The Controvski over Grotowski

The Controvsky over Grotowski.
This is a short transgressive appreciation of Jerzy Grotowski (The Grot), written as a response to recent time spent with the Grotowski Institute (GI) in Wroclaw and Brzezinka. This document is as transgressive as the Grot was, reflecting his dialectic of apotheosis and derision - probably the coolest tool he contrived.
My time there with his legacy amounted to three weeks, during which I had the opportunity to see several dvds of his productions as well as a few more home movies. Later we observed a top of the line 10 day workshop run by the director of the Institute, Grzegorz Ziolkowski. Grzegorz is a Grot Swot, and if I am not mistaken these ateliers are designed to spread the Grot’s hip and penetrating dramaturgy world wide.

The GI is devoted to sponsoring the research into the various aspects of the man’s work as well as support gigs by some small companies that have taken up the traces of his legacy. At the moment these small groups are Teatr Zar based in Wroclaw and Maisterne Pisne, based in Lvov, Ukraine. The GI is not to be confused with The Grot’s designated heir, Thomas Richards, who is to be found holed up in Pontedera, Italy working on arcane actions. The GI does support him, although the relationship is somewhat testy as Richards is very preciously trying to keep the ‘museum’ virgo intacta. There are also other groups beetling away in Europe and the USA claiming that they are The Way of The Truth of The Grot, and word of mouth indicates that they are equally pretentious about their take on his legacy. And whenever they show some sort of result from their hermetic endeavours, it turns out to be underwhelming - the emperor has no undies!.
I have read about The Grot and recently had this concentrated period with his legacy, which doesn’t necessarily qualify me for critiquing the game plan, but I am going to, notwithstanding, because:
1) I bring to the commentary box extensive acquaintance with Tadashi Suzuki, who is in many ways, an eastern equivalent. Time with Suzuki has given me a cluey reference point with which to judge the work of The Grot.
2) My other knowledge point is that I have considerable ken of the major dance techniques and their cultural history. I have used this knowhow to dissect and articulate many of the aspects of Suzuki’s work and now gives me the ammo with which to judge the veracity of The Grot’s systems and their applications.
Grot’s history can be separated into two main periods: early hipster Blues Brothers when he did his true theatre productions and the Beardy Wierdy hippy days when he divorced his company, morphed into a 70’s tree-changer and became mired in esoteric post theatrical mumbo jumbo.
The second period is usually broken into another 3 sub phases, but its more pertinent to see them as a continuous drift further off with the fairies in the forest. But later on I will mention aspects of the first of these sub-phases, Para-Theatre, to show how inane you become if you believe your own PR and take yourself too seriously in the silly seventies.
The second and third phases became more progressively private and are called The Theatre of Sources and Active Culture, even more pretentious titles, whose putative claims are shredded once you see the pics, which look ever so earnest.

I might add at this point that I have earnt the leisure to lampoon this era, as I myself was doing similarly stupid stunts in Adelaide, Australia in the early Seventies – bounding around in brightly coloured but illfitting untitards to ‘Earth’ music.
I know from whence I laugheth, because I know to whence it goeth - nowhere!

Blues Bro Grot. Where's the hat?

The Theatre period:

It was very interesting being in Wroclaw checking out the vids because the stuff that broke him internationally still looks really wicked, even on a crappy old video. The show in question is The Constant Prince, and one can easily see that the dramaturgy and the acting would have been a revelation.
It would have been the first time in a long while that the West saw a show that wasn’t another re-enactment in a faux-real set by a disparate bunch of luvvies who preciously emote.
The Big Diffs that Grot and his band brought were:

a. Mise-en-scene…he set the show in a cell with the audience watching down from over a ledge.

b. Rather than do the whole play with all its padding, he extracted the themes he wanted to engage, and even added other dialogue which could add nuances of meaning.

c. The band was a real team that had ‘trained’ and built their skills together as a pre-rehearsal process even before the show’s development started.

d. The performances had a moral imperative - the actors were working their rings off - they were ‘sacrificing’ themselves to the act.

e. The actors’ movements and voices weren’t neat and bourgeoise - putting on an act with sham tears and gags. These actors really went for the doctor – gung ho, every show, every night.

f. The main man (Ryczard Cieslak) was a St Sebastian figure, a sacrificial lamb whose inner transformation made men weep.

