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What is there NOT to say about Grotowski TODAY?

Y.E.S.! Young and Emerging Scholars on Grotowski
Sponsored by the Lab on Polish Culture Abroad
Institute of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków

What is there NOT to say about Grotowski TODAY?

In Wanda Świątkowska’s chapter on Hamlet Study in Darius Kosiński’s forthcoming book on the 13 Rows’ Opole productions from 1959–1964, she details the company’s last, and most provocative, boundary-pushing Opole performance. The company’s experiment in collective directing was brutal, violent, and struck at the heart of taboo subjects–sexual violence, Polish antisemitism, and the culture clash between the intelligentsia and reactionary conservatives, represented by a Jewish Hamlet and goy Polish Peasants who rape Ophelia, spit in Hamlet’s face, and ultimately kill them both.

Grotowski was not safe. Grotowski exploded on the scene, his reverberations so shocking and profound that many layers, many nuances of his various ‘landings’ have gone unnoticed, under-reported or un-translated–and thus remain absent from the larger, canonical discourse on Grotowski and his legacy.

Yet, in our time Grotowski has become an obligatory fixture in the canon, banal, “run-of-the-mill”, overly esoteric and yet also oversimplified. His work is painfully abbreviated in curricula, and in peoples’ understanding. And at this time, when our world seems increasingly upside-down, his critical approach to theatre, culture, and human relationships may help us. Now is the time to encourage exploration! Now is the time to look at how Grotowski’s contributions refract on our particular political, social, and cultural situations today.  The current “Grotowski discourse” does not “allow” us to do so.

Darius Kosiński points to several under-reported and under-analyzed aspects of Grotowski’s early work that have strong resonance with pressing conversations today: the connection of theatrical work to ‘proper politics’; gender equality and the authority of the male director; queer sexualities, genders and ‘taboo’ representations; the search for secular ritual; cross-cultural connections and ‘cultural appropriation’; and the depravity of modern violence–in mainstream institutions, in everyday life, and in all of us.  

It is not that these issues have never been broached in relation to Grotowski. Rather, these issues lie buried in the discourse to keep Grotowski palatable as a Saint “above it all.”
So, we dig in, blaspheme, and turn that soil.

#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Asylum Seekers, Pride!, Climate Catastrophe, Rising Nationalism and Fascism, and the Technologization of Daily Life, all call for a re-examination of Grotowski, his life work, and their relevance NOW!

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