on the practice of new work
“Good training will show in your work
People who know will recognize it.
Those who don’t – will see something too.”
Grotowski
At best I could only hope to not be imitating Grotowski, but at worst I feel I have scratched the surface towards his aesthetic without the sacrifice of daily work- perhaps no sacrifice is enough while I am still caught in my own daily performance. Peter Brook once remarked that “the temptation to be an armchair Grotowski will always be hard to resist,” but it has never been my intention to create his work; it’s too small a placement on too narrow a stage. How do we hold a daily practice while reaching past the rarifed form into something new?
New work has always had a savior complex: persecuted first and exalted later. There is also the risk of a survival essentialism- the new way often gets self-touted as the best way or the only way in its hope to survive. Bertolt Brecht once responded to this accusation, “Is this new style of production the new style? …The answer is no. It is one way, the way in which we have gone. Experiments must continue. The same problem exists for all art, and it is a gigantic one.” Often new work hails to remove itself from institutions and tradition, to be more accessible, more diverse and more affordable, but ends up co-opted by the only ones who can afford the novelty of newness.
It is the task of the artist to dismantle the master’s house with his tools and rebuild it with her own, yet I do not seek to do theatre that merely dismantles the rules of form without creating something in its place, something that needs to be created. New work always carries a great risk of being misunderstood, confused, dismissed. But it is that risk which carries the possibility of transformation. New work has the possibility of insurrection by its very nature of creating a context outside the established system, a body outside the socialized norm.
In new theatre, we perform in order to call to attention our daily performance. We extend and expand the imagination in our characters in order to glimpse the size life really is. We work our bodies to be able to have the agility and agency of specialized action so that we can sustain an experience long enough for an audience to see it in themselves. As a good ballet will invite the audience to see the body as fragile and strong, with both the weight of gravity and the ability to fly; the audience will not concern themselves with not being able to do it, or even with its difficulty. If we do our job well on the stage, we will disrupt the audience’s notions of themselves as witnesses, expand their perception to fit something larger than their initial expectation and we will create something wordless that lives with a magnified half-life in their sustained imagination.
***
practice is praxis
to be informed by the form
to be content with content
to not be narrowed by narrative
to be gracious with gravity
and craft to the cracks
to be quiet within text
and loud as if with song in the spaces between
to know the difference between a consonant and a vowel and yet hold the whole word
to feel a sense of arrival in the endless search
i would call this practice, praxis.
Thanks, Ms. Rauch, for another thought-provoking post. It puts me in mind to comment on the nature of ‘influences’ in creative practice.
When I started writing songs as an adolescent I felt a very conscious desire to sound ‘original’. I hoped to never emulate another songwriter/band. The irony, of course, was that I did not possess the technical skill to recreate someone else´s sound even if I had wanted to. After many years of practice, I began to possess sufficient skill in songwriting/guitar-playing/singing to approach some modicum of ‘originality’. But the old irony evolved to keep pace with my painstaking progress; somehow, my influences had become more evident, not less so, in the listeners’ ears.
As a theatre artist, I too feel indebted to the work of Grotowski. I certainly never encountered the man, but have encountered his influence in the works of some who trained with him, and in many who trained with those who trained with him. At what point in this ongoing process of transmission can one presume to have encountered/left his ‘influence’? More than anything I have encountered his ideas through the body of literature that swirls around his life/work/practice, and I take those writings at their word; to read about the doing can’t substitute for witnessing the doing, let alone substitute for the doing itself. In my opinion, this fact in no way diminishes the value of his literature on practice. The very thing that drew me to Grotowski’s writings was his ability to define the challenges of performance that I had already begun to encounter for myself. If his writings can be so accurate about those challenges, isn’t it natural to presume they may be correct when presenting positive examples to the practitioner? So, I work to implement the ideals espoused therein, as well as heed his warnings. While I leave it to others to judge for themselves whether or not those ideals are visible in the outcome of my work, his influence remains very real to me.
When I play a song that I wrote ten years ago, I immediately encounter one of the fundamental problems of performance work in any discipline. Namely, I must find a way to present it as if for the very first time. While not exactly destroying the old song (which, in the parlance of Grotowski, serves as ‘the container’), it becomes necessary to ‘re-create’ it in the moment – to rediscover, re-connect with and renew what made its inception so vital to me. This necessitates an act of forgetting on my part. I must forget what has worked in the past in order to find what will work right now. In this way at least, the song is always alive with the spirit of ‘new work’. Perhaps this equation applies to the theatre as well? If there is such a thing as ‘New Theatre’ it must necessarily confront theatre’s past, and I would be surprised not to find its seeds had been planted generations ago. No matter what one’s discipline of choice, it seems to me, our passage as individual artists backwards, through the unique crucible of our influences, constitutes an inescapable part of the journey towards something that we should aspire to make ‘new’ every time.