[p. 175]

Jennifer Lavy

Theoretical Foundations of Grotowski's
Total Act, Via Negativa, and Conjunctio Oppositorum

The only communication that has true value is communication that is an enhancement to the other person.

-- Martin Buber

Grotowski's mentality is such that it attaches itself to creative ideas which he in turn uses as instruments of personal investigation. The logic implicit within them is then pushed to the extreme. It is not a question of influence but of a kind of transmission. The torch is taken up once again but not as a relic, to be extinguished with reverence or be placed under a globe, nor like a sacred flame to be piously preserved, rather a flame capable of lighting a new hearth.

-- Raymonde Temkine

The three theoretical concepts most central to Poor Theatre as this aesthetic was developed by Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theatre in the early 1960s are conjunctio oppositorum, via negativa, and total act. Although these are terms of art specific to Poor Theatre, they represent a reformulation of ideas which have been in circulation, in some cases, for centuries. Even as a young man, Grotowski had wide-ranging interests and a passion for philosophical thought. While he did occasionally write theory or philosophy, he was first and foremost a theatre artist seeking solutions to the real theatrical challenges he encountered. Many of the major questions Grotowski asked are the same ones asked by scores of people before him: What do truth and authenticity in acting and performance mean? What is the actor-spectator relationship? What constitutes the greatest manifestation of the actor's craft, and how might we work to achieve it? Why do we create theatre—what is its function within community? His answers to these questions defined his Poor Theatre. In this essay, I propose not only to enhance our understanding of Poor Theatre's key concepts but also to gesture towards their practical application in Polish Laboratory Theatre work. I will develop these concepts by drawing upon the theories of Patanjali and his yoga sutras, Nagarjuna and the Hindu concept of sunyata, Zeami and his treatises on the art of Japanese Noh drama, Denis Diderot, Martin Buber, Victor Turner, Niels Bohr, and Grotowski himself. However, before turning to that task, I will provide a brief [p. 176] overview of the theorists not selected for this study to demonstrate the potential scale of a comprehensive investigation.

Grotowski borrowed from often contradictory philosophical systems which, in addition to those already mentioned, included structuralism, psychoanalysis ("Not about psychology in relation to character but rather how, involuntarily, to draw out certain characteristics and personal energies in order to colour the scenic action"(1)), and Marxism. During his university study at Moscow's GITIS, he set out to become the world's foremost expert on Konstantin Stanislavski so that he could begin his own practical theatre research at the place where Stanislavski had left off. He also became fascinated with the theories of Meyerhold after reading the complete mise-en-scene documentation for The Inspector General. But of the Russian directors, the one most influential for Grotowski was probably Evgeny Vakhtangov, whose work extended Stanislavski's theories of physical action. Grotowski studied with Yuri Zavadsky, a former actor with Vakhtangov and Stanislavski—and read Vakhtangov's essays. Because these directors and their theories are regularly invoked in studies about Grotowski, I will not take them up further at this time.

Antonin Artaud is often cited as having influenced Grotowski's theories, and although there are some similarities between their visions, it has already been established that Grotowski did not learn about Artaud or his writings until after the notions of conjunctio oppositorum, via negativa, and total act were already developed (see Temkine and Barba). Similarities to Artaud are coincidental and are more likely the influence of the Polish theoretician-playwright S.I. Witkiewicz's (Witkacy) influence on Grotowski. Witkiewicz had formulated theories comparable to Artaud's but had done so nearly two decades earlier.(2)

As early as 1963, Eugenio Barba, who spent 1961-64 in Opole as Grotowski's apprentice, was writing about the work there as an "anthropological expedition" into the "reservoir of hereditary experiences that science designates sometimes as 'primitive thought' (Lévi-Strauss), sometimes as 'archetypes' (Jung), 'collective representations' (Durkheim), 'categories of the imagination' (Mauss and Hubert), or even as 'elementary thoughts' (Bastian)."(3) I believe these [p. 177] theories would be most useful in connection with Grotowski's Objective Drama phase and even elements of the earlier paratheatrical projects.