Crucial Factors:

From seeing the videos, reading the lines, and then reading in between the lines the separate factors that pulled it all together were:

1. He got the nod to put a small company together in a tiny little theatre in a dirty, dreary, regional mining town (Opole) in a commie country. Being tiny meant that nobody cared too much. Being a country posting off the radar meant that the sexy actors weren’t interested, and a more committed artistically ambitious bunch were attracted. Being a dirty and dreary dump meant that life outside was so awful, that staying inside and rehearsing was a no-brainer. Being a communist country meant that everybody was getting paid as much as any other Pole prole, and you didn’t have to make a profit. But you did have to know how to talk the Comradespeak and surf your way round the deadly shoals of the scary politics in the right way at the right time- which could be really tricky.

2. Poland, although communistic, was and is, a VERY religious country, and The Grot is an extension of this, being imbued with a densely spiritual attitude by his mom from a very young age. Later he read too much of his own gospel and tipped over the edge and morphed into an empty messiah.

3. Poland has a very classy theatre history dating from the mid 19th C with lots of cleva fellas all down the line. There was even a hip theatre ensemble called Reduta in the 20s/30s that provided a template and prefigured the Lab.

4. He had a keen spiritual assistant in displaced Italian, Eugenio Barba (EB), a self confessed wide–eye who put the Grot on the international map. Without Barba’s preaching and bus driving, Grot would have remained unknown in the west, let alone hit the bigtime. There is a crucial episode in the saga that concerns Barba borrowing a mate’s bus and hijacking an international conference in Warsaw by snatching a bunch of influential delegates, and zooming them off to a distant unsanctioned Grot show. They were gobsmacked by the demo and instant world fame followed pretty damn fast. . He was the internationally mobile proselytizer- John the Baptist to Grot’s JC.

Bringing up the name of our Lord also conjures up this telling anecdote told to us by Stephen Champion, an Aussie mate who went to work fulltime with Zibignew Zyncutis(ZZ) in the mid 80’s. (Zyncutis was one of the original merry band who tried to keep the flame alive after the Grot left the building.) Some little time after Stephen joined Zyncutis (in 1987?), ZZ carked in a car prang (some say suicidally-more of which later!) sinking the plan.
ZZ’s tale goes something like this: Apparently, one day at work, the Grot asks the band: Should I tell the world outside that I am Jesus Christ?” The band as one, looked at their toes, shuffled their feet, ummed and arred, before suggesting that…. It was…er...maybe…. not….. such a good idea!
It may have been a gag, but surely a tad predictive in the light of what happened later.

5. JG had a cluey Dramaturg, Ludwig Flaszen, and a handy designer Jerzy Guralsky. Flaschen actually got the Grot the job and acted as a devil’s advocate, pressing buttons and prodding weak spots with sardonic wit. One could probably describe Flaschen as the Brainiac behind Grotowski’s soul. Guralsky was very quiet and very useful, especially in the early days, and he may have been the guy who thought up the ‘setting’ smarts.

6. Being soviet style there was tight censorship, but only at the dress rehearsal, so they were free to muck around and do whatever they liked, until the big day. Grot maintained this was KEY. That’s not to say that life was easy! The whole game could be tricky and scary, though not as bad as Uncle Joe Stalin, who could end the chat with a bullet or a billet in the gulag. You had to be mighty quick on your feet and learn to pick the new shifts depending on which way the current political wind was blowing.

