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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - June, 2007 ------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS 1) SHOWINGS: Song Cycle 2) WEEK-LONG INTENSIVE: Another City 3) NEXT PHASE: September-December 2007 PROSE 4) What is the "organic" line? ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS ------------------------------------------------------ 1) SHOWINGS: Song Cycle In July, it will be possible to see a work in progress: /// Song Cycle /// Developed and presented by Michele Farbman and Ben Spatz, with direction from Ryan Etzel and generous support from Winsome Brown. Showing dates will be finalized later this month. Seating will be extremely limited and reservations will be required. ------------------------------------------------------ 2) WEEK-LONG INTENSIVE: Another City Urban Research Theater presents: /// ANOTHER CITY /// Week of the New Moon In the heat of the New York City summer, experience another way - another city - another self. August 12-17, 2007 New York City One intensive week of outdoor meditation, group singing, ritual craft and urban pilgrimage. Fee: $350 ($50 deposit by July 15) The group is limited to ten people! To register: anothercity@urbanresearchtheater.com More information: www.anothercitynyc.com ------------------------------------------------------ 3) NEXT PHASE: September-December 2007 The next phase of Urban Research Theater work will take place from September to December 2007. It will include additional "body & song" workshops, small theater projects, urban expeditions in search of urban sources, and continuing work on song-based performance techniques within the core group. Anyone wishing to be involved with these undertakings should contact me as soon as possible to discuss the potentials for collaboration. ben@urbanresearchtheater.com ------------------------------------------------------ PROSE ------------------------------------------------------ 4) What is the "organic" line? 'At the end of his life, during his lectures at the Collˇge de France, [Grotowski] referred to [his] chosen path as "the organic line in theatre and ritual," and compared it to the "artificial line," most often found in the performing arts. Is this a contradiction that needs to be reconciled? Or is it precisely the dialectic between the two--organic and artificial--that reveals the conclusions of a theatre master who has realized how to utilize the tools of his craft as a vehicle for personal transformation?' - GROTOWSKI, by James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta. The terms "organic" and "artificial" are problematic in this context and give rise to many questions that demand answers. Why choose two words that imply a heirarchy, with the organic superior to the artificial? What is it about the organic that makes it special or worthy of attention? And if the organic was more widespread in the past, as Grotowski often suggests, then why has it shrunk or disappeared today? Was Grotowski's search for the organic a variety of romanticism? When he described a specific action or moment as organic, was he stating a personal preference? What objective meaning can we find in Grotowski's "research" on the organic line? These questions are reasonable, and they have answers. To begin with, I propose replacing the terms "organic" and "artificial" with two other words that may illuminate the significance of Grotowski's work and help answer the questions posed above. Rather than contrast the organic and the artificial, I suggest we consider the relationship between the communal and the social. This opposition can be understood simply in terms of the scale of a human group. A community is a group in which all individuals have personal relationships with one another. A society is a much larger group in which most people are strangers to one another. The border between the two categories is fuzzy rather than clear, but it's obvious that a group of ten, twenty, or even fifty people can be a community in a way that a city with hundres of thousands or millions of people cannot. Grotowski's research was on communal meanings and practices: those that have meaning between people through direct personal relations. Although he was very skilled at interfacing with the larger society, this was nothing more than a strategy for him. He did publish writings and even allowed a few film documents of his work, but he exercised tremendous control over these and all social communications. His only work at the level of society was to do what was necessary to create the space in which a genuine community could emerge. The word genuine here is not vague. It means precisely that a kind of meaning comes to exist within the community which is independent of any external society. Grotowski's research was to see how such meaning could be created in a community of choice, with adults coming from different backgrounds, rather than one in which multiple generations exist in actual isolation from other communities or societies. Grotowski wrote of an isolated period of paratheatrical work that "things happened which were on the border of a miracle." I take this to mean that the events and actions took place which achieved their meaning entirely within the domain of the community and not with any reference to the larger society. Not that the participants in this work literally forgot the existence of society, but that the weight of its existence became in some way lesser for them than what took place inside the community. From this perspective we can easily see why what Grotowski called the "organic" line has been steadily shrinking and disappearing over the past thousands of years. Starting with writing, the sudden (in evolutionary terms) appearance of communications technologies has massively increased the size of the human group in relation to which individuals define themselves. I am writing this essay to a "general public" that consists of potentially thousands of people. The laptop on which I am writing was built by hundreds of others. My day-to-day life involves corresponding with corporate moguls, independent artists, and poor African students, etc. etc. In this context, to be responsible for the existence of a community is not a small task but an immense one. It literally goes against the grain of the progress of civilization. This is not to say that Grotowski opposed technology itself or had any moral quarrel with the fact of society--only that he spent his life working to rediscover the kinds of meanings that existed (and to some extent may still exist) in human contexts that are communal rather than social. His was not an intellectual judgment against society but an actual long-term practice of removing the influence of society in specific times and places. This was his research. If he had wanted to observe a community of rats or apes he could perhaps have become a zoologist, but he wanted a laboratory dish of humans. Nor could Grotowski's questions have been answered by setting up a farming commune, as others in the last century did. This would perhaps have been a small isolated group, but the demands it placed on its members would not have been sufficient to remove them from the context of the societies in which they grew up. So Grotowski worked in a more direct way, not (in most cases) by first isolating people and then observing out what new meanings were developed by this community, but by directly overseeing the actual process of meaning-creation in small groups. Finally, in the last phase of his work, he did manage to conduct this process in a setting that was extraordinarily isolated by contemporary standards. The questions raised by Grotowski's perhaps intentionally provocative word choice can be answered in a way that affirms the objective significance of his work without negating the reality or potential value of what he called "artificial." Society is not artificial in the sense of being fake or imaginary. It is artificial in the literal sense: that is, it has been created by human beings. The expansion in size of human groups, and the change from community to society, is a direct result of technology. It is not romanticism to point out that in this great expansion, something has also been lost. Nor is it a matter of personal preference whether a given moment or action is organic or artificial in this sense. It may often be difficult to tell whether someone in a given moment is acting in relation to a small personally-known community or to a larger social field--but the difference is unquestionably real, and objective. In a given moment, an actor (or any human being) may act in reference to here and now, "with us," in this place, in our community--or may act in reference to the movies, the books, and the ideas of people he or she has never met and will never meet. Grotowski's research on the communal line has important applications not only in theater--which for him was essentially a laboratory for precisely that purpose--but also in life. ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ Ben Spatz ben@urbanresearchtheater.com New York City