The selection of theorists in this essay represents my interest in understanding the intercultural foundations of Poor Theatre. Grotowski was drawn to Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern philosophies at a very young age. His interest was fostered by family members, including his maternal grandparents and his mother, who was fascinated with Hinduism and took Grotowski to India. During Grotowski's college years, scholarships enabled him to travel widely, spending time in Paris as well as in Egypt and other areas of the Middle East. And after he had accepted the directorship of Teatr 13 Rzedow, he spent August 1962 in China. Barba says Grotowski returned from China with information and impressions about what he saw there that had direct bearings upon his work but indicates that Grotowski was more influenced by the Eastern philosophies which he studied in books than by direct encounters with theatrical traditions on his travels.(4)

This simplest way to think about Grotowski's notion of conjunctio oppositorum is as the necessity of bringing together opposite forces in order to create a unified whole. By 1967, in an article written to explain the aims of his institute, Grotowski articulated the theory of conjunction oppositorum in his list of "conditions essential to the art of acting" which would be made the object of a methodical investigation: "To stimulate a process of self-revelation, going back as far as the subconsciousness, yet canalizing this stimulus in order to obtain the required reaction."(5) On a basic level, this theory can be traced through Niels Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, which emerged from quantum physics and the knowledge that the electron is both particle and wave—which had previously been considered an impossible contradiction. The Principle of Complementarity "allows the possibility of accommodating widely divergent human experiences in an underlying harmony," and holds that "seemingly irreconcilable points of view need not be contradictory. These, on deeper understanding may be found to be mutually illuminating; the two apparently opposing views being partial views of a 'totality' seen from [p. 178] different planes."(6) Grotowski's brother worked as a physicist at the Bohr Institute. I believe the notion of mutual illumination and wholeness gained because of the opposing forces appealed to Grotowski's political sensibilities in a time when the arts were carefully censored by the government. This principle effectively can be seen as a bridge bringing Western science together with Eastern wisdom. In many ways, as Grotowski applies this concept to the actor's work, he rejects the notion of Denis Diderot's paradox as it has conventionally been understood.

Our common understanding of Diderot's paradox tends to be reduced to Lee Strasberg's famous paraphrase: "to move the audience the actor must himself remain unmoved."(7) Although Diderot did think about theatre and the actor's situation as mutually exclusive binary oppositions, when we revisit what Diderot actually said and why he said it, we can see how that reduction oversimplifies the argument. Diderot understood that two actors playing the same role would play it differently, "expressing entirely different thoughts and matter."(8) He saw the play's words as no more than symbols "which need action, gesture, intonation, expression, and whole context of circumstance, to give them their full significance"(9) and so believed we should not expect actors' performances to correspond precisely. However, he identified "unequal acting" as a fault of "players who play from the heart,"(10) relying upon natural inclinations as their only resource. In combining his notion that "Nature without Art [cannot] make a great actor when nothing happens on the stage exactly as it happens in nature"(11) with his observation that "The extravagant creature who loses his self-control has no hold on us; this is gained by the man who is self-controlled",(12) Diderot effectively called for discipline in the actor's craft. From an outsider's perspective, and with his ideas about theatre's possibilities bound by the type of [p. 179] theatre and acting prevalent in his day, Diderot constructed a binary whereby actors are either ruled by their sensibility or by their thought/judgment. When Diderot says that great actors must have no sensibility,(13) he means more than simple emotion. For Diderot, "sensibility" describes a host of conditions ranging from a "disposition which accompanies organic weakness [to] vivacity of imagination [. . .] faintings [. . .] to loss of self-control [. . .] to having no clear notion of what is true, good, and fine, to being unjust, to going mad."(14) The unbridled emotion—even psychic break—to which Diderot refers spins into an indulgence on the part of the actor which he views as generally unpleasurable and incapable of moving the audience. However, the thoughtful, disciplined actor advocated by Diderot has passion "with a definite course," where "the accents are the same, the positions are the same, the movements are the same."(15) He suggests that even the more desirable of the sensibilities are completely absent in thinking actors and that all ability to prevent oneself from spiraling into madness is lost in actors with sensibility.

