COMING UP

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Saint-Exupéry’s tale is about making true friends. 

A golden-hair prince coming from a distant planet  lands on Earth. 

Wandering through the Sahara desert in search of humans, he meets a fox that wants to be tamed before it can play with the Little Prince.

The fox explains that taming means “creating ties” with another person so that two people become more special to one another. 

In his journey, the Little Prince meets a king, a conceited man,  a businessman, and a lamplighter. But all of them are too stuck in their routines to establish proper ties with him. The fox tells us a secret: in order to be truly connected to one another, two people must give part of themselves to each other. 

Despite the work and the emotional involvement required, taming enriches our lives. 

While the fox feels like he's living in a new world because the little prince has tamed him, the businessman cannot even remember what the stars he owns are called.

TOTAL ACT, BY JERZY GROTOWSKI

Principles  #  1

The rhythm of life in modern civilization is characterized by pace, tension, a feeling of doom, the wish to hide our personal motives and the assumption of a variety of roles and masks in life (different ones with our family, at work, amongst friends or in community life, etc.-). We like to be "scientific", by which we mean discursive and cerebral, since this attitude is dictated by the course of civilization. But we also want to pay tribute to our biological selves, to what we might call physiological pleasures. We do not want to be restricted in this sphere. Therefore we play a double game of intellect and instinct, thought and emotion; we try to divide ourselves artificially into body and soul. When we try to liberate ourselves from it all we start to shout and stamp, we convulse to the rhythm of music. In our search for liberation we reach biological chaos. We suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves.

Theatre - through the actor's technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives - provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions. This opportunity must be treated in a disciplined manner, with a full awareness of the responsibilities it involves. Here we can see the theatre's therapeutic function for people in our present day civilization. It is true that the actor accomplishes this act, but he can only do so through an encounter with the spectator - intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a cameraman, wardrobe mistress, stage designer or make-up girl - in direct confrontation with him, and somehow " instead of" him. 

The actor's act - discarding half measures, revealing, opening up, emerging from himself as opposed to closing up - is an invitation to the spectator. This act could be compared to an act of the most deeply rooted, genuine love between two human beings - this is just a comparison since we can only refer to this "emergence from oneself" through analogy. This act, paradoxical and borderline, we call a total act. 

In our opinion it epitomizes the actor's deepest calling.

GROTOWSKI

"In Poland there is a small company lead by a visionary, Jerzy Grotowski, that also has a sacred aim. The theatre, he believes, cannot be an end in itself; like dancing or music in certain dervish orders, the theatre is a vehicle, a means for self-study, a means for self-study, self-exploration, a possibility of salvation. The actor has himself as his field of work. [...] Seen this way, acting is a life's work - the actor is step-by-step extending his knowledge of himself through the painful, ever-changing circumstances of rehearsal and the tremendous punctuation points of performance. In Grotowski's terminology, the actor allows a role to 'penetrate' him; at first he is all obstacle to it, but by constant work he acquires technical mastery over his physical and psychic means by which he can allow the barriers to drop. 'Auto-penetration' by the role is related to exposure: the actor does not hesitate to show himself exactly as he is, for he realizes that the secret of the role demands his opening himself up, disclosing his own secrets. So that the act of performance is an act of sacrifice, of sacrificing what most men prefer to hide - this sacrifice is his gift to the spectator. [...] Grotowski makes poverty an ideal; his actors have given up everything except their own bodies; they have the human instrument and limitless time - no wonder they feel the richest theatre in the world" 

(Peter Brook, "Pusta przestrzen" / "The Empty Space", Warsaw, 1977).

http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_grotowski_jerzy