7. Grot’s elder brother became a Nuclear Physicist (his mum did well to produce two such bright sparks on her ownsome- Dad joined the free Polish army, and after the war refused to come back while Poland was Commie! ) and that may have given him clues re. theatre as labwork- it also maybe the reason he was so shtumm in the anti-commie riots – big bro may have been delicately placed, working on an A- bomb for the Russkies.

8. If you see footage of Cieslak going through his training schtick, or Thomas Richards and the Pontedera crew, the boys are all bounding around in their extra skinny speedos – the gals in all-over unitards…. Hullo Sailor!.... What does that say that nobody wants to talk about? That Grot was a homoxual, although apparently the non practicing sort? And, if one checks out Cieslak’s lap-lap as St Sebastian/JC in the Constant Prince, the sense of homo-erotica starts to stick out like the proverbial dog’s …. Now its fairly certain Grot never did the dirty deed with anybody of either sex, which means that the unconsummated energy morphed into transgressive spiritual éclat (something similar happened with Hitchcock whose unrequited voyeuristic impulses made ice-cold babes like Grace Kelly super sexy).

9. Apparently the place was freezing and they were pretty much starving all the time. In all the pics they sure are skinny! This along with all the other trials and tribs of surviving in post-war East Euro Marxism, meant that it was a hard life. This instilled in them huge chunks of Moral Fibre, which in turn gave them discipline and focus. The theatre space became a refuge where Grotowski could anneal all these factors into a rare delicate aesthetic.

After the international success of the ‘Prince’, Grot took another 3 or 4 years to put his final show together. It is a masterpiece and after two false starts, emerged as Apocalypsis Cum Figuris. A very good title for what was effectively an illustrated 5th gospel. To make this work it is recorded that he changed his working process. Prior to this his interdiction was one of relentless interpenetration – he was right there, inside the work with them, much like George Martin, the 5th Beatle. For ACF it morphed into an entirely passive response of saying a series of dos and donts’. He would sit in a corner saying one of four things: “I don’t understand / I understand / I believe / I don’t believe”. This gnomic attitude of stony monosyllabic reticence made the actors work very hard at convincing him, and at one stage he didn’t even step inside the theatre for 2 whole months! This drove the actors spare and eventually they dragged him back in and made him face his job description.
My sense is that after The Constant Prince, he felt under a lot of pressure to come up with something better; hence the blue funk. It was worth the wait though, because ACF toured the world very successfully for the next 11 years. It cemented his reputation and is such a key piece that even now it is the last word on western theatre as spiritual metamorphosis.
It is classic like Oedipus or Noh Theatre, because everything has been ablated or reduced to its essence, with minimal props, setting, lighting and dialogue.

Key Theatre Legacies:

Thus endeth his theatrical period. The key legacies from The Grot’s theatre work as far as I can figure would be:

1. Return of theatre to its original intent of spiritual event.

2. Let’s have a real setting e.g. an asylum, not just two thirds of half of a piss poor copy,

3. Actors who say what they mean and mean what they say and have the bodies to match it,

4. Writers are not infallible or sacred like the pope and that there’s going to be some dross that’s worth dropping off and replacing with other texts more apposite. And it is this other information that can reveal deeper insights inside the original.

5. Transgressive acts: An early critic, one Kudlinski, who had watched JG’s work on the up and up, pinned it down in 1961 as a dialectic of ‘apotheosis and derision’. JG turned these words into a manifesto, engineering a killer tool to shunt and shock the play (and by extension the audience) into abruptly facing itself.

6. Grot stressed an approach that he called at one stage bodymemory. This indicated searching for cultural templates that exist in the body as a result of archaic or archetypical forces that continue to resonate inside a society or culture. The companies I have seen recently in Wroclaw, if their shows are guide, have used this legacy as a valuable kick off. Zar and Pisne chant ancient religious songs for inspiration. One night in Brzezinka it was brought home to me when I was present at a compelling discursive chat by Jaroslav Fret, the artistic director of Teatr Zar. From what he said, it seemed that he used ‘mythic hymns’ as a metaphysical search engine for finding new unconscious data.