But ultimately, Diderot wants an actor who will "play [the part] so well that you think he is the person."(16) With this, he introduces another layer of the paradox: the problem of the actor being himself and simultaneously not himself—presenting a lie of self. Given a culture which privileges the text as Diderot's did and as our own still does, it is easy to see how this can be construed as deception. But we cannot presume that Diderot attempted to think about possible solutions outside the realm of the theatre he knew. He has attached the notion of deception to an actor whose task is assumed to be to faithfully represent a text. As we move to the avant-garde and Grotowski's work, we see Grotowski's productions with the Polish Laboratory Theatre as a way not so much around the paradox as straight through the heart of it, asking the same questions that had prompted Diderot's formulation of the paradox in the first place. It's actually important for Diderot, as Strasberg also asserts, that "Our response to the actor is a total one [that] does not distinguish easily between the actor as a personality and the role he is [p. 180] playing."(17) This notion of totality as it moves the audience appears to answer Diderot's own question about what true talent is.

As already discussed, such a totality is part of the goal described by the Principle of Complementarity, and the goal of Grotowski's practical research was to develop methods through which the actors could strive to achieve total act: the crux of an actor's art through which one reveals oneself completely to another (the spectator) in a self-reflexive act that does not distinguish between character and self. In total act, Grotowski articulates a dialogical encounter with the spectator in metaphysical terms, which can be difficult to trace out without it seeming as though the sole purpose has become religion. To the contrary, Grotowski firmly believed that spirituality and discourse of the sacred were not the sole property of religion. Even when he borrowed from theological philosophies, as he did with Martin Buber's dialectic theory, Grotowski's new application of the theory did not also borrow the religion. Buber was among Grotowski's favorite authors. The themes of authentic encounter, sacrifice, and risk which run through Grotowski's discussion can also be found in Buber's concept of I-Thou, which says it is only when a human being is "concentrated into a unity" that he can " proceed to his encounter [with You]—wholly successful only now—with mystery and perfection."(18) But to arrive at this vision of an actor-spectator relationship as total act, Grotowski had to eradicate Diderot's mutually exclusive binaries. He cultivated the notion of conjunctio oppositorum and devised a methodical approach (via negativa) through which total act might be achieved.

Conjunctio oppositorum is also critical for dealing with the relationship between spontaneity and formal technique in Grotowski's theatre. His response to Margaret Croyden on this subject merits quoting at length:

Structure or form is a discipline; it is significant because it is a process of signs that stimulates the spectator's associations. This discipline is organized and structured; without it we have chaos and pure dilettantism; this is the first thing. The second thing: if you have structure which stimulates the audience, and if the actor does not express 'the total act,' if he does not reveal all of himself (I mean his instinctive and biological roots), action is prevalent, but it is not a living action. It is significant, but it is not alive. A great work is an expression of contradiction, of opposites. Discipline is obtained through spontaneity, but it always remains a discipline. Spontaneity is curbed by discipline, and yet there is always [p. 181] spontaneity. These two opposites curb and stimulate each other and give radiance to the action. Our work is neither abstract nor naturalistic. It is natural and structured, spontaneous and disciplined.(19)

This passage succinctly maps out the dialectic nature of the foundational concepts upon which almost all the theory of Grotowski's production phase was built. In it, he reveals the structuralist side of his method, showing himself to be consciously and deliberately taking it up as a responsibility for him and the actors to develop systems of signs for the "spectator's associations." His distinguishing of the spectators' associations from actors' associations is important because for Grotowski the two were not necessarily the same. In addition to the structure of signs through which the actor works, Grotowski says the action must be a "living action." He situated the "living action" as an element of any "great work," which can mean one in which the actor is expressing total act. Total act can be thought of in this way as a vehicle for the actor's expression. But what, then, is the "great work" an expression of? Of contradiction and opposites—incorporating not only the content, the meaning of the signs communicated, but also what we might call the methodology employed by the director and actors in order to communicate those signs.