One of the most frequently encountered words in the avant-garde theatre community has become the term “workshop.” Everywhere one turns, there is talk of a new workshop being offered, or of so-and-so's workshop of last summer, or desperate inquiries of young actors concerning whether so-and-so is giving another workshop soon, and if so how does one get in? Clearly, the experimental theatre workshop is now a popular phenomenon rather than the exclusive domain of a select few. Publications such as Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theatre (1963), Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) and Robert Pasolli's A Book on the Open Theatre (1970) have been responsible for disseminating workshop ideas to mass audiences, while many groups' early touring efforts helped to reach audiences and actors who might never have found out that an alternative form of theatre existed.

During the first World War, in Paris Jacques Copeau developed the idea of a severe and simple form of theatre, neither classical nor topical, but versatile through the economy of its means. In 1919 he remodelled the stage of the Vieux-Columbier in accordance with his new ideas, and over the next two years he founded a school for the training of actors, the École du Vieux Columbier. Both in design and in acting, Copeau wanted to make large statements with simple gestures. The pursuit of simplicity made him eliminate distractions, to create the still ground against which a movement or a form could be seen. His bare architectural stage was meant to magnify the evanescent statements of the drama. “I want the stage to be naked and neutral,” he wrote, “in order that every delicacy may appear there, in order that every fault may stand out; in order that the dramatic work may have a chance in this neutral atmosphere to fashion that individual garment which it knows how to put on.”

During the past dozen years or so a number of contemporary theatre groups in Tokyo have been exploring, each in their own way, new and intensely theatrical approaches in the actor's art. Each group bases its work on ensemble playing, so that in the midst of the exploration, some consistency of performance style has seemed desirable. In either formal or informal ways, this usually means an actor training system created out of the group and designed for its own needs. A training system that is especially Japanese is the one developed by Tadashi Suzuki with members of the acting company of the Waseda Little Theatre (Waseda Shogekijo see T60, T65).

Suzuki formed the Waseda Little Theatre in 1965. Among the twenty members of the acting company today, seven are part of that original group. They gather four nights a week, after working at other jobs, to train under Suzuki's direction. Suzuki, with the actors, has created a series of training disciplines, combining voice and body, which, while being flexible and capable of variation, are precise in their structure.

I am going to describe a workshop technique that makes the abstractions of conceptual thought available as physical experiences, and in so doing, makes abstraction itself—usually thought of as a danger to theatre work—available to theatre, both as a subject matter and as an untapped source of performance energies.

There is a tendency, in most branches of contemporary thought, to use metaphors of space for all sorts of concepts and relationships that are not in themselves spatial. Literary critics locate the nuances of a word in “semantic space.” Psychiatrists refer to the “therapeutic space” in which they encounter their patients. Anthropologists imagine networks of kin-relationships spread out in “social space.” Musicologists speak of a “harmonic space” within which tones and timbres are distributed.

European theatrical thinking of the last fifty years is dominated by the urge to make theatre theatrical. This urge was a reaction against the text-dominated theatre of the preceding era. Artaud, with his program of the Theatre of Cruelty, became the most radical speaker of this thinking and a trendsetter.

Artaud's contemporary, Brecht, coming from a country where a literary theatre was at home and institutionalized (Bildungstheater), demanded an intensification of its literary, “scripted” character. Brecht's postuiation of the “Literarisierung des Theaters” found the most radical application in his theory of a Lehrstück. As a matter of fact, in a way typical of Brecht's subversive strategies, it meant a sublation of the traditional notion of a literary bourgeois theatre. Nevertheless, his postuiation pronounces a program opposed to Artaud: theatre does not need to be theatrical

In Brecht's concept of a Lehrstück, it meant an elimination of an audience and a new genus proximum for theatre: learning instead of spectating or, more precisely, collective text reading.

Apocalypsis Cum Figuris marked the last theatrical performance of the Polish Theatre Lab. Although this spectacle is still performed periodically by the group, its members are primarily concerned with different projects. Initially these projects were termed “paratheatre.” The name was transformed gradually and moved outside the realm of legitimate theatre. Grotowski started to use the term Active Culture. Very recently, a new term emerged out of this innovative group of artists: Theatre of Roots (or Roots of Theatre). What exactly this new term brings with it is still to be discovered.

The following is a description of a Theatre of Roots workshop led by Ryszard Cieslak of the Polish Theatre Lab and co-led by myself. It was a ten-day workshop that included twenty participants (an even number of men and women) and took place in and around Penn State University.

I am in a state of culture shock. When this way of naming my state occurred to me, I thought it metaphoric. Now I do not. I have decided that the Public Participatory Event (PPE) was a nascent community, a subculture appearing as an event. An event is more ephemeral than the network of structures we call a “culture,” but the event I concluded a few days ago leaves me more a stranger at home and work than I felt the first day I stepped foot in either. I have no choice but to reconceive the assumption which I have carried to much of my scholarly work in religious studies and anthropology, namely, that culture is a configuration largely of language, thought, and art. I am certain now that culture also resides quite literally in the bones; that is, in our patterns of moving, breathing, walking and so on.

The theatrical flashpoint In the 1920's was Berlin. The aftermath of war, revolution and putsch; the increasing polarization of society; inflation and depression, which revealed the flaws in industrial capitalism; the example of Russia, which under Lenin still provided an ideal of heroic political action—all formed a creative ferment that found expression on the German stage with its traditional claim to be a “moral tribunal.” The primary challenge was to develop ways of representing a new, distinctively twentiethcentury perception of reality. As Brecht put it:

The following is an attempt to reconstruct the total course of a performance of Rasputin, with special consideration to the technical data. Rasputin is the single production of the Piscatorbühne for which such a reconstruction is possible with certainty, making use of available material which has been preserved. Serving as support are the sketches by Erwin Piscator from his book Das politische Theater; an essay by Julius Richter, the technical manager of the Piscatorbühne (Rasputin/Nach der Aufführung der Piscator-Bühne in: “Die Scene” 1928, Nr.2, p.40f); notes on the technical course of “Rasputin” made by the technical office of the Piscatorbühne (Rasputin. Notes on the technical operation. Theatermuseum Clara-Ziegler-Stiftung. München) and various reviews of the production.

At the beginning of the play, the hemisphere, with the playing areas set for the first part, is completely closed. At the sound of a gong, the stage, with closed dome, revolves a half turn to the left.