7. Lots of more street-wise directors than Grot have done a David Bowie to Grot’s Iggy Pop. They have seen the commercial potential and made big names for themselves by dividing it by five, hiring some sexy ethnic types who speak LOTE (Languages Other Than English), dredging up a politically correct multicultural myth then watching the critical acclaim accumulate.

8. He left behind old fashioned concepts such as ‘Character Development’, as belonging to an earlier era of neo-realism. It would seem that he felt such shibboleths merely continued a culture, rather than engaging it anew.

Grot and Barba eyeing off fumbling ferals.

Grot the Commune Leader:

Now, if those are his legacies, he’s done excellent well! So far so good, but what’s the next step?

After getting Apocalypsis on, and letting the guys do it by themselves (A Bad Sign! Never leave the kids home alone!) Grot went for a couple of wanderings, one back to India, where he’d been before and which had been inspirational in the past. And another across the USA on Route 66 straight to the heart of trendy Californian Counterculture. He went away a hipster and came back a hippie. Prior to this he had dressed in black suit and tie, white shirt, sunnies after dark, and liked to have himself filmed looking sharp, shaded and inscrutable. Now he shuffles back into town vegan skinny, scraggly hair and beard, denim and sandals, carrying an off the shoulder fag bag. It was such an image shift that when he touched down in Bogota for a theatre conference in Colombia, many truly took him for a fake.

He dropped a bombshell by stating publicly that he would no longer make any shows and would devote himself to performance ‘research’. Not only would this have been a huge shock for the arty world which wanted more of the same, thank you very much, but imagine the plight of the actors who had committed themselves to the Grot, lock, stock and barrel? Now he was divorcing the very actors that made him as much as he made them, and leaving them to fend for themselves, scratching around for meaning like orphans in mourning - Bummer!!!! Some tagged along for a while with the Grot through his hippy workshops, while a few topped themselves when they realized that future play was to be wide and shallow, not deep as before.

Cieslak following the Grot to the end.

The team captain, Cieslak slowly drank and smoked himself to death. The USA Grot Swot, Richard Schechner, recounts a dolorous tale of chatting to him as they watched the 9,500( Yesssssss! 9,500!) gullible ferals cavorting ineffectually in the grass outside Wroclaw in the peak Paratheatre event of 1975.
In response to a ‘What are you going to do next?’ type query, Cieslak turned his lugubrious brown eyes to Schechner and said something along the lines of “I hitched myself to the Grot for better or for worse”. …..What remained unspoken was: “ It’s a lot worse, but I can’t back out now”
The Grot’s dissing of his actors was a callous act, feyly disguised as a ‘need to be free’. It was monumentally self- serving, and typically emblematic of the indulgent seventies. Many people felt then they had the right to break free from their responsibilities, and do their own ‘thing’. Imagine creating some of the most magnificent actors the world has ever seen….. Then make them fart around with the tattooed and toothless. Deceptively cruel to the true believers, sacrificing them like that to the altar of his own myth. No wonder his Karma never recovered! It’s much less cruel to do what the other hard cases of the theatre do - make it so that your actors leave you – their decision! It sounds more brutal but it means that they take a part of you with them. When you leave them, conversely you steal part of them away with you.

Why the big existential shift? My take is that he was so freaked out by the success of Apocalypsis, that it was such a killer testament that he could never surpass. Better to take his wand and go walkabout in the wilderness. There’s nothing like fading to black on a big note to make people feel they are missing you already. When he divorced the lab, they lost themselves and that implacable act made him into a myth.

