The continuation of the legacy of the Reduta Theatre was stressed by Grotowski who took the group’s emblem when he founded his Laboratorium Theatre. The director of Apocalypsis Cum Figuris did not consider himself an imitator of Osterwa’s work, but his spiritual successor. According to Grotowski, Osterwa’s activity made it possible to…
…move towards a different perspective, in which man could meet man over something that has some meaning, some purpose and some purity – over something of which they would not have to be ashamed.
And just like the man behind the idea for ‘Genezja’, Grotowski, guided by this same ‘other longing’, saw theatre as a way towards an extrasensory and interpersonal experience. It is common to easily and automatically link Grotowski with the concept of ‘ritual’ or with para-religious activity. But the director did not create any cult that could be easily characterised. He was rather a constantly active discoverer, who looked for the spiritual truth and the arcane knowledge of the consciousness in many sources: in the gnostic sphere, in Gurdjieff and Jung, but also in the Upanishads and the Vedas. He travelled to the East: to Central Asia, China and, several times, to India.
Although he started with plays, he moved towards para-theatre until he reached a moment in which he reduced the artistic dimension of his activity to almost nothing. He was constantly interested above all with what happened outside the theatre.
A performance was not a product or an artistic project for him. It was a possibility to have a communal ‘festival’ within the bounds of the inter-human ecology. For him, theatre was like a ladder that could be discarded once one reached the top. The fact that when applying to the Directing Department at the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków, Grotowski planned to study in Indology and medicine (specifically, psychiatry) is not without importance. He looked for various roads that could lead him to decipher the spiritual and psychological dimensions of men and theatre was only one of them.
Grotowski’s late period is especially important in this context – it is when Przedsięwzięcie Góra (Mountain Project) was prepared, also known as Góra Płomienia (Fire Mountain, 1977). It was one of the last attempts to create a new communal experience based on the structure of ritual and inspired by its spiritual potential for transformation – it was undertaken by a group of members of the Laboratorium Theatre led by Jacek Zmysłowski and Grotowski oversaw the project.
The director presented the idea for the project two years earlier. Its name directly corresponded with the Arunaćali Mountain (Mountain of Red Flame), a site of Hindu pilgrimages which was associated with Grotowski’s spiritual guru, the mystic Ramana Maharshi, and to which Grotowski also travelled. Grotowski’s ashes were scattered at the slope of Arunaćali.
Part of Przedsięwzięcie Góra consisted of a series of collective ‘Vigils’. Grotowski said that they:
last day and night (…). People reach the Mountain and leave, others experience the Road, take part in a Vigil and leave…
It was mostly about the suspension of the situation of acting, to which Grotowski was particularly ‘sensitive’. He spoke out against the mundanity of life, against the mechanical enacting of repetitive patterns. He saw the extra-theatrical experience without spectators (and almost without words) as a possibility of mutually living out the presence of other people in an inter-human event.
It can be said that this project was in fact an anti-thesis of theatre and everything theatrical. The spiritual discoveries of Grotowski and his associates led them to reject the medium with which they began their journey.
In one of his interviews, Krystian Lupa called Grotowski ‘a false prophet’. Lupa considered him a victim of egocentrism that only imitated the figure of a real guru. He wondered about it in a conversation with Łukasz Drewniak:
I am not sure whether Grotowski was a kind of mystic or only pretended to be one. I know that he was a first-rate intellectual but was he a carrier of illumination? Was he, like the Eastern mystics, an individual that carried out the act of insight within himself? Because this is what mystical experiences are about. Or maybe he was an intellectual who pretended something like that.
Lupa’s dreamland