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ENIKŐ SEPSI THEATRICAL FORMS AND TRAINING The debates on sacrality in Europe and America and the increasing interest in rituals outside Europe compelled twentieth-century artists to abandon traditional theatre and the classical dramatic text. The revolution of the ritualistic theatre, which took place in Europe in the second half of the 1960s, is connected primarily to Jerzy Grotowski. While Peter Brook and Eugenio Barba had reformed Western theatre by researching its archaic forms, Grotowski had in turn been establishing the foundations of actorpedagogy, which has been in use up to the present day and is applied in theatrical practice.? His organic theatre (to use his term) tries to reach via negativa, the state at which the actor is a vehicle, an empty vessel ready to take in and carry transcendence. The aim of the physical training is to achieve this condition by reaching out to and training the maximal boundaries of the body. As one of Kantor’s younger colleagues, Grotowski created a so-called “poor theatre” characterized by its search for a “secularized sacrum” and demanding from its actors the sort of total commitment usually expected from saintly men in traditional religions (“secular saint”). Instead of the mercantile attitude of actors trying to “sell” themselves to an audience, Grotowski propounded an ascetic via negativa of acting by elimination. He demanded that the actors take off the mask of everyday life and perform an act of total self-revelation. 1. Training at Grotowski’s Teatre-Laboratorium in Wroclaw with Ryszard Cieslak. Plastic and Physical Training (1972) — Picture taken from Odin Teatret Film, director: Torgeir Wethal ° SeeJ. Edgar Bauer, Tadeusz Kantor, Kenotic Theatrology and the “Reality of the Lowest Rank”, a paper presented at The 2000 CESNUR International Conference, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia, 2004, http://www.cesnur.org/2004/bauer_kantor.htm, accessed on November 20, 2018; Peter Brook, The Empty Space. A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate, New York, A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster, 1996; Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces. Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, ed. and trans. by Michal Kobialka, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1993. + 308 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 308 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:25
