The Laboratory as Utopia
The Laboratory as Utopia

Summary/Abstract: The primary goal of a laboratory is not the creation of representation, but the examination of certain elements of stage craft, mostly the indispensable element, the actor and his process. This way it very much resembles a scientific laboratory. At the same time, a theatre laboratory is an alchemist’s laboratory, because the experimenter firstly has to experiment, to perform the transmutation on himself before he starts working with other elements, thus he resembles an alchemist. In my paper I present the source of “laboratoriality” (through the islands of Grotowski, Barba and Staniewski), and link it to the perspective of this search/research becoming a spiritual discipline, a vehicle to work on oneself – all the while accentuating it’s practical, concrete, craftsman like aspect, steering clear of the modern tendency to reduce it to theories.

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