That was Grot theatre: now Grot the Guru, Space Cadet:

On his meanderings along Route 66 into the delusional clouds of 70s counterculture, he turned himself into Grot the Guru, buying heavily into the politic of nature worship. My thinking is that when he jawed with the likes of Carlos Castenada, Timothy Leary and the Gestalt Therapy crew he swallowed the ‘no rules, no barriers’ story, hook line and sinker, and seeing himself as a Messiah, proclaimed: “I’m going to do an open plan learning of my own and call it BEYOND THEATRE”. He first kicked off with a scheme called Paratheatre, where thousands of people used to gather in fields frisking and frolicking, doing creative movement (sounds like a face painting workshop!). These weren’t actors per se, but ordinary punters, confused by the evaporation of flower power and this was his big chance to become messiah to the masses with dumbed down theatre as the Gospel.
Of course the results, like most events in the 70s, were pretty dire and about as interesting as watching your sandals for six hours.

A few salient observations concerning Paratheatre:

1. The beaded, bearded pacifist commune-itis was very much a world wide epidemic in the early 70s. Australia had its versions too, and as I said before, I was at some of them! Temporary university arts festivals became live in communes where anti-establishment, anti-commerce, anti-nuclear family became the buzz and disaffected youth went to Nimbin to go feral and grow their own in ‘non-structured’ symbiosis with the earth. Smoking dried banana skins became shooting smack… Goodbye paradise….Hello squalor….The Grot got sucked in too!

2. This philosophy of every body being equal and ‘no hierarchy or elitism’ meant that you had Eagles dancing with Chickens.
Highly tuned and skilled artists such as Cieslak were forced to share space with unco bozos. Is this not like tennis great Roger Federer playing doubles with partially talented wannabes? This is neither interesting, explorative or fair- its just plain dumb! And…. who wants to watch it? The real reason for making the experts such as Cieslak, Flaszen et al. move to the back of the line with the plebs was to make sure The Grot reigned supreme and alone at the top of the pole. More than a touch of Orwell here: “Everybody’s equal, but I’m more equal”. Hippie communes like this tend to throw up the same dictators as Communism.

3. Here is a quote from one Kolankiewicz dude about the Grot’s paratheatre work in 74/75: ‘I stand face to face with a tree. It is strong - I can climb it, support myself delicately on its branches. On its crown, a strong wind blows us both, on the tree and myself. With my whole body I feel the movements of branches, the circulation of fluids. I hear the inner murmurs. I nestle into the trees…..’ Oh, Pu-llease!!!!
Such self-important gibberish you ever heard…..! Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a tree hugger myself, but I don’t think such tree deals are of intergalactic import. The wind, I hate to tell him, blows on all of us. Lots of ordinary guys and gals do it with out making it into an opera- its called ‘going camping’.

4. More from Kolanks….. ‘On some nights, we go, several of us, to the woods. We walk without any light. – I feel the quiet breath of the trees. We gather by the thick of the woods opening to receive us. The forest plunged into darkness lives in a different way than in daytime…..’ Oh! Really!! How Illuminating! Such tragic wishful symbiosis is made the more ludicrous when one realizes that other animals are silent and at one with the forest only because they are trying to Kill and Eat other furry little animals.

5. For guys that wanted to be so at one with the air and the trees, they were keen…one could say… industrial strength smokers!!!

6. It peaked in 1975 with a giant be-in, where 9500 hopeful believers lobbed up from 26 countries, to undergo all sorts of workshops called very caringly, Beehives. It became a giant show bag of the shallow soul, where the Roller-Coaster was replaced by Group Therapy, Meditation and Massage. Lots of luminaries like Peter Brook and J. L. Barrault turned up for the love-in, adding serious clout, climbing on board and making suitably clucky noises. But they found that unlike Grot’s theatre phase, this time there wasn’t much to purloin.

Journalists were allowed to be at the seminars but were excluded from the workshops. This was done nominally so as they couldn’t contaminate proceedings by being judgmental but, in reality, so that they couldn’t witness the waffledust.
The outcome of this self-important extravaganza had the long term impact of a burp in Bermuda! It disappeared down the sink with all the other 70’s twaddle.

