23

HOLIDAY [SWIETO]

The day that is holy

Jerzy Grotowski

These fragments are from Grotowsk’s texts from 1972, based in part on a shorthand record of his
conferences at Town Hall, New York City, 12 December 1970 and New York University, 13 De-
cember 1970. Brief passages were also taken from GrotowskVs statement at the Polish/ French
seminar in Royaumont, France, on 11 October 1972, and from his lecture in Wroclaw on 23 Oc-
tober 1971. The order of the paragraphs was dictated by the order of questions received from the
audience.

Holiday: the Polish word swieto, in the ancient sense utilized by Grotowski, does not have a pre-
cise English equivalent. It has no connotation whatsoever of vacation or of a day free from work,
but is directly related to the word "sacrum, " or "holy. " In its sound, it is very similar to the Polish
word swiatlo, which means "light, " but there is no direct etymological relationship. Swieto is not
necessarily related to any particular religion, and even if it has strongly sacral connotations, it is
also used in a secular sense. In any case, it indicates something special, exceptional, extra-quo-
tidian.

Some words are dead, even though we are still using them. Among such words are: show, specta-
cle, theatre, audience, etc. But what is alive? Adventure and meeting: not just anyone; but that
what we want to happen to us would happen, and then, that it would also happen to others among
us. For this, what do we need? First of all, a place and our own kind; and then that our kind, whom
we do not know, should come, too. So, what matters is that, in this, first I should not be alone, then
– we should not be alone. But what does our kind mean? They are those who breathe "the same
air" and – one might say – share our senses. What is possible together? Holiday.

The first question that has been asked here is an actor’s question. The questioner has said that what
prevents him from really disarming himself is the reason why one engages in acting. He also has
said that it is the need for approval from others that contributes to the fact that the actor remains
armed. Yes, indeed, I believe that the motives which have led us to engage in theatre are not pure.
Some want to pursue theatre as a commercial enterprise, others want to be acclaimed by the public
or gain a certain status, or receive gifts from high society. Somehow we know that not only is there
something dishonest about this, but also barren. A man [czlowiek] who gives his bodily presence
in return for material gain – in one sense or another – by this very fact puts himself in a false
position; today even more so than in the past when it was a profession clear in its ambiguity,
approaching that of a buffoon. For that matter, the life around seemed simpler, too, more stabilized;
atrocities were being committed then as ever, but they seemed far away. Everyone could build up
in himself a feeling that he occupied a lasting position in the world. The world also took itself as
more or less permanent – fallacious though this was – and thought that there existed more or less
permanent rules of the game, more or less permanent beliefs. But time is different, even if we look
at a certain singular phenomenon which occurred two thousand years ago in the peripheries of the
huge empire encompassing the entire Western world, as it then was: some men walked in the
wilderness and searched for truth. They searched in accord with the character of those times,
which, unlike that of ours, was religious. But if there is a similarity between that time and ours, it
consists in the need to find a meaning. If one does not possess that meaning, one lives in constant
fear. One thinks that the fear is caused by external events, and no doubt it is they that release it,
but that something we cannot cope with flows from ourselves, it is our own weakness and the
weakness is the lack of meaning. This is why there is a direct connection between courage and
meaning. The men who walked the vicinity of Nazareth two thousand years ago – they were rather
young, which has been forgotten, and they are traditionally represented as old from the start –
talked about strange things and sometimes behaved imprudently, but in the air there was a need to
abandon force, to abandon the prevailing values and search for other values on which one could
build life without a lie. If I have presumed to refer to that moment, it is to stress that – with all the
differences – what is happening in our century is not happening for the first time and that we are
not the first who are in the quest. And if one is in the quest, there are things one cannot do with a
clear conscience: for instance, mount a rostrum and pretend, perform a tragedy or a comedy in
order to be applauded, day after day fervently to exert oneself in order not to lose one’s employ,
push oneself into the limelight, hold tight to someone who is going to launch us ... If we feel this
to be futile, this is already not bad, because the situation becomes less false. But a thousand chances
of escape are lying in wait for us; escape from life, in effect. For instance, if instead of occupying
oneself with politics, one makes politics in the theatre, then this is obvious escape; if instead of
revealing oneself as one is, to the end – one makes use of nudity and sex as a decorative element,
or almost as in pornography, then this is worse than escape. One could multiply these examples.
One could invent a new philosophy, call up new names, proclaim new methods, practice some
kind of exercises and some sort of macrobiotic diet, i.e., always find something new for oneself,
in appearance.

