Practitioner’s Workshop Part 1

09/30/21 - 10/04/21

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Today we did a workshop on three different theater practitioners. Me and Maggie were assigned Grotowski who came up with the style of poor theater. I learned a lot about Grotowski and Poor theater through this workshop. Poor theater is the idea of taking away all the fancy production elements and solely focusing on actors and creating an intimate connection between the audience and actors. I learned that Grotowaski went to school for theater and that was where he learned to direct. He became a director in the late 50’s and then began lecturing and directing workshops. He had a bit of a scandal when he started changing a playwright’s work to fit his own visions, by adding other literary texts, changing or taking a way parts of the text, he stood with his beliefs that a director should be able to change a piece of work. In the 1960’s he was widely recognized for his idea of Poor Thea. He was always very focused on the relationship between the stage and the audience, and the actor and the audience which can be seen in Poor Theater through the intimate shared space and close connection between the actors and audience.

I can incorporate poor theater into a lot of Act 2 of my play. I would do this by using bare lighting that spanned across the entire stage which would mirror a hospital room’s lighting. I would also have the actors that visit Lisa enter and exit through the audience. Her loved ones usually leave the scenes very emotional and the actors exiting through the audience could be a way to connect the audience and actors.

After learning about poor theater, Maggie and I had to direct 2 scenes in La Llorana. She did one scene and I did the other. I wanted my scene to not include any props and instead utilize actors as props and set pieces. I wanted the moon to be acted out by an actor so that the moon could have fluid movement and so that it could be in the audience’s face one second and gone the next in a way that is not distracting. We wanted the characters to be wearing their own clothes and not needing costumes, this is a key part of poor theater and so the actors coming in their real clothes really forces the audience to focus on their acting and not get distracted by anything else.

We had our actors act out the props, such as the baby. We did this because while the baby is important to the scene it is not integral and the baby being imaginary doesn’t take away from the meaning of the scene. This allows the audience to focus on the acting instead of the baby doll.

We wanted the audience to feel close to the actors and so all of our choices revolved around that idea.

I think that this workshop really helped me to gain an understanding of what poor theater is and why Grotowski created it. I loved directing the scene because it made what we were learning very tangible.