Victor Turner, in The Anthropology of Performance, asked much the same question about social drama as Croyen asked Grotowski above: "How to account for the fact that the social drama is processually 'structured' before any story about it has been told."(20) With conjunctio oppositorum, you don't view that as a liability but as an opportunity to transcend ordinary significance. One must not exclude the other.

How does this theory get developed? As already indicated, Grotowski had a strong interest in Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern philosophies from the time of his youth. We also know that Grotowski spent August 1962 in China. Eugenio Barba, who was apprenticed to Grotowski at the time, says he returned with information and impressions about what he saw there that had direct bearings on the work:

[Grotowski] had noticed that in the Peking Opera the actors begin an action by starting out in the opposite direction to where they want to end up. If they want to move to the left, they take a step towards the right and then go to their objective [p. 182] on the left. This observation became an effective working tool that we baptized 'the Chinese principle', and under the same name it also entered into the terminology and practice of Odin Teatret.(21)

If we can look past Barba's colonialist narrative, we can see this marking a moment to which the principle of opposition became a conscious factor in the Grotowski's work. Historically, this is still more than a year earlier than the theory of total act would be fully developed and just at the beginning of the rehearsal process of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, when physical, vocal, and rhythmic training would become a continuing, daily activity and the theory of via negativa would become clarified.

Grotowski developed techniques permitting actors, in collaboration with directors, to structure roles through a sign system within which they could explore personal associations. These personal associations are another essential vehicle by which the actor can engage in the act of self revelation towards absolute presence, oneness with the self, and an open, authentic encounter with the spectator. Grotowski's conjunctio oppositorum brings together apparent opposites in a dynamic relationship that, he believes, are necessary for any work to transcend the ordinary in a living, dynamic way.

Notions of transcendence are critical to Grotowski's concepts of via negativa and total act; however, tracing out the theoretical foundations of via negativa and total act as separate concepts is a sticky task for two reasons. First, the two terms are implicitly bound together—via negativa being the discipline or praxis through which an actor works to achieve total act. Second, the collision of theories feeding in to Grotowski's theatrical vision does not readily lend itself to linear description. It is in this dense intersection that we can note clear strains of Patanjali's yoga sutras, Nagarjuna's doctrine of sunyata, and Martin Buber's I-Thou.

In his yoga sutras, the ancient Indian philosopher Patanjali offers the possibility of spiritual transformation not through mystical experience but through logical meditation practices and philosophical introspection. When Patanjali writes, "The purpose of Yoga discipline is to eliminate the impurities caused by the process of conditioning so that the Light of Pure Unconditioned Awareness may shine"(22) this awareness is a oneness with your true nature, [p. 183] referred to in the yoga sutras as the Atman. Into this sutra, we could simply insert via negativa and conjunction oppositorum to arrive at a basic philosophy for actor training that essentially says the actor's main task on the way to total act involves not accruing skills so much as eradicating obstacles.

Until the theory of via negativa was developed, Grotowski's actors had practiced conventional training methods which usually sought solutions to some kind of "how-to" question related to a specific production need: "How does one show irritation? How should one walk? How should Shakespeare be played?"(23) We might call this a via positiva approach to actor training, with actors amassing skills from singing, dancing, and fencing to horseback riding. While this approach does build an arsenal of useful skills, they function much like vocabulary in language: You either have the word/skill or you don't. It doesn't have any bearing on expression. But Grotowski's aim was to understand and work at the theatrical event reduced to its most necessary elements—the actor and spectator. What happens in this relationship? How does communication occur? And how might this relationship be optimized? The simple fact of possessing skills did not optimize the actor-spectator relationship so crucial to the then-developing aesthetic of poor theatre. Methods had to be explored for liberating the actor's expressiveness within elaborated sign structures.

By 1967, Grotowski had formulated his answers. In an article explaining the aim of his institute, he stated three "conditions essential to the art of acting" as comprising the object of methodical investigation, including "to eliminate from the creative process the resistances and obstacles caused by one's own organism, both physical and psychic (the two forming a whole)."(24) This process of elimination, while very clearly focused on facilitating creative process, depends upon a union of the mind and the body. Such mastery is not merely one of building muscles, though, it is intricately bound in with notions of wholeness not only of self but of community. The other two essential conditions reinforce the metaphysics underlying that quoted above, showing a dual process involved in working towards total act that is discussed elsewhere in this essay.