In the fear which is connected with the lack of meaning, we give up living and begin diligently to
die. Routine takes the place of life, and the senses – resigned – get accustomed to nullity. Every
now and then we rebel, but this is only for the sake of appearances. We make a big row, create a
scandal – not too violent, as a rule, so that it will not threaten our position, something sufficiently
banal that it could be accepted by others with sympathy. For instance, we drink ourselves uncon-
scious. This shell, this sheath under which we fossilize, becomes our very existence – we set and
become hardened, and we begin to hate everyone in whom a little spark of life is still flickering. It
envelops all our tissues and the fear of someone’s touch, or of exposing oneself, is ever greater.
Shame of naked skin, of naked life, of ourselves, and at the same time, often, complete shameless-
ness when it comes to putting it all on the market, selling it all. We do not love ourselves, our own
selves anymore; hating others we try to cure that lack of love.

With great agility, through hiding our gloom, we busy ourselves about our own funeral. How many
functions are needed here, what effort, what ritual. And what is this death? The dressing, covering,
possessing, escaping, canonizing of one’s burden. And what remains, what lives? The forest. We
have a saying in Poland: We were not there – the forest was there; we shan’t be there – the forest
will be there. And so, how to be, how to live, how to give birth as the forest does? I can also say
to myself: I am water, pure, which flows, living water; and then the source is he, she, not /: he
whom I am going forward to meet, before whom I do not defend myself. Only if he is the source
can / be the living water.

And now a few words about the, so to speak, final dying. Some people say that man in a moment
of dying sees his entire life in a flash, all that was essential in it – a kind of film. I do not know if
this is true, but let’s believe that it is. What do you think we are going to see at such a moment?
What is important, what will return? The moment when you bought a car, when your boss praised
you, or when a trick you played came off and you felt you were better than others because you
were more clever?

I am sitting opposite someone who is like me and like many of you. I feel a need, so tangible that
it seems one could touch it with one’s fingers, and yet we cannot find words which could define
it. I ask him question after question – the questions which I really ask myself: he replies and when
I feel I cannot tell whether it is his reply or mine, I note down what he says. And in this way, there
gradually emerges the description of our need:

To be "looked at" (yes, "looked at," and not "seen"); to be looked at, like a tree, a flower, a river,
the fish in that river.

Life in falsehood, pulling wool over people’s eyes, pretending: how long can one go on? To give
up "what I can expect"; to come down to earth and to give one’s hand – it is not a clean hand, it
does not matter, what matters is the warmth of the body. To take off one’s clothes and spectacles
and to dip into the source.

I know that now I am supposed to reply in a more "technical" manner, for such a question has been
asked. Do the things I am talking about transcend the psychophysical contact, as Stanislavsky saw
it? Do you want me to say I have transcended him? I have too much respect for Stanislavsky to
say this. I considered him once to be my father.

Stanislavsky was concerned with producing written drama, how to stage plays, remaining in agree-
ment with the writer’s intentions and the human experience of the actor. If an actor performs Ham-
let, he ought to conceive everything that happens in the drama as assumed circumstances: that
there are countries which are like prisons; that the atmosphere in such countries is exceptionally
tense; that the crown prince loves his mother very much, but maybe he loves his father even more;
that his father died murdered, etc. All these are circumstances. Stanislavsky asked the actor the
question: what would you do if you found yourself in that situation? In the first – let us call it
psychological – period, Stanislavsky stressed rather the question: what are you going to experi-
ence, what are you going to feel? In the second period – that of physical actions – he stressed rather
the question: what would you do? How would you behave? One could say that the actor ought to
have built of the material of his own nature the image of a role, its vision, shape. I think that in
Stanislavsky, theatre – as the art of the actor – received its apogee. Wasn’t a man divided in this
kind of work? Yes, he was, and Stanislavsky seemed to assume this.

