Grotowski’s approach aroused considerable interest among the major avant-garde directors in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among those he has worked.

Grotowski’s approach aroused considerable interest among the major avant-garde directors in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among those he has worked with are Barrault and Brook as well as Joe Chaikin and Luca Ronconi, all of whom also participated in his 1975 ‘research university’ in Wroclaw, together with his leading disciple, Eugenio Barba.

Grotowski himself rejected such direct attempts to create audience participation as ‘a new myth’, pointing out that true intimacy is more likely to be achieved through physical distance.

Grotowski’s only true followers were his own acting group, although the Polish Laboratory Theatre only achieved one independent production before their dissolution, Thanatos Polski (Polish Lament, 1981), a highly abstract and musically structured participatory piece, directed by Ryszard Cieslak, with an all too accurate poster depicting two coiled serpents swallowing each other’s tails.

Barba’s Odin Teatret founded in 1964 and transferred from Oslo to Denmark in 1966, has remained within the circle of the stage while rhetorically announcing ‘the death of the theatre’, and condemning even experimental theatres as ‘the blasphemous caricatures of a ghost’.

Specializing in the ‘transcultural analysis of performance’, ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) applies the techniques and artistic approach of Oriental traditions to develop a western form of physical stylization.

However, just as this remained a technique for actor-training, rather than becoming a therapeutic process with little theatrical relevance, so Barba’s work has retained the dimension of stage performance, while moving from a drama rooted in myth towards akin to international circus.

Myths were used as images of ‘the worn-out stereotypes that make up our habitual social conduct’ to reveal these as inherently primitive, repressive and violent. Against these false myth were set ‘ritual’ behaviour patterns, ‘biological reactions that spring up in extreme situations’, where the socially conditioned gestures of everyday life are transformed into a ‘natural physical language’, which paradoxiacally was also a ‘sacerdotal sign language’ of hieratic attitudes.

Feraï attempted to present a universal paradigm of social structures by combining the legend of King Fredegod – whose rule was so Draconian that valuables could be left on the open street, and whose death was concealed for three years in order to preserve social discipline – with the myth of Alcestis, Pherai with the Faeroes.

One another level the play is a conflict between male and female principles, symbolized in the three props that formed the only materisl or scenic aids in the production” the masculine symbol of a knife with leather thongs, which was used as a whip representing political repression, as a sabre for the duel, as a royal sceptre, as a flute; the feminine and passive symbol of a blanket, used to represent the subjugated kingdom, swaddling clothes, Alcestis’ corpse; and an ivory egg, symbolizing life and death, a skull and the fertile womb.

The figure of Kaspar Hauser has almost become a hallmark indicating Grotowski’s influence, being used as an image of ‘natural man’ versus society not only by Barba, but also by Joseph Chaikin (in The Mutation Show, 1971) and by Brook (1973).

When the 16-year-old boy, who had been kept totally isolated from all human contact since birth, appeared in Numbering in 1828, he immediately struck the public imagination as the epitome of ideal innocence. His murder shortly afterwards came to symbolize the death of the spirit under the pressures of social conditioning; and his story has since become a familiar literary archetype.

Barba’s version exactly parallels Hndke’s play in scenes where Kaspar learns to walk, or where ‘the community as educator’ makes its appearance.

As in so much avant-garde work, the main problem with a production like Barba’s Kaspariana, which was also referred to as an atheist mass, is that any challenge to religion presupposes a climate of belief, which has become increasingly marginalized in western society.

The eclectic mix of archaic languages in Kaspariana, and the choice of an Oriental comparison to define the aims of his group, point to the direction taken by Barba in the 1970s.

Taking the avant-garde cult of primitivism a step further, instead of receiving foreign images through the filter of anthropological studies or in a western context, the actors became anthropologists.

Using Danish as a working language in Italy or Venezuela automatically restricted communication to a physical level, so that the Odin Teatret offerings in the early stages of their global tour were dances.

The purpose of this street-theatre in gathering spectators from the whole community , who would then perform something in their turn, was to foster indigenous, non-professional theatre groups that would act as ‘the cells of a new social body’.

Barba labeled them Third Theatre.

Thus for Barba’s group to act as a catalyst it was essential for their art to change, while conversely, if somewhat solipsistically, changes in their performance could be seen as guaranteeing tan equivalent effect on the global ‘cells’ of the Third Theatre, and two of the various Odin Teatret’s productions from this period are representative.

Come! And the day will be ours (1976) was based on historical incidents and images from the conquest of the American West, the title coming from the last letter sent by Custer before he and his soldiers were all massacred at Little Bighorn in 1876.

The spectators were thus an integral part of the action, representing the tribespeople around a campfire or city crowds at the circus.

The abstraction of these terms reflected the generalization of the theme, in which the genocidal process of American colonization was intended to be merely a paradigm for ‘the way one man destroys another in the name of values which he believes to be universal..the violence hidden behind words such as Altruism, Progress and Truth’

The Million (1979), prepared after the group’s return from global travel, offers a fuller example of such reciprocity and its implications.

Primitivism and ritualistic drama became a striking display of physical virtuosity.

