Teatr ZAR: Theatre Out of Death

Abstract

Working in the building formerly inhabited by Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre, Teatr ZAR has been struggling for years in the shadow of the master to achieve its own original theatre language and performance style.

Earthing the Laboratory

“…To a certain extent, theatre and performance artists have already explored laboratoriality, most famously through the European tradition of the 'theatre laboratory' (Schino 2009;Brown 2019;Kosiński 2020), but also in countless theatre and dance companies and projects that foreground collaborative creation (Colin and Sachsenmaier 2016). At its best, a performance ensemble can be what Katherine Profeta describes, in reference to choreographer Ralph Lemon's work, as a kind of laboratory in which the grandest questions -about 'the tensions between individual and group', about freedom, history and spirituality -'bubbl[e] up easily from just below the surface of the daily work', linking 'effective intercorporeal exchange' to the largest scales of human activity (2015: 204-5).…”