Sophia Metcalf
As a theatre practitioner, I’m interested in legibility of the body. When one performs, how does one make one’s body — its emotions and gestures — interpretable to an audience. There are gestures that have a kind of language built in them already. For example, if I wave, that wave will probably be understood as a greeting. But then there are the kinds of gestures that require more interpretation. These gestures-- a raised eyebrow, a slight turn of the shoulder-- these are the types of gestures can communicate more than words can express. It is this phenomenon that fascinated Polish dramatist and director Jerzy Grotowski, and fed his obsession with the legibility of the body.
Grotowski writes a lot about the body in his seminal treatise, Towards a Poor Theatre. In this manifesto, he seeks a definition for theatre, trying to distinguishing “what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle” (Grotowski 15). He finds that at the core of theatrical practice is the transgression of social norms, also referred to on the grand scale as the myth. In a traditional myth, a human faces up to God-like power, such as in the early Greek and Christian theatre. These kinds of plays “liberated the spiritual energy” of the audience, what Aristotle might refer to as catharsis (Grotowski 22). Grotowski posits that the human body, the corporeal existence, is the last bastion of these so-called myths (Grotowski 23). The body is the last site for transgression, the last place for catharsis available to a secular audience. It is this corporeality that distinguishes his theatrical practice.
Grotowski attained these transgressions by pushing the human body to its physical limits. In this way, he explored the extremes of human behaviour. However, I believe that these extremes and transgressions were only legible because of the position of the body as a cultural landmark in the 1960s. Many thinkers and researchers in the 1960s put emphasis on the experience and expansion of the body (free love, drugs, bodies-as-protest). Therefore, Grotowski’s theatrical explorations were understood as transgressive, because people generally were already intimately familiar with their own corporeal state. Today, however, so much of our daily communication is digital and textual, and I believe that because of this, audiences have a more difficult time interpreting the live, corporeal body, whether it be on stage, or in public life. This paper seeks to explore the negation of the body as it relates to Grotowski’s theories about theatre-making, and interrogate the body’s legibility in public spaces, specifically, the stage.
Because I am a feminist theatre maker, I am also engaged with what this cultural negation of the body means to feminist theory. Historically, philosophy has opposed the mind and the body, describing the mind as the house of reason, and the body as the seat of feeling. These associations became gendered, with the feeling-body assigned as “female,” and the reasoning-mind as “male” (Lennon). Feminist philosophical discourse has at alternate points rejected, reappropriated, reclaimed, and / or removed these historical baggages. However, it cannot be denied that the body itself has formed the backbone for much of feminist theory and discourse for at least the past hundred years. Thus, a cultural negation of the body in the form of technological advancement may have grievous impacts for women in both the theoretical and practical realm. Any assertion of the viability of Grotowski’s practices in the 20th century must be as invested in feminist theory as it regards the body as it is in examining the body’s erasure via technology.
I refer to this kind of theatre as “fembot” theatre— a theatre as aware of feminist critique as cyborg politics. I use the term fembot here to refer to this investigation because it has inherent in it several facets I think are useful to both Grotowski and to Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, which I discuss below. The term “fembot” has a complicated social history. It is perhaps most famously used in the movie Austin Powers where Dr. Evil uses fembots to distract our hero with sex. In addition to this oversexed robot version, “fembot” is also used derogatorily to describe a female who is lacking in feeling or individuality. However, I came across the term in queer pop icon Robyn’s 2010 album, Body Talk. Rather than these two derogatory contexts, Robyn re-empowers the word “fembot” using the song by the same name. In this song, Robyn combines the idea of a powerful cyborg female with a woman who is still capable of love and sex, and in this way she creates a strong independent fembot who is “looking for a droid to man her station.” Rather than a sex object, this fembot is an powerful, feeling cyborg. In addition, both Robyn and Janelle Monae have revamped the fembot to be a camp figure; queering the cyborg, and acknowledging its existence as liminal. I therefore think referring to an feminist update of Grotowski as “fembot theatre” serves several agendas— it introduces notions of postmodernism and camp, and it offers that terms and practices once used to oppress can themselves be tools of resistance. It also encapsulates both my feminist and neo-futurist agendas.