[p. 184] Grotowski's statements of essential conditions read like the yoga sutras and, in fact, among the sutras of Patanjali, we can find a similar concept: "With the removal of obstacles there comes a mastery of cognition and action which ranges from the smallest to the biggest,"(25) and "Thus we may cultivate the power of concentration and remove the obstacles to enlightenment which cause all our sufferings."(26) According to Hindu thought, the word "obstacle" suggests a particular emphasis: Obstacles present a consequence of "alienation from the Reality within us."(27) Among the obstacles described by Patanjali are those psychological blocks which also form a central target of Grotowski's via negativa: "ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and the desire to cling to life."(28) To work through via negativa, Grotowski said,

[. . .] one must ask the actor: "What are the obstacles blocking you on your way towards the total act which must engage all your psycho-physical resources, from the most instinctive to the most rational?" We must find out what it is that hinders him in the way of respiration, movement and—most important of all—human contact. What resistances are there? How can they be eliminated?(29)

He identified key obstacles getting in actors' way and preventing their progress towards total act: breathing capacity and control, physical flexibility, and even an insensitivity to—or perhaps lack of understanding about—the interpersonal relationship actors must have with other actors as well as spectators.

Grotowski began to guide his actors to work at the level of impulse, striving for ways to free them from what he saw as a gap in time between inner impulse and outer reaction. Even the slightest hesitation to follow through on an impulse renders it less potent, less direct in some capacity, and, conversely, opens up the temptation for the actor to "edit" the moment of expression or inject some cliché gesture. He developed methods of training that could help actors confront their personal blocks and could remain flexible enough for actors to continue using them even as their personal obstacles changed, shifted, or returned. Many of these [p. 185] exercises were described by Barba in his 1966 article, "Actor's Training," which appears in Towards a Poor Theatre. All of these exercises, many borrowed from hatha yoga, aim to develop organicity—a union of body and mind, impulse and action—not to build muscles or gymnastic virtuosity. Like Patanjali's meditation, actor training at the Polish Laboratory Theatre was a "process of devolution," an evolution in reverse through which the performer simultaneously "goes inward, seeking always the cause behind the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached,"(30) and goes outward, seeking to manifest that innermost reality physically and vocally at the moment and level of impulse.

The theory of via negativa helps us understand that for Grotowski, in the theatrical event, expression is a property adhering to impulses as they are made visible; the privileged level of communication with the spectators resides in the impulse, not in the physical gesture or the spoken word. A training which helps actors achieve simultaneity of impulse and action would help the actor's body cease to be an obstacle to direct communication with the audience. Using imagery reminiscent of Artaud's, Grotowski wrote that by bringing impulse and action together, the actor's body would burn and vanish, no longer preventing the actor from following through on an impulse even for a second due to physical inability or fear.(31) This is an element of total act.

Nagarjuna's doctrine of sunyata follows almost the precise trajectory as that outlined above. Barba has discussed how the concept of sunyata fit into Grotowski's theories at the time:

Sunyata, the Void, is not nothingness. It is non-duality in which the object does not differ from the subject. The self and belief in the self are the causes of error and pain. The way to escape from error and pain is to eliminate the self. This is the Perfect Wisdom, the enlightenment that can be attained through a via negativa, denying worldly categories and phenomenons to the point of denying the self and, by so doing, reaching the Void.(32)

In order for a company of actors to follow this via negativa toward total act, they must change their training regimen from a unified group activity to an individualized endeavor, with the principle of elimination guiding the choice and development of exercises. Training, [p. 186] therefore, becomes an individual journey of self-knowledge toward self-revelation not as a fixed value but as direction. Borrowing again from Patanjali's yoga sutras, the actor must cultivate an attitude of non-attachment if he is to view the obstacles he must renounce as "mere restlessness in the mind"(33) rather than as something he really needs or wants. By eliminating our obstacles, says Patanjali, we are "freeing ourselves from imaginary needs and desires."(34) Grotowski says that the point

is not to renounce part of our nature—all should retain its natural place: the body, the heart, the head, something that is 'under our feet' and something that is 'over the head.' All like a vertical line, and this verticality should be held taut between organicity and the awareness. Awareness means the consciousness which is not linked to language (the machine for thinking), but to Presence.(35)

Just as the desire not to fall may prevent us from learning to walk on our hands, the desire to protect our own egos may prevent us from fully knowing ourselves and from having an authentic encounter with another person. Like the Hindus, and like Martin Buber's dialectic philosophy, Grotowski saw the sacred in each person's true nature, in the total acceptance of human beings and of the present.

