Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory
Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work
Description:... Polish theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski s lifelong research, while taking various forms and undergoing multiple transformations, is unified by a single underlying propulsion: the work on the self with and through the other. Domnika Laster s book pulls together threads of various aspects of Grotowski s broadly construed notion of self-development from various phases of the theatre director s research in order to approach the totality of his complex understanding of human relationality and self-realization of the human being. Laster engages in a critical analysis of key aspects of Grotowski s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, including the (re)discovery of essence through the process of active remembering; the exploration of vigilance understood as enhanced states of awareness and an active wakefulness which lead to acts of witnessing and testification; the vertically structured work on the refinement of energies; and, finally, the numerous and complex lines of transmission conceived as a multidirectional process of relationality with the (imagined) ancestor to the broadly construed twin . While the present work explores these elements individually in order to elicit a fuller description and an in-depth analysis of each, all of these aspects are in reality various elements of one multifaceted and complex phenomenon of the work on oneself, which constituted one of Grotowski s most essential preoccupations. Through a critical and theoretical engagement with the conceptual framework that grew directly out of his research, the volume demonstrates the ways in which Grotowski s praxis constitutes a concrete and deliberate blurring of the boundaries of the self and other.
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