I want to begin with a feminist approach which could help blend both my concerns about feminism and technology. In 1985, Donna Haraway published her Cyborg Manifesto, in which she imagines a feminist future in which people are understood as cyborg gestalts of their interrelated traits— black, white, femme, masc, queer, trans, straight, ace, etc. When Haraway first published this paper, the cyborg was a projected concept. Haraway locates the cyborg as a feminist ideality, one which lies “outside salvation history” (Haraway). Unlike the intersectional feminist theory that has been largely adopted by gender studies in the west today, Haraway’s cyborg theory mandates a belief in utopia. This is especially useful for a theatre maker, because the stage offers entirely utopic world views. Haraway’s theory relinquishes historical baggage in favour of a world without genesis, a world of peoples who lived beyond “salvation history,” as cyborgs exist beyond Adam and Eve and tenements of western culture. Haraway’s future is a true ideality, a future of hopeful imaginings.
In some ways, the cyborg today is not unlike the cyborg Haraway wrote about over thirty years ago. The modern cyborg is all of us, in all of our eccentricities, errors, and egos. With unbelievably powerful technology at our fingertips at all times in the form of smartphones, each and every one of us could be construed as a cyborg. The modern cyborg blurs the borders of “production, reproduction, and imagination,” as the smartphone becomes the locational activity of all work and all pleasure (Haraway). Where we continue to fall short, however, is in “taking pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” which could lead us toward “a world [...] not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway). Rather, it seems smart technology creates a capitalism that feeds off projected, digital selves that clearly and succinctly brand their identities and desires. Our instagram bios, our email signatures, our posts, and searches serve to make us more marketable both to online merchants who use our data, and to our fellow social network users, who gauge our utility based on followers, likes, etc. This reinforces a dangerous identity politics based on marketability. Rather than fruitful chaos and liminality, cyborg-life prioritizes the binary, with less and less emphasis on the physical body. The digital body is where the most “work” is able to be done-- whether that work is the harvesting of our personal data via social media, or the previously paid work of correspondence and idea-exchange, which has transferred to unpaid email and text.
I think about Haraway’s cyborg often. Intersectional frameworks for theatre do function, but only to a point. Whereas previously an actor may not have been cast at all, now that same actor may only being cast for their race or gender, rather than their inherent talent. To add insult to injury, those actors are culturally required to use those identity markings to manipulate a virtual system which looks for keywords (black, queer, trans, etc.). This reduces the corporeal experience of any given actor down to these keywords, and minimizes the diversity within subsects of marginalized identities. Although I may be a queer woman, I am certainly not a platonic ideal of a queer woman, as is no woman. By demanding wholes, as opposed to Haraway’s partialities, identity politics forces successful actors to represent whole swaths of marginalized communities, which is detrimental to both the individual and the group.
I can’t help but wonder if a less integrated, more liminal approach such as the cyborg theory could help this problem. Instead of viewing someone as the product of their parts, the result of their cultural and ethnic history, we could imagine actors as gestalts, where certain parts can be taken apart, or re-emphasized depending on context. To be clear, I am not suggesting a complete disregard for intersectionality, or even identity politics. I do, however, feel that Haraway’s approach is more immediate. Rather than forcing labels, Haraway’s cyborg theory thrives in the partial. Her theory asks that people see the gestalt composite of cyborg parts that confronts them moment to moment, a self which asserts itself as a constant partiality, rather than an assumed, projected whole. This is where I believe Grotowski and Haraway share fruitful threads-- both are invested in the immediate, instantaneous person, as opposed to the projected, virtual self, which Grotowski would have referred to as part of the “life mask.” By combining Grotowski’s theory of theatre with Haraway’s approach to the cyborg, I believe we may get to an even truer level of diversity on the stage.
