Grotowski

This week in rehearsals I worked on a scene where I had to physically portray The Man’s love for music through the use of the body alone. Naomi, our sound designer, played the piano as I slowly navigated towards her, with my hands leading the rest of my body away from the doctor’s chair. I researched Grotowski’s techniques and the following video really inspired my movements for this scene which showed how vivid music was in my character’s life, despite his memory loss:

In this video, the highly-trained actor Ryszard Cieslak physicalizes a bird, adopting animalistic traits in his bodily movements. Whilst I was not emulating the same idea as this actor in my own scene, I used this approach to the movement of my whole body to show the effect that music has on The Man’s life. In doing so, my hand led the pathway of my choreography as I wrote music notes with my hands in the air, creating an interesting visual picture. Thomas Richards spoke about Grotowki’s method saying that, ‘we cannot set feeling; we can only set physical action’ (Richards, 67, 1995). By this idea, we aimed to physically portray emotion and feeling through the movement of the body. We became fascinated in rehearsal with finding ways to physically express emotions without the aid of long pieces of dialogue. In many ways, our whole piece now consists of two forms of communication: the dialogue of text and the dialogue of movement. By fusing the two together, we have started to create an interesting piece of theatre which amalgamates different styles to portray a narrative to the audience.

Works Cited:

Contemporary Arts Media artfilms (2009) Training at Grtowski’s “Laboratorium” in Wrozlaw in 1972 Screener. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRyLLTvs00c [Accessed 18 March 2015].

Richards, T. (1995) At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions. London: Routledge.