Following Patanjali's concept of non-attachment, Grotowski posits the "decisive factor in this process" as "humility, a spiritual predisposition: not to do something, but to refrain from doing something, otherwise the excess becomes impudence instead of sacrifice."(36) Two lines of thought must be clear in order to follow this statement: the notion of sacrifice and the notion of passivity. First, the actor who achieves self-revelation through via negativa sacrifices not himself but his obstacles—those things we often hold tightly to as needs but which merely belie that "restlessness of the mind" already discussed. For Grotowski, this means that "the actor must act in a state of trance," defined not a loss of consciousness or will or presence but, rather, "the ability to concentrate in a particular theatrical way."(37)

[p. 187] More than 600 years ago, the Japanese theatre practitioner and philosopher Zeami wrote his treatises on the art of Noh drama in which he, too, discusses the actor's art in terms of sacrifice, and the same notion of concentration appears again:

The actor must rise to a selfless level of art, imbued with a concentration that transcends his own consciousness, so that he can bind together the moments before and after that instant when "nothing happens." Such a process constitutes that inner force that can be termed "connecting all the arts through one intensity of mind."(38)

This passage offers a logical link to the second line of thought noted above—that of passivity. Zeami's "one intensity of mind" equates to the requisite state of readiness which Grotowski describes as "a state in which one does not 'want to do that' but rather 'resigns from not doing it.'"(39) This is a deep, disciplined readiness on the level of impulse; it is not a release. Zeami considers this the Noh actor's greatest and most secret skill: "the actor must never abandon his concentration but must keep his consciousness of that inner tension. It is this sense of inner concentration that manifests itself to the audience,"(40) and it is this inner concentration, impulse made visible, which allows for the possibility of total act.

While there is no possibility of claiming that this essay has explored all the ways which Grotowski's terms of Poor Theatre intersect with the theorists I've addressed, I believe I have demonstrated the wealth of opportunity for extended study. Even without the benefit of that study, I hope to have offered a new perspective through which to understand the passage from Towards a Poor Theatre that I believe stands among Grotowski's most eloquent and concise encapsulations of conjunctio oppositorum, via negativa, and total act:

Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art? Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and unrepeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance and lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in use: to fulfil [sic] ourselves. Art is neither a state of the soul (in the sense of some extraordinary, unpredictable moment of inspiration) nor a state of [p. 188] man (in the sense of a profession or social function). Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.(41)

Endnotes

1. Eugenio Barba, Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, trans. Judy Barba (Wales UK: Black Mountain Press, Center for Performance Research, 1999) 56.
2. Raymonde Temkine, Grotowski (New York: Avon, 1972) 145.
3. Temkine 78.
4. Barba 53.
5. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. Eugenio Barba (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968) 128.
6. S.C. Goswami, "Complementarity Principle: Meeting Ground of Science, Philosophy and Religion," Here-Now 4U, 20 Feb. 2004 <http://www.here-now4u.de/eng/complementary_principle__meeti.htm>
7. Lee Strasberg, introduction, The Paradox of Acting, by Denis Diderot, and Masks or Faces?, by William Archer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957) ix-xii. x.
8. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957) 13.
9. Diderot 13.
10. Diderot 15.
11. Diderot 13.
12. Diderot 17.
13. Diderot 13.
14. Diderot 43.
15. Diderot 15.
16. Diderot 20.
17. Strasberg ix.
18. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner's, 1970) 134.
19. Jerzy Grotowski, "I Said Yes to the Past," interview by Margaret Croyden, Village Voice 23 January 1969: 41-42. 42.
20. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1987) 33.
21. Barba, Land: 53
22. Rohit Metha, trans. and comm, Yoga: The Art of Integration (A Commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) 1975. (Wheaton IL: Theosophical Publishing, 1982) 142.
23. Grotowski, Towards 209.
24. Grotowski, Towards 128.
25. Mehta 75.
26. Mehta 167.
27. Mehta 168.
28. Mehta 103.
29. Grotowski, Towards 209.
30. Mehta 41.
31. Grotowski, Towards 17.
32. Barba 48-49.
33. Mehta 29.
34. Mehta 30.
35. Jerzy Grotowski, "From the Theatre Company to Art As Vehicle," At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, by Thomas Richards (London: Routledge, 1995) 113-35. 125.
36. Grotowski, Towards 37.
37. Grotowski, Towards 37-38.
38. Zeami, No the Art of the No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, Princeton Library of Asian Translations, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1984) 97.
39. Grotowski, Towards 17.
40. Zeami 96-97.
41. Grotowski, Towards 256.