I have always admired the work of Jerzy Grotowski, who taught at UC Irvine (where I currently attend) from 1984-1987. In some ways, his theory is prototypically feminist. Its emphasis on the body, the ritual, and the primal combats Stanislavki’s cerebral theatre, which insisted that significant portions of rehearsal time be devoted to getting inside the mind of a given character. (Or at least, this is how much of Stanislavski’s work was implemented in the United States. Stanislavski’s legacy is too complex to go into here, but there are many nuances to the idea that his theatre was primarily of the mind.) Grotowski, on the other hand, prioritized a physical approach, engaging the body equally, if not more than, the mind. It is worth noting, too, that at the heart of his theory was a fear of technology. Worried that television and film would usurp the theatre as pure storytelling mediums, Grotowski settled on “the closeness of the living organism” as the one thing TV could not steal (Grotowski 41). This prioritization of the body is an inherently feminist act, though Grotowski may not have called it that himself.
In addition, Grotowski’s physical exercises created a kind of genderless levelling in the same way similar physical theatre practices, such as contact improv, have since. The female and the male within these physical theatre spaces are meant to perform to equal standards of equal rigor. The goal for Grotowski was spiritual as well as physical, a transcendence achieved by the actor through militaristic exhaustion techniques. Thus, his techniques if anything prioritize a kind of genderless androgyne, as capable of “feminine” emotion as of “masculine” physical strength, both of those goals localized in the body.
In practice, however, Grotowski was a patriarch. Although groundbreaking, Grotowski was also seen by some as dictatorial and manipulative (Luger). In his work, he frequently brought actors through gruelling emotional turmoil, and created communities in which chaos was casual and celebrated; after those actors returned to the outside world, they sometimes had trouble readapting. As his lead actor, Ryszard Cieslak said in an interview,
He actually took people outside of their daily routines, took them into new communities, established different ways of working and being with each other. What it didn't really do was then take responsibility for how people entered back into the real world. It perhaps left them high and dry a bit, left them a bit exposed. (Lueger)
Cieslak here I believe is referring to a kind of emotional exposure, which prevented reintegration into a world outside of the theatre. To be a great actor, after all, one must have immediate access to one’s emotional extremes-- a practice not as highly prized off the stage. This disregard for mental health denies the duality of the actor as both performer and person. It, like the modern cyborg, prioritizes the aspect which is able to do “work,” and conveniently ignores the person inside the actor. If the actor was instead viewed within Haraway’s cyborg framework, wherein the blurring of these lines does not necessarily lead to erasure but rather, celebration of one’s interconnected, partial identities, I believe practicers of Grotowski’s theory could great heights while protecting their mental health outside the rehearsal studio.
In Grotowski’s later phases, including the work he did at UC Irvine, he drew on “primitive cultures from India to the Phillipines, East Africa to Haiti and South America” in attempt to “reproduce and codify ancient rituals which produced something akin to ‘the trance state’” (Currier). This is one of the more difficult aspects of Grotowski’s theatre to bring into the twenty-first century. As a white performer, constantly living and performing on stolen land, in an art form that has racist tendencies historically (black face as a blatant example), I think a great deal about appropriation and diversity in the theatre. Thus, Grotowski’s appropriation of “ancient rituals” is sticky for me. Thomas Richards, Grotowski’s protege and the head of his Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, talks about his experience with these traditions when he was training under Grotowski:
When I was hearing these songs of tradition, it had a kind of impact on me. [...] It gave me the sensation that I was hearing someone from my ancestry singing. And this was a very, very deep thing for me because I'm half black and half white. I come from a mixed family. I grew up in New York City, completely disconnected from every kind of African tradition. [...] And when I met this Polish man [...] It was very bizarre and strange to encounter my African tradition somehow through him. (Lueger)
Richards has continued to keep these traditional songs within the teachings at the Workcenter, a testament to their impact on him, and to his belief that they have the power to impact others similarly. I believe that Grotowski engaged in these practices earnestly, and respectfully. However, their presence in a western theatrical tradition, even a controversial and avante garde one like Grotowski’s, is problematic and appropriative. Without understanding a culture, how could one attempt to understand that culture’s most sacred songs, rituals, and symbols? I do not have an answer to these questions, but I think they are necessary to discuss in attempting to update Grotowski’s work to be an ethical feminist practices that operates for artists from all walks of life.
