Name: Poor Unfortunate Theater: Crash Course Theater #48
Uploaded: 2019-05-05T14:24:25.000Z
Duration: 13 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course
Theater, and today we're looking at two

Adverbs of degree

very different models of radical, transformative
theater.

First, we'll head to Poland for Jerzy Grotowski's
Poor Theater.

Then, we'll zoom over to Brazil for Augusto
Boal's The Theater of the Oppressed.

These are pretty different movements: one
is mostly concerned with personal discovery

and the other is about creating broader social
change.

But both of them do away with theatrical conventions
like costumes and scenery.

Eh, but you're kinda like more of a “co-star.”

And both try to break down barriers between
actors and audiences, remaking the theater

as a space to create real and lasting change.

INTRO
Poor Theater was started by this guy, Jerzy

He was born in Poland in 1933 and later educated
in Moscow at the Russian Academy of Theater

In 1959, he settled in Opole in Poland and
began to work with a group of artists who

would form the Polish Laboratory Theater.

In the early 1980s, he left Poland, moving
first to America, where he taught at several

Like Stanislavski, who was both a big influence
and a big rival , Grotowski was a charismatic

figure who tried to create a new style of
acting.

While Stanislavski's style is based in psychological
realism, Grotowski moved away from realism

and toward something more ritualistic and
elemental.

The other, which he developed after 1970,
is called the Theater of Sources.

We'll mostly focus on Poor Theater, because
it was the more influential of the two and

because Grotowski compiled a very handy book
about it, “Towards a Poor Theater,” published

If you have any interest in avant-garde theater,
it's definitely worth a read.

Well—surprise!—it's the opposite of
a rich theater.

A rich theater doesn't have to be all that
rich.

It includes everything from glitzy multimillion-dollar
Broadway productions to amateur shows in church

What all rich theater has in common, though,
is lights and make-up and costumes and sets.

Instead, it relies on the power of the actor
to convey character and setting.

Grotowski writes:
“One must ask oneself what is indispensable

“Can the theatre exist without costumes
and sets?

“Can it exist without music to accompany
the plot?

“Can it exist without lighting effects?

One of them is that Grotowski realized that
theater was in competition with film and television.

And if illusionism was what you were after,
then film and television were going to do

But what film and television can't do, Grotowski
reasoned, is to tap back into theater's

Maybe you're thinking, hey, that sounds
like Artaud.

And you're not wrong, although, as you maybe
remember from our earlier episode, Artaud

So many frogs, scorpions and jets of blood!

Another reason for poor theater is that Grotowski
wanted to eliminate the separation between

If spectators don't get to have fancy wigs
and spotlights, then neither should the actors!

In most of Grotowski's productions, the
audience mingled with the actors or surrounded

the actors on all sides, so that they everyone
occupied the playing space.

The performers were constantly exposed and
unmiked.

Grotowski and his actors would spend years
rehearsing productions, refining every movement,

And yet actors still described a feeling of
intense spontaneity and emotional connection

Maja Komorowska, an actor in the company,
said it was a “precise, meticulous composition,

but there wasn't the slightest sign of artificiality…

This explosion, an eruption of emotion and
truth—[it] was no longer merely theater."

Grotowski believed that a role should “penetrate”
the actor.

That's his word—well, except he said it
in Polish.

Grotowski's method required that an actor
open themselves to the role completely.

Ryszard Cieślak, for many years his lead
actor, said of Grotowski's style, “It

is anyhow impossible to treat it in merely
artistic terms.

It resulted in my fundamental transformation,
not only as an actor, but also as a human

You might say this all sounds kinda… religious.

Director Peter Brook, who observed Grotowski
at work, considered Grotowski an example of

Brook called this style of acting, an “act
of sacrifice, of sacrificing what most men

prefer to hide—this sacrifice is his gift
to the spectator.”

Brook wrote that in Grotowski's poor theater,
actors give up everything except for the power

of their own bodies and unlimited rehearsal
time to bring those bodies to the role: “No

wonder they feel the richest theatre in the
world.”

For a closer look at Grotowski's methods
and style, let's explore one of his most

famous and —fair warning—most disturbing
works, “Akropolis.”

“Akropolis,” first performed in 1962,
was based on a long 1904 poetic drama by Stanisław

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Poor Unfortunate Theater: Crash Course Theater #48

eventually

ritual

audience

kinda