A few years of this and he was canny enough to figure this was going nowhere fast, and what’s worse, outsiders could see too easily that there were no underpants on the emperor. Thinks: “To maintain Guru status the smart move is to say I’m going further and deeper than any man has done before, shrink the numbers, and close the doors, so the un-converted can’t make harsh, uncaring judgements. You have to be a paid up member of the club that won’t let you in unless you’re a true believer. By pulling this stunt, the Grot can keep top spot because no-one knows enough to say, ‘Hold the phone, Tyrone!’

So, in the last 19 years of his life, as he spun further out into deeper space, he had to become more precious and private. I can hear some say, maybe it has value; and some fellow space cadets will even buy the notion, but surely the analogy would be a tennis player who never plays a game but practices sooooo well. Here he is, banging a ball against a wall every day, but is never tested, and never witnessed being tested. Surely he isn’t a tennis player until his ‘special talent’ is measured as to how it affects other tennis players (try playing a game) and the crowd?

Holes in the system :

1. There is a culture of denial surrounding Grot theatre’s ‘spirituality’. This is more than wrong, it’s double denial - his theatre was more than spiritual; it was downright religious, both in what they talked about and the way they did it. Both ‘Apocalypsis’ and ‘Prince’ were modern morality plays and if you interchange Cieslak for Jesus in both you’re on the right track. But in the 60s, as now, the idea of God was submarxian heresy, and you couldn’t say you were religious in anything approaching a Christian sense– that would have been the kiss of death. So you had to rewrap the goodies, and brand them under Hindu or Zen.

2. The spectacular irony was that the shows were a revelation precisely because they were religion repackaged! This was religious theatre for the ‘devout agnostic’. It says so much about the climate of that time and which continues through to the present day. Under sub Marxian academia mention of things religious is still an unacceptable heterodoxy.

3. Grot wasn’t really connected with his training. He was a brainiac, not a bodiac. Grotwork is not a training but a combo of spiritual interdiction and supersmart reductive dramaturgy. That it is an approach and not a training becomes obvious when you check out the video footage of Cieslak trying to teach the schtick to a couple of eager beaver Scandos. If anything it should really be called Cieslak Warm-up Style. As you watch the Scandos loping about behind Cieslak, it also becomes apparent that he’s not a teacher- he cant pass his skills on. He was instinctively too good at it to consciously know what he was doing.

4. Due to the fact that there is no real methodology to hand down, the boys from Pontedera (Workcentre, Italy) and Akron (USA) have got nowhere to go. Grot has sold them a dramaturgical approach packaged as a method and if he’s not there to run it, the results get precious and pedestrian. I don’t know much about the Akronites, though people who’ve seen it, say their recent work is very ‘how’s your father’. But, the pics of the Pontedera boys in their jockettes look like a trio of part time male models doing a 60’s Lester Horton dance class.

The acid test is that if they actually performed and were any good, we would have heard it through the grapevine. Instead, if you ask anybody who has seen them in the flesh, you get the shuffling of feet and mumbles….er…. well…. actually…. It’s sort of interesting….
If that ain’t damning with faint praise, what is?

The best test for any great theatre is the truckie’s test. If you can get a bunch of truck drivers to watch your stuff, what’s their reaction to be? If they say: ‘Bunch of wankers!’ Then it’s all in your head, thespie-nerd! If they say: ‘Shi-i-it, that’s intense! Weird stuff, man, but they sure work hard.’ Then you know it’s a happening thang.

As I wind up, I’d like to comment on aspects of The Grot’s deep interest in archaic or primitive customs as tools in his Theatre of Sources phase. One of them was his long term infatuation with Haitian Voodoo.