Lastly of course, one must deal with the rigorous physical demands Grotowski’s work asks of its practitioners. His techniques favor the able-bodied, as many of them require actors to leap, run, lift, and move in ways that may be prohibitive to some disabled performers. Although there are companies, such as Axis Dance Company, which welcome disabled dancers, much of the dance and physical theatre world has historically prioritized the able-bodied. Thus, it is difficult for disabled performers to have the same kind of access to physical theatre training as able-bodied performers, and therefore Grotowski’s work can seem doubly daunting. It would be my hope that an updated practice of Grotowski’s work could allow for performers of all abilities, however, this is an area I believe I would need to develop in a rehearsal space with diversely abled performers.
There is one way in which Grotowski’s work already serves some of the ethics of disability culture, however. Alice Sheppard, a disabled modern dancer who worked with the Axis Theatre, talks about the need to structure the audience-performer relationship differently in spaces with persons with disabilities. Specifically, she cites a recent performance, and how, for her audience, “the beauty of my performance lay in the visible but then oh so tangible connection between the movement space of the stage, and the movement space of the audience. Accepting, promoting, choreographing this response is part of the work of disability culture’s ethics” (Sheppard). Grotowski’s theatre prioritized this audience-spectator relationship, and reorganized it for every performance based on what he and the actors believed would make that relationship the most visceral. This investment in equalizing the importance of the performance space and the audience space could lend itself helpfully to creating a theatre which is more in line with what Sheppard cites as necessary for disability culture.
Jerzy Grotowski’s theory was founded on the belief that the theatre contained something mystical and of mythic value. It is this mysticism that transformed the theatre world, this emphasis on the body’s vast unknowing that still draws theatre practitioners from all over the world to his techniques. However, today, we are in need of a theatre that both embraces a feminist, intersectional approach, and combats technology-based dualism. Now, more than ever, we are in need of a theatre that pushes boundaries, that forces us to confront our corporeal selves. We are not simply the virtual selves we put out into the universe. We are, perhaps, everything but those selves. In order to escape the capitalist structure which feeds on our virtual identities, we need to go back to what makes us uniquely human, behind the life-mask of marketability and intersecting, inescapable identity politics. Through Grotowski’s theory, we can re-find the authentic humanity at the root of all of us, and use Haraway’s cyborg theory to identify one another as carriers of difference without retreating to our silos.
Works Cited
Currier, Robert S. “At UC Irvine.” At UC Irvine - Robert S. Currier, Owen Daly, Mar. 1999, owendaly.com/jeff/grotows6.htm.
Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Cyborg Manifesto. Camas Books, 2018.
Lennon, Kathleen. “Feminist Perspectives on the Body.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 11 Sept. 2014, plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-body/.
Luger, Michael. “Exploring the Work and Legacy of Jerzy Grotowski with the Stories from the Eastern West Podcast, Part 2.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, Emerson College, 20 Dec. 2018, howlround.com/exploring-work-and-legacy-jerzy-grotowski-stories-eastern-west-podcast-part-2.
Robyn. Fembot, Konichiwa Records, 1 Jan. 2010.
Sheppard, Alice. “Alice Sheppard on Disability Dance and Access.” YouTube, Emory University, 13 Oct. 2014, youtu.be/c-qfZA1V7Yo.
Biography
Sophia Metcalf is an academic and performing artist interested by the queer and/or female body’s radical occupation of public and performative spaces. She has previously been published in The Channel Undergraduate Review (McGill University). She is currently completing her MFA in Acting at UC Irvine.