He said, for instance, that the actor ought to have two perspectives: the purpose of his work (what
it will give the spectator), and what the character he creates is doing and thinking. There are, how-
ever, different interpretations of this: for instance, the first perspective was also described by Stan-
islavsky as a kind of creative strategy. The actor already knows that the character will die in the
finale of the play – this is the actor’s perspective – so how is he to prepare the death?

What, for example, distinguishes what we are aiming at from Stanislavsky’s wisdom, that genuine
wisdom of craft? For us the question is: what do you want to do with your life; and so – do you
want to hide, or to reveal yourself? There is a word which, in many languages, has a double mean-
ing: the word discover/uncover. To discover oneself means to find oneself, and at the same time
uncover what has been covered: to unveil. If we want to discover ourselves (like the hitherto un-
known earth), we have to uncover ourselves (unveil, reveal ourselves). "Find out – unveil." There
is something exceptionally precise about this double meaning.

It is not essential whether you feel that personally, for you, some written play is indispensable as
a point of departure. Okay. Maybe yes, maybe no. But if Hamlet is for you a living area, you can
also measure yourself with him; not as with a character, but a ray of light, falling on your own
existence, which illuminates you so that you will not lie, will not play.

What did Stanislavsky understand by physical actions? He saw them as ordinary,

But are the everyday actions important in what is close to me, in that towards which we are aiming?
Sometimes, perhaps, yes; at other times, no, not at all. On the whole, however, the ordinary, eve-
ryday actions, which for Stanislavsky were something essential, and in his case rightly so, from
our perspective are rather means by which we hide or arm ourselves in life. Do you regard the way
you behave with your friends in a café as disarmament? Every one of you must have experienced
that, when he was sincere to the end – what was happening with him was not ordinary, and was
not happening when he was talking, or when he only talked, but when he was totally naked, as in
real love, which is not just gymnastics, but embraces us as whole, up to the loss of self before
another person. Is it ordinary what we are doing then? Certainly, there are actions resulting from
habit, but the most important of them are not such. Why is this not ordinary? Because in this case,
when we touch, we touch with our own self, and when we touch in everyday life, we already think
about something else.
•

Perhaps, everything I am talking to you about just now, you take to be metaphors. They are not
metaphors. This is tangible and practical. It is not a philosophy but something one does; and if
someone thinks that this is a way of formulating thoughts, he is mistaken. This has to be taken
literally, this is experience. That these are metaphors ... this is where the difference begins and it
is the core of the difficulty. It is enough to understand that I am attempting here – in as much as I
can – to touch on the experience of meeting – meeting with man [czlowiek]; then reject this word:
metaphor . . . Am I talking about a kind of existence rather than about theatre?

Does the behavior of those people in the wilderness I mentioned at the outset, or the practices of
yoga or Buddhism, belong to other epochs? It happened in another epoch and so belongs to another
epoch. We can understand them because we have reached a similar point, but we are unable to
formulate an answer in words. An analysis of this could take us too far from the theme of our
conversation. May I be allowed to say, however, that there is something which remains the same
in all epochs, or at least in those when people are aware of their human condition – this is the quest.
The quest for what is the most essential in life. Different names have been invented to call it. I do
not think it possible for myself to invent religious names; what’s more I do not feel any need at all
for inventing words. But the question of what is the most essential in life, which some of you can
think abstract, really is of great import. Many people do reject it; they feel obliged to smile as if
they were advertising toothpaste. But why are they so sad? Maybe they have missed something in
life? Maybe they never asked themselves the only question they ought to have asked. It must be
asked. And the answer? One can’t formulate it, one can only do it.

We do a great deal in order to not find a reply to this question. We want to learn means: how to
play? How best to pretend to be something or someone? How to play classical plays and modern
plays? How to play tragic plays and comic plays? But if one learns how to do, one does not reveal
oneself; one only reveals the skill for doing. And if someone looks for means resulting from our
alleged method, or some other method, he does it not to disarm himself, but to find asylum, a safe
haven, where he could avoid the act which would be the answer. This is the most difficult point.
For years one works and wants to know more, to acquire more skills, but in the end has not to learn
but to unlearn, not to know how to do, but how not to do, and always face doing; to risk total
defeat; not a defeat in the eyes of others, which is less important, but the defeat of a missed gift,
that is to say an unsuccessful meeting with oneself.