Part of his ‘Let’s be caring in private’ scheme is the desire to get back to nature and to hanker for an arcadian past where everybody lives a simple honest life, inside a perpetual ‘nice’ climate. While this is laudable in a notional sense, remember that people who actually live like that have pretty dracky lives and mostly die of some dreadful disease that the west has eradicated by inventing medicines that are only possible because they have been tested on nice furry animals that we should be kind to. Ergo, the locals are keen to get out of there Pretty Damn Quick!
Such a desire of return to nature is quite possible in our wealthy, comfortable western society for only one reason - we can afford to have such atavistic wishes because we don’t have to live with them! People who have to scratch out a living in such societies are desperate to get a picket fence with a two car garage and air-con, asap!

Witness Haiti where the transformational and transgressive voodoo comes from. While Voodoo is a good map of the other side of the soul, remember this is a country that’s totally dysfunctional, giving rise to the psychedelic barbarism of the Papa and Baby Doc’s. Here is a place where you’ll see kids eating bits of dogs on the street - an arcadian paradise - NOT. And Voodoo is a very big part of the whole culture, and a big part of what’s holding them back.

Effete softies such as the Grot, love playing games like Voodoo, because it allows them the thrilling frisson of dangerous liaisons, as long as they don’t have to do the long term wade through the daily squalor. So, after a few days with the Voodoo Queen, sitting on the dirt in Haiti looking dutiful, Grot takes them back to his place, which is like - really nice. But of course now that the culture has been uprooted it must be treated much more preciously, because it only thrives in a dump,etc. Hence, the sacred attitude, the admonitions: the songs must be sung a certain way, they must not be sung without the Queen Bee, they must not be sung outside the space, they must not be copied…Oooh! That’s a no-no! Only sung truthfully with full sincerity from the heart, etc. etc.

The spectacular irony is that back home the ‘sacred’ ceremony is a mad woman’s breakfast of clattering pans, garish plastic tablecloths, chooks scratching in the dirt and wailing kids wiping the flies off their snot…. neither Sacred nor Profane – a Rabble!
This becomes crystal when one buys a CD of true Voodoo music. Its …like … boring. It’s much more exciting to listen to music inspired by Voodoo, e.g. Miles Davis or Perez Prado, whose Voodoo Suite is a lot more dangerous and transgressive.

And check this out! After all these admonishments about purity, eventually the Voodoo Queen decamped, not back home to the shit and squalor, but to a nice civilized spot like the south of France. For her Voodoo was a handy little ticket to the good life! And guess what, the boys in speedos still sing the ‘sacred’ songs long after the pure, original, genuine, sincere source has bolted! Sheeeet!!!!!
Guys like Jung talk very much of the western mind’s unconscious desire to go to darker places because:

1. We have largely eradicated them due to our technological competency and,
2. Western post- modern and feminist thought imposes the judgement that ‘dark’ is Male and Bad.

This has created a culture of denial surrounding ‘dark’ in our society and ‘dark’ is only acceptable when it is on the other side of the techno- fence - as long as the ‘other side’ is nominally more ‘caring’ and closer to ‘mother earth’.
The dark ideas that inhabit more primitive and static cultures, are dark ideas precisely because they come from, and exist in, dark spaces, i.e. places where the lights don’t work - places where there is not enough technology to control the environment.
It also worth a reminder that the cultures that foster such ‘dark’ undercurrents as their spiritual drivers also have very strict views of the male/female divide. This is of course anathema for softies within a western context, but psychotically, when transposed to the other side of the fence, quite acceptable in more ‘multi-cultural’ cultures.
Of course Modern Art has long benefited from daemonic influences such as Voodoo, viz Picasso and his Afro masks. But let’s get a little perspective on this! It may be interesting and informative but it’s not too sacred. After all, theatre is not life - it is a refraction of life. Theatre may be hyper serious, but its also artifice.
Its deep, but its also play- DEEP PLAY.

Final scores:

From where I stand in the commentary box, if I had to give marks to Citizen Grot for all he’s done:
The Theatre of Productions: 9 out of 10, top of the class and an Elephant stamp.
For Para-Theatre, Theatre of Sources, Art as Vehicle, At work with The Grot on Physical Actions: 1.5............a snowball’s chance in summer.

I welcome any discussion.....