Although there is much lip service paid to the importance of interdisciplinary frameworks in today’s academia, interdisciplinarity is a hard row to hoe. In Acting After Grotowski: Theatre’s Carnal Prayer, Kris Salata, an internationally acclaimed Grotowski scholar, takes on the challenge.
In his earlier book, The Unwritten Grotowski: Theory and Practice of the Encounter (2013), Salata explored Grotowski’s work as a practical philosophy of the encounter. In Acting After Grotowski, he extends that exploration but cautions:
I don’t simply pick up where I left off […;] rather, I build an argument upon the theoretical foundations I have already developed, introducing some major themes contained in The Unwritten Grotowski, and presenting and developing them as it best suits the subject of this book. (2)
The subject is embedded in the subtitle: the carnal (i.e., nonverbal) prayer.
To some, the subtitle may sound intriguing; to others, odd, if not extravagant; to others still, preposterous, sensationalist, even off-putting. Salata is quick to point out that the baffling concept of the carnal prayer comes from Grotowski. Grotowski first used this term (in Polish, “modlitwa zmysłów”; literally, “a prayer of the senses”) in 1990 while discussing Ryszard Cies´lak’s legendary performance in the Laboratory Theatre’s production of The Constant Prince (1965–70). It is Salata’s argument that Grotowski’s notion of the carnal prayer, along with his idea of the secure partner, described in Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) as a sort of virtual entity that demands from an actor a complete self-revelatory act, “provides a unique insight into his theory of acting as well as an opportunity to discuss the intersection of performance and religion” (xi). Read in relation to one another, the two concepts — the carnal prayer and the secure partner — push our understanding of Grotowski’s work forward in critical and ambitious ways.
Acting After Grotowski aims “to overcome the religious/secular binary by treating prayer both as a pre-religious, originary deed performed daily inside and outside of religious contexts, and as an action that grounds the process of the actor” (xi). At the same time, the book examines the nexus between the carnal prayer and a more familiar aspect of Grotowski’s work — the encounter with an other. Here, the starting point for Salata’s investigation is what he calls “the Grotowski Question” or, rather, a series of questions that Grotowski asked during a television interview in 1972:
“What does it mean, not to hide from another person? Not to veil or mask yourself from another person? Not to play a different person? […] To reveal yourself, to disarm yourself before another person, and to come forth like that?” (2)Footnote 2
Salata posits these questions as “the key to [Grotowski’s] legacy” (2). Elaborating on them, he argues:
Grotowski does not merely dare the actor to drop the social mask but, rather, asks: within the event of the encounter with an other — what does it take and what does it mean to come forth in this way? The former is a question of craft and the core of Grotowski’s teaching for the actor. The latter is a more philosophical question, but one that also has concrete ties to theatre practice. The self can only be revealed in relation with an other — it comes to being only as relation. (3)
In more ways than one, this slender volume is groundbreaking. To begin with, Salata is fully proficient in Polish and therefore is able to mine sources that are only rarely available to scholars outside Poland, while his linguistic gifts enable him to develop nuanced readings of Grotowski’s comments. Moreover, he recovers the concepts of the carnal prayer and the secure partner from cultural oblivion. As he points out, Grotowski’s notions of via negativa and holy actor are widely known, while the carnal prayer and the secure partner have gone largely unremarked, even though they provide crucial directives in Grotowski’s acting legacy. Most importantly, Salata’s investigation is firmly grounded in philosophy and postmodern theory, enabling him to debate some thorny problems in Grotowski’s work.
Although it seems unfair to criticize a book that achieves so much depth and breadth of analysis within a space of under 150 pages, I will nevertheless close with two comments on what I perceive as more problematic aspects of Salata’s study. First, I am not convinced that the sequencing of its six chapters facilitates an effective presentation of his richly textured argument. For example, chapter 5, an overview of the philosophical treatment of prayer by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray, might have been more productive had it been part of the opening discussion. Second, for all its engagement with postmodern theory, Acting After Grotowski leaves a central issue unexplored: how to reconcile the essentializing thrust of what Salata terms “the Grotowski Question” with the postmodern view of identity as performative? Given the postmodern understanding of selfhood as fragmented, multiple, or mobile, is it ever possible not to play a different person?