Does a man arm himself again, after he has fulfilled the act of carnal sincerity – disarmed himself
in the meeting I am talking about – and when he, so to speak, is returning into everyday life? In
order to approach the "impossible," one must somehow be a realist. In life, can one not hide? It is
better if we do not hide, but let us imagine a situation in which you will reject all means of con-
cealment, but others will not... maybe one must begin with some particular places. Yes, I think that
there is an urgent need for a place where we do not hide ourselves and simply are as we are, in all
the possible senses of the word. Does it mean that we remain in a vicious circle – that life is
different here, and different there? No, I think that this will come out outside the place I have been
talking about, will come out through a small opening, gap, window, door, penetrate outside.

There is in it also something like cleansing of our life. And it even makes me think very literally,
tangibly, as an action: cleansing. This, too, is swieto [holiday], to be in swieto, to be swieto. There
is no other way out here, but one must talk by associations: for some it will seem abstract, even
embarrassing or ridiculous, for others it will be as concrete as it is for me. This, too, is something
we can recognize one another by. And so, I am taking that risk and I will tell you about associa-
tions. Here they are, only some of them, there are very many: games, frolics, life, our kind, duck-
ing, flight; man-bird, man-colt, man-wind, man-sun, man-brother.

And here the most essential, central: brother. This contains "the likeness of God," giving and man
[czlowiek]. But also the brother of earth, the brother of senses, the brother of sun, the brother of
touch, the brother of Milky Way, the brother of grass, the brother of river.

A question has been asked about the concept of gesture as sign. In other words, that there exists
something like gesture and what does it mean. . . . But do the contents, and the means to express
it, exist separately? Must one have a conception of something and then look for means to put it
into practice? It is commonly thought that this is the only way. I must confess that I regard it as
altogether false. Entering on such a course, one is from the start divided into thinking and acting,
intention and life; one deals with certain "ideas," which one assumes from the start, and then one
looks for a way to illustrate them. One can, of course, construct in this way, and it will be logical;
one can explain ideas, but this product will never fully encompass him who has made it, or him
who encounters it, for it is not possible to achieve fullness walking the road of divisions.

This is, let us add, only a small aspect of a wider problem, the perennial, rigidly fixed division
between body and soul, a split which, in a more modern fashion, has been called the difference
between mind and body, or the distinction between the psychic and physical. Someone here men-
tioned "the psychic act," which I allegedly looked for, as if the act we are looking for could be
only psychic. In it, or rather towards it, man [czlowiek] acts with his living presence.

What perspective is opening here? A perspective which transcends acting, with all pretending,
with all "playing." It is the fullness of man that is thrown onto the scale. A human being in his
totality – that is to say what is sensory and at the same time shining through, as it were.

It can happen, however, that when we have achieved something which reveals our own life, we
will sell it to others. But in that case, we are sure to give it up for destruction: while, on the face of
it, remaining the same, it will be utterly destroyed. Slavery does not leave room for truth.
What matters is not how to secure the audience’s approval. One must not look for the audience’s
acceptance, but accept himself. The very word audience, for that matter, is "theatrical," dead. It
excludes meeting, it excludes the relation: man-man [czlowiek-czlowiek]. Our courage to discover
ourselves, to uncover ourselves, has another difficulty to overcome, caused by the eyes of the
stranger. It is not enough to accomplish that which reveals us; one must do more: effect this, in as
much as it is possible, in full light, not furtively, but overtly. Then, perhaps, this is a "sign," or
becomes one?

What does it mean: not to hide oneself? Simply to be whole – "I am as I am" – then our experience
and life are opening themselves. And every essential experience of our life is being realized
through the fact that there is someone with us. And it does not matter whether that other person is
present now, at this moment, or was present once, or will only be; that person either is actually,
tangibly there, or exists as a need actualizing itself – he, she, that other who is coming, is emerging
from the shadows, is pervading our life – is incarnated, of flesh and blood. We are like a big book,
where the presence of other human beings is registered, thanks to which every essential experience
becomes tangible. In the fulfilling of essential experiences we know: something is happening with
me. And is happening in a most concrete way: in the senses, in the skin, in the tissues. We are not
taking possession of it, but it takes possession of us, and then all our being quivers and vibrates.
We are a living stream, a river of reactions, a torrent of impulses, which embraces our senses and
the entire body. And this is the "creative material" you are asking about.

