Voices from Within: Grotowski's Polish Collaborators (Polish Theatre Perspectives)

by Paul Allain

Voices from Grotowski's Polish Collaborators brings together, for the first time in English, the distinctive voices of renowned director Jerzy Grotowski's Polish colleagues, providing a rare insight into different areas of their research and work. Through conversations, recollections, journal entries, images, working notes, and other testimonies, the collection opens up a range of perspectives on this changing practice - both within and beyond the theatre - from the actors, artists, designers, producers, administrators, and investigators who co-created it. The book spans the full period of Grotowski's career, from the theatre of productions phase, through paratheatre and Theatre of Sources, to the final phase of Art as vehicle following his emigration from Poland. What emerges from these narratives is a genuinely collaborative endeavour that, as Grotowski himself comments within - in a note distributed with the Laboratory Theatre's touring productions - is often mistakenly associated with 'his name and his name alone'. Voices from Within makes an important contribution to international understanding of this work, by offering a multi-vocal insiders account of the collective and individual searches, uncertainties, discoveries, and experiences that accompanied many of Grotowski's long-time creative partnerships. This title is available in paperback and as an Open Access ebook.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He was nominated for the Times Higher Education Award in Excellence and Innovation in the Arts 2010.

He collaborated with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 and published the book Gardzienice: Polish Theatre in Transition (1997). He co-edited the Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (2000) and his book The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki was published by Methuen (2002; second revised and expanded edition with DVD 2009) and Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2003). Routledge published his Companion to Theatre and Performance, co-written with Jen Harvie in 2006.

He has since published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.
Most recently he has hosted Professor Richard Schechner at Kent for a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, and has in 2012 published Andrei Droznin's Physical Actor Training with Routledge, a DVD/booklet. He has contributed extensively to the Routledge Digital Performance Archive.