totality of his complex understanding of human relationality and self-realization of the human being. Laster engages in a critical analysis of key aspects of Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, including the (re)discovery of essence through the process of active remembering; the exploration of vigilance understood as enhanced states of awareness and an active wakefulness which lead to acts of witnessing and testification; the vertically structured work on the refinement of energies; and, finally, the numerous and complex lines of transmission conceived as a multidirectional process of relationality with the (imagined) ancestor to the broadly construed ‘twin’. While the present work explores these elements individually in order to elicit a fuller description and an in-depth analysis of each, all of these aspects are in reality various elements of one multifaceted and complex phenomenon of the work on oneself, which constituted one of Grotowski’s most essential preoccupations. Through a critical and theoretical engagement with the conceptual framework that grew directly out of his research, the volume demonstrates the ways in which Grotowski’s praxis constitutes a concrete and deliberate blurring of the boundaries of the self and other.