![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The connection between Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski is often overlooked or underplayed because there are substantial distinctions between them in terms of practices and approaches. In Part I of this essay, I examine Grotowski’s reflections on Stanislavsky’s final experiments, which the Polish director considered to constitute the culmination of the System, as well as the starting point for his own work at the Laboratory Theatre. In Part II, I explore the implications of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage and its legacy for contemporary performance research by relating Stanislavsky’s idiosyncratic usage of the term perezhivanie, translated by Martin Kurten as “conscious experience,” to the neuroscientific investigation of embodied experience, discussed by Rhonda Blair, and to Grotowski’s own conception of consciousness as a form of embodied awareness. I then focus on a crucial point of convergence between the Russian and Polish directors’ respective approaches lying beyond the purview of neuroscience, namely, the correlation between the physical and the spiritual, prompting Sharon Carnicke to invent the neologism “physiospiritual.” I infer that the legacy of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage consists in an expanded notion of perezhivanie that I relate to philosopher Alva Noë’s phenomenological understanding of the interrelation of consciousness and experience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Blair, “Reconsidering Stanislavsky,” 186.
2. Ibid., 184.
3. Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action, 22.
4. See Part I of this essay, published in the May 2023 issue of Stanislavski Studies, as well as the first two chapters of my book Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women (Routledge 2014).
5. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 132.
6. Kurten, “La Terminologie de Stanislavski,” 67–8.
7. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 147.
8. Wilson, “The Benefits of Music for the Brain,” 141.
9. Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action, 22.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Mandoki, “The Evolution of Aesthesis,” 118.
12. Gallese, “The Empathic Body,” 185.
13. Ibid., 194.
14. Ibid., 188.
15. Schechner, “Exit 30’s, Enter 60’s,” 7.
16. In Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, 128 and 142.
17. Ibid., 150–1.
18. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 240–1.
19. As I explain in Part I of this essay, I was fortunate to attend Grotowski’s Collège de France lectures, given in French and hosted by various Parisian theatres between March 1997 and January 1998. These were Grotowski’s final public talks prior to his death a year later. I documented the Collège de France lectures in the Polish theatre journal Didaskalia (see Bibliography).
20. See page 127 in the 2002 edition.
21. Four Arrows et al, Critical Neurophilosophy and Indigenous Wisdom, vii.
22. Ibid., viii.
23. Ibid., viii.
24. Ibid., 88.
25. Ibid., 90–1.
26. Ibid., 92.
27. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 227.
28. Ibid., 228.
29. Grotowski, “Performer,” 378.
30. Ibid., 378.
31. Grotowski, “From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle,” 125.
32. Grotowski, “Performer,” 36.
33. Grotowski, “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un,” 297.
34. Ibid., 298.
35. Ibid., 298.
36. Ibid., 299.
37. Ibid., 300.
38. Ibid., 300.
39. Ibid., 300.
40. Ibid., 301.
41. Ibid., 301.
42. Grotowski quoted in Osinski, Grotowski and His Laboratory, 400.
43. Ibid., 400.
44. Cajete, Native Science, 48.
45. In the fourth chapter of my book The Performative Power of Vocality (Routledge 2020), I explore current theories about the possible functions of performance in the earliest period of cultural evolution through the lenses of phenomenology, musicology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience, and performance studies. I foreground musicologist Gary Tomlinson’s theory of biocultural evolution, which builds on research in archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory to trace the emergence of music and language to a pre-musical and pre-linguistic form of protodiscourse hinging upon non-semantic and non-symbolic vocalization.
46. Noë, Varieties of Presence, 127.
47. Ibid., 124.
48. Ibid., 130.
49. Ibid., 130.
50. Ibid., 131.
51. Ibid., 131.
52. Also see my discussion of Noë’s phenomenological anlysis of the interrelation of presence, embodied experience and consciousness in Magnat, The Performative Power of Vocality, 199–201.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Virginie Magnat
Virginie Magnat is a performance scholar-practitioner from Occitania, in southern France. She is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus located in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx people. She works at the intersection of performance studies, cultural anthropology, qualitative research, arts-based inquiry, and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies. Her two monographs The Performative Power of Vocality (Routledge 2020) and Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women (Routledge 2014) are both based on research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. https://virginiemagnat.space/