Another director to have labeled himself explicitly as Grotowski’s disciple is Richard Schechner, whose Performance Group in New York achieved overnight notoriety with Dionysus in 69 (1968).

In Dionysus in 69, the ambivalence of the god was intended to represent the tendency to fascism inherent in the retreat of the ‘new left’ from political revolution, to the introverted sexual liberation of the drug culture.

This was Schechner’s most overt attempt to recreate ritual drama, an aim which led The Drama Review under his editorship to explore modes of non-verbal communication, the connections between human and animal behavior patterns in play and ritualized activity, and the types of religious performance surviving in primitive cultures.

As opposed to a conventional play (an action presented by professionals to a separated and passive collection of individuals), ritual is defined as an action in which all the members of a community actively participate, one which symbolically or even actually transforms the status and identity of the group, depending on the degree of participation.

Euripides’ play was restructured into an initiation rite. ‘Opening ceremonies’ were designed to create contact between actors and the audience, who were carried individually from the entrance to the performing area in explicit imitation of ceremonial practices described by Van Gennep.

The rhythmic writhing and groaning of the group, naked and in unison, the men stretched out flank to flank on the floor with the women standing above, legs straddling them from shoulder to buttock to form an arched tunnel of flesh, created the dominant image of a birth-canal, adapted from a New Guinea rite of passage.

This was repeated twice, at the beginning, when the actor playing Dionysus was ‘reborn’ as a god, being literally pushed through the ‘passage’ by pelvic thrusts, and again, reversed, at the death of Pentheus.

Instead of being torn to pieces, the actor was symbolically reingested into the community that he had tried to dominate as an individual.

Indeed certain sections of the performance could not be completed without a predetermined response from a specific number of spectators, while at the same time simple rules were laid down to increase the degree of participation.

As Dionysus repeatedly announced, ‘It’s a celebration, a ritual, an ordeal, an ecstasy’, and the audience were encouraged to join ‘the community’ by stripping and dancing with the performers as a positive act, even though by the time this level of participation was reached the group had a negative significance in terms of the play, mindlessly following a megalomaniac quasi-fascist leader in acts of violence.

Indeed, then Schechner gave his audience a more specific function – as in Commune (1971), where fifteen randomly selected spectators were required to act as villagers in the My Lai massacre, or find others from the audience to take their places – the actors’ relationship to them was clearly one of intimidation.

In addition, participation only becomes more than an illusionistic device when it can change the outcome of the performance. This possibility was built into Dionysus, though in a way which effectively precluded its realization.

Schechner derived his term ‘Environmental Theatre’ from Kaprow’s concept of the Happening, and tried to incorporate such disruptions by interspersing organized action with ‘open’ sections.

But in his later work participation was limited to physically following the action, with scenes being played throughout the available area, forcing spectators to change their position in order to see, or as a simultaneous montage so that spectators had to be selective, each making their own logical connections.

This movement through a complex arrangement of the play in Schechner’s Makbeth (1969) , where the performance was given focus by the way groupings of spectators gathered and dispersed.

Genet’s play, once a revolutionary text for the avant-garde, had now become a ‘modern classic’ for Schechner; and just as Marowitz had done with Hamlet, he ‘deconstructed’ it, eliding scenes and altering sequences.

He also used extensive doubling, as well as cross-gender casting.

Instead of sexual/political revolution, the mainspring of the performance became theatre itself, both experimental theatre and brothels being seen as in the business of selling fantasy.

Schechner wanted to show that ‘theatre is a “house of illusion”, sister to the whorehouse. After all, one of the root meanings of prostitute is substitute: someone who stands for someone else ( in the mind/body of the client)’

But the metaphor works both ways. Here the Performance Group ideal of audience participation was explicitly voyeurism, a perhaps unintentional acknowledgement of what had always been essentially the effect of their attempts to create direct physical involvement.

Other radical American groups followed much the same trajectory in their careers, such as Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre, which developed from a closed acting workshop to ritualistic performances of archteypal material with The Serpent in the same year as Schechner’s Dionysus.

Chaikin, who had started out with the Living Theatre and worked with Peter Brook on US, began developing The Serpent following sessions with Grotowski and Ciéslak at a Grotowski workshop laboratory in 1967.

The Open Theatre’s subsequent productions included one of Jarry’s Ubu plays, along with three developed out of ensemble improvisations: Terminal (1969), The Mutation Show (1971) which was partly based on the histories of Kaspar Hauser and the wolf-girl Kamala, and Nightwalk (1973).

In both the Open Theatre and even more in the Performance Group, the merging of illusion and reality and the stress on total commitment, together with the subjective nature of the dramatic event, turned productions into a form of psychotherapy.

Personal tensions constantly plagued the Open Theatre, fostered by the incompatibility between ensemble creation and productions that expressed Chaikin’s vision as a director.

The model for all Grotowski’s disciples was that of the Asian performer whose training was seen as ‘holistic’ and ‘the primary means of personal growth’. Their ideal was to recreate a shamanistic performance exorcizing the ‘disease’ of the community in the form of taboos, hostilities, fears.

Schechner’s claim that ‘the locus of the essential theatre shifted from the page to somewhere between the navel and genitals of each performer’ – from his point of view a positive and progressive state of affairs – was unfortunately all too accurate.