A Few Genius Moments in 60s Avant Garde Theater

Sound in Grotowski’s “Akropolis”

Nobody knows better than 60s avant garde theater directors Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor that simple theatrical choices can have a serious dramatic impact on a viewer’s experience. In  Grotowki’s “Akropolis” (a play based on Polish dramatist Stanislaw Wyspianski’s play of the same name but set in the concentration camp at Auschwitz), heavy work boots with wooden soles clap and thud on the hollow platform stage, causing bursts of frenetic, nervous trampling, creating a soundtrack of confused terror. Their burlap sack outfits scratch abrasively against one another, an untuned violin plays intermittently, offkey wailing and obscure liturgical-type chanting explode randomly while actors move with a bizarre automaton quality, making the whole display very creepy and pathetic and inviolably sad.

Makeup in Tadeusz Kantor’s “The Dead Class” and  “Wielopole Wielopole”

Polish director Tadeusz Kantor makes probably one of the smartest decisions I have ever seen any theater director make. Appropriately, in “Dead Class” and “Wielopole Wielopole,” two plays where death and war are omnipresent, the actors’ faces are coated with a greenish-gray layer of paint that makes them seem ill, corpse-like, and also reminiscent of washed-out figures in sepia tone photographs. Death is especially redolent in “Wielopole Wielopole,” where the Service Woman/Man character begins to “shoot” a photograph of a brigade of soldiers and ends up shooting at them with his/her camera/machine gun.

As the play goes on and the actors/characters sweat from their exertion on stage, this makeup wears off and we begin to see patches of skin color shining through beneath the sheen of pasty green. It is unlikely that Kantor would have neglected to see this during rehearsals since he is onstage directing them the entire time. I think what Kantor means to say is that whatever systems are bearing down upon them that force them to play a role, they are able, through exertion, to return to their essential humanness which can never be covered up or forgotten. And this is what art and the exertion of art seeks to do, to bring out the humanity underneath.