Where Is "Gurutowski?"

Abstract

Four years ago, Kazimierz Braun, a distinguished Polish director, confronted his readers in Poland and the United States with a question of peculiar and profound intensity: Where is Grotowski? (1986, I986a). It was not impossible to view Braun's essay as a planned provocation that disparaged Grotowski (see Burzynski 1989). Braun presented him, or so the argument went, as a has-been who left no trace in the collective cultural memory or the current theatre practice. It remains an open question why Braun felt it necessary at the time to indulge (in the English version of the article) in a political insinuation, or why he turned his reservations about misguided criticism into an attack (in the Polish version) on the incompetence of theatre scholarship (I986a:24). This is an issue that must be left, at least for the present, hanging. But behind Braun's Where is Grotowski? I could not help hearing a less strident tone. His compelling question reverberated with the pervasive sense of an ending and the no less troubling sense of exile from the time when the guru from Poland commanded the attention of the world. Braun's question may well have been: Where is Gurutowski? And so the essay seemed less an uneasy confession of aversion than a testimony of cultural as well as personal deprivation:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.