It is easy to give way to temptation for striving after a miraculous key to creativity; one easily
assumes that there are ideas which are fertile and can easily be taught to others. This is how many
people see the function of our exercises; the same exercises which we have considered only as
kinds of tests to discover the points of resistance of our organisms. Or rather: a certain meaning of
these exercises consisted in that on their basis we could occasionally recover trust for our organ-
isms – lack of trust being a frequent cause of division. This then, let me repeat, is an area where
we have wrestled with the mistrust of our own bodies – of ourselves – or, if you like, where we
have confronted certain obstacles which offered us the greatest resistance. I am rather afraid that
this latter possibility is too conceptual by now, though there is some truth in it. Anyway, the exer-
cises are not even an introduction, not even a point of departure. They can prepare us for the proper
search, give a certain discipline, a certain morale, I would say, in approaching one’s resistances.
They are like a prayer before something which is to be done; but if someone prays all his life,
instead of doing things, he will not have achieved much.

When one talks about method, about a method of someone who was psychologically as shrewd as
Stanislavsky was, as logical in his order of thinking as Brecht was, as technically precise as
Meyerhold in his biomechanics, one usually wishes to find those miraculous cases which would
exempt one from revealing oneself, from giving testimony, from the act. And when they talk about
any method, "my" method for instance, the problem boils down to the same thing: nearly always
they see it in the categories of "to know how to do." When they say that Grotowski’s method exists
as a system, the implication is that it is a false method. If it is a system, and if I myself have pushed
it in this direction, I have contributed to a misunderstanding; it follows that I made a mistake and
one must not go along that road, because it instructs "how to do," that is to say, it shows how to
arm oneself. We arm ourselves in order to conceal ourselves; sincerity begins where we are de-
fenseless. Sincerity is not possible if we are hiding ourselves behind clothes, ideas, signs, produc-
tion effects, intellectual concepts, gymnastics, noise, chaos. If a method has any sense at all, it is
as a way to disarmament, not as a system. On the way to disarmament it is not possible to foresee
any result in advance, to know what and how it will happen, because this depends exclusively on
the existence of him who fulfils the deed. One cannot possibly foresee the forms we shall arrive
at, "themes" to whose temptation we shall fall, facts which will follow next. For this will depend
on everyone personally. There is no answer which should be taken as a formula that should be
adhered to.

It is not theatre that is indispensable but: to cross the frontiers between you and me; to come for-
ward to meet you, so that we do not get lost in the crowd - or among words, or in declarations, or
among the beautifully precise thoughts.

Everywhere in the professional theatre, one can see symptoms of its agony, and at the same time
a convulsive battle to regain faith in something which does not excite us anymore. And when we
fall prey to profound doubts, we want to defend them with noise, with the chatter of forms - or
through the appeasing of our conscience by means of a new method. But the doubts remain.

If someone wishes to be sincere with regard to his own life, giving it a pledge with his own flesh
and blood, one might assume that what he reveals will be exclusively personal, individual. It is not
the whole truth, however; there is a certain paradox about it. If one carries one’s sincerity to the
limit, crossing the barriers of the possible, or admissible, and if that sincerity does not confine
itself to words, but reveals the human being totally, it – paradoxically – becomes the incarnation
of the total man [czlowiek zupelny] with all his past and future history. It is then superfluous to go
to the trouble of analysing whether – and how – there exists a collective area of myth, an archetype.
That area exists naturally when our revelation, our act, reaches far enough, and if it is concrete.

A particular question has been asked here regarding responsibility, that is to say the extent of the
respective rights and duties of the director and the actor, and about "collective creation." The idea
of a group as a collective person must have been a reaction to the dictatorship of the director, i.e.,
someone who dictates to others what they are to do, despoiling them of themselves. Hence the idea
of "collective creation." However, "collective creation" is nothing but a collective director; that is
to say, dictatorship exercised by the group. And there is no essential difference whether an actor
cannot reveal himself – as he is – through the fault of the individual director, or the group director.
For if the group directs, it interferes with the work of every one of its members, in a barren, fruitless
way – it oscillates between caprices, chance and compromise of different tendencies and results in
half-measures.

