Jerzy Grotowski

Jerzy Grotowski's had works on 'Poor Theatre', his movement started in 1968-1980, he wrote a book called 'Towards a Poor Theatre' and this showed the theory of his work. It was that theater should compete with television film, and that it should be brought back to it's original routes where actors would act live in front of a spectator on stage. He saw this as an important factor, this was demonstrated through Grotowski's rehearsals as a black set was used and also black clothing, during this time he made it evident that actors needed to have control over their bodies and also their breathing and voice, strenuous and vigorous exercises were done to achieve this. His demand for the actor's was to have them engage in both themselves and also the audience to find something deep within them. Grotowski aims to train his actors to be 'holy' in the way that they had to leave their egos behind and their personalities in order to become the character that they are designed to be, also through extreme mental and physical training the actors helps to expose their innermost being. In class we did exercises involving physical training with our bodies then there are vocal training too. We did an exercise based off the harlem shake where we had to use every part of our body from our toes to our head and so Nour started the Harlem shake and everyone first started doing their own movement then to allow us to alter our body movement Mrs. Morris would shout at now you are walking on glass, hot coals, you are excited, you are sad and with each mood/feeling we were capable of changing our bodies. What I realized was everyone had quite the same mind set whenever we had to change our emotions, for example when it was time to get excited everyone was waving their hands high up in the hair and shouting and screaming, and jumping, using their whole body, actors had to do this for rehearsals for 5 minutes straight and I could not even do it for 3 minutes it was so exhausting afterwards, and if we had to act tired all our bodies would just slouch and down to our feet we would be wobbly, then we did some vocal exercises where we had to go from a low tone to a high tone, saying a specific word, it was quite peculiar to see how low we can start then go very high, and I found it fascinating how Grotowski's actors had to do this for 3 minutes and we only lasted 30 seconds, it had a long of constraint on our voice box because we weren't used to it. In class we also watched a scene from Woza Albert, where they used minimal props to depict certain things, such as the white boss by wearing a ping pong ball, and on set they would just have a box to represent different things, a car or a train, when we watched it they moved around a lot and so the actors have to be fit to be able to use their voice and body movements to the best of their potential, and also once they start sweating, you know they are doing their job well. By the end of all the exercises I was mentally and physically drained.