If one assumes that at rehearsals the actor ought to construct his part outside himself, as it were, if
he is merely its material, man is not free. But ask him to uncover himself, to reveal himself with
the courage to cross the barrier, to be sincere beyond words and above the admissible measure,
then his own freedom will find expression; it is not a freedom to do any random thing, but the
freedom to be as one is. The "order" still remains, however, as a bed of the stream: what is that
which we have found and what one must not abandon in order to go on doing? And: How not to
defend oneself against doing, which seems an impossibility’? This is very difficult to define pre-
cisely. It begins really to exist if the "director" exists towards the "actor," if he ceases to be "direc-
tor" and ceases to exist; on the other hand, where the "actor" does not hide before him and his own
partner, and so does not think about himself, about his fear. And is not an "actor" anymore. There
can be no talk about a method here. The most essential in this intimate affair is he who is standing,
facing the thing he is to fulfil, and no one can stand in for him, no one can undertake to do it for
him.

In spite of all professional experience – that which is the germ, that act which determines all, that
unveiling, could not be found through technical perfection, by means of training. It is something
that is done directly, here and now, or one gives it up. It can happen that someone who has turned
up from outside and is spending the first day in our group, who has never done anything in the
theatre, thanks to his human determination will, right away, achieve the thing which we have been
searching for for years. But another day a new problem will arise when that someone will want to
repeat the act in a situational, "external" way, as a trick, as an effect, and there will lose everything.
And we, with our experience of failure, should know that it is impossible for the thing ever to be
"reconstructed" as an effect, as a trick. But it is not quite certain whether we are aware of it: our
"professional life" still tempts us to exchange everything for effects.

What do I think about talent? But what is talent? It is certain only that there exists something like
lack of talent. A case of that arises when someone occupies a place which – in a natural, manifest
way – does not belong to him. Talent as such does not exist, only its absence.

What part does the audience play? Why worry about what the audience’s part ought to be? And
what does it really mean, "the audience"? We are doing something, and there are others who want
to meet us. This is not audience, they are concrete human beings; some are opening their doors,
others come to the meeting, there is something that will happen. This is more important than having
an idea about the "audience" and its role. What is it that we are to do and what people do we want
to meet? And what is that something that will happen to us and among us? These are the questions
that we ask ourselves over and over again, every time; and if so – the place of those who have
come to us will emerge of itself.

A slogan has been uttered here: The theatre and the Church are dying. I am coming back once
more to this problem because to me it is very important. Bear with me if I repeat certain examples,
which I find closest. Men shared bread and felt they shared God. They shared God. And we feel
the need to share life, share ourselves, as we are, whole, share brother – and if one is brother –
share not like brioche, but as bread. One must be like bread, which does not recommend itself,
which is as it is and does not defend itself. How to know, how to refer to brother as to God? And
then – how to become brother? Where is my nativity – as brother?

© 1972 Jerzy Grotowski

24

THE VIGIL [CZUWANIE]

for Ania Zmyslowska

Francois Kahn

In traditional Polish culture, "czuwanie" means something between people that happens on the
occasion of the death or birth of someone. "Czuwanie" is an old word, little used, which means: to
be attentive in front of ... to take care of... to be present before something.

Jacek Zmyslowski

Czuwanie [The Vigil], a project directed by Jacek Zmyslowski (on which I worked from the spring
of 1977 in Poland until its final development in the winter of 1981/82 in New York) is a work that
has disappeared together with its creator. The few analyses and testimonials dedicated to it cannot,
by reason of their small number, reflect the great importance this work had for those who, either
closely or from a distance, have followed the research of the Teatr Laboratorium. To remedy this
lack partially and to attempt to clarify this essential phase of the Laboratory Theatre, I refer to two
sources: on one hand to the conference Jerzy Grotowski dedicated to Czuwanie at Hunter College,
New York, in May 1981, and on the other to the interview with the members of the guide group
of Czuwanie (and in particular Zmyslowski) made in Milan in 1979 by André Gregory for the
documentary directed by Mercedes Gregory and produced by Atlas Theatre Company. To simplify
this article and to avoid repetition, I made a montage of these two texts, numbering the citations
(1) for Grotowski and (2) for Zmyslowski.