Polish theatre director and theoritician, cultural practitioner and researher of human behaviour under “extra-daily conditions”. He was born in 1933 in Rzeszow, Poland and died in 1999 in Pontedera, Italy. He is considered to be one of the greatest directors of Western 20^th century theatre.

Grotowski studied acting and directing, and when he finished his studies in 1959 he took over the artistic directorship of the “Thirteen Row Theatre”. Along with Ludwik Flaszen, they transformed it into the Laboratory Theatre, in which they realised their conception of “poor theatre”. This idea emphasized the essential element of any theatre event: the intensified participation of actors and spectators in a shared space, which was shaped anew for each meeting between them. The laboratory Theatre as not theatre in its usual meaning, but rather than an institute for research into the domain of theatrical art, and the art of the actor in particular. Its line of work centered on the great classical texts, by polish Romantic authors: Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Wyspianski, as well as my Marlowe and Calderon, whose function to Polish culture was close to myth. Grotowski’s performances consisted of vivisections of those myths.

Grotowski emphasized the elimination of blocks rather than the accumulation of skills and named this approach “via negativa”. By means of this negative path a human being could achieve a “total act”, about Grotowski said: “It is the act of laying oneself bare, of tearing ogg the mask of daily life, of exteriorizing oneself. Not in order to show oneslef off, for that would be exhibitionism. It is a serious and solemn act of revelation. The actor must be prepared to be absolutely sincere. It is like a step towards the summit of the actor’s organism in which consciousness and instict are united”. The most advanced realizations of this phenomenon were his works with Ryszard Cieslak on The Constant Prince (1965) and with the whole ensemble on Apocalypsis cum Figuris(1968-69).

Grotowski pushed the boundaries of theatre in the paratheatrical projects of the 1970s. There, the seperation between actors and spectators vanished, creating a shared domain of active culture. The main premise of this phase of work was a search for the conditions in which a human being can act truly and with the whole self, fulfilling his or her individual, creative potential.

In the late 1970s Grotowski explored ritual techniques connected to diverse source traditions. Working in this Theatre of Sources project an international team of practitioners, every member of which was “rooted in his native background related to tradition and culture”, Grotowski aimed at examining “techniques, archaic or nascent, that bring us back to organic primary experience of life. Existence-presence”. His approach in Theatre of Sources made Grotowski among the first to theorize the intersections between theatre and anthropology.

From 1986 until his passing in 1999, Grotowski dedicated himself to a research that came to be known as Art as Vehicle. This research focuses mainly on “actionsrelated to very ancient songs which traditionally served ritual purposes and so can have a direct impact on the head, the heart and the body of the doers, songs which can allow the passage from a vital energy to a more subtle one”. He also wrote “When I speak of Art as Vehicle, I refer to verticality. With verticality the point is not to renounce part of our nature, all should remain in its natural place: the body, the heart, the head, something that is ‘under our feet’ and something tha os ‘over the head’. All like a vertical line, and this verticality should be held taut between organicity and the awareness. Awareness means the consciousness which is not linked to language, but to Presence”.

In 1996, Grotowski changed the name of the Workcenter ‘To Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards’,acknowledging the unique importance of hiscollaboration with the latter. In this final phrase of his life’s research, Grotowski was concerned with transmission: ‘The nature of my work with Thomas Richards has the character of "transmission"; to transmit to him that to which I have arrived in my life: the inner aspect of the work’. Today, Richards leads the Workcenter, continuing and developing its research. Mario Biagini, a key member of the Workcenter since shortly after its foundation, has been the Workcenter’s Associate Director since 2003.

Before the end of his life, Jerzy Grotowski traced back over the trajectory of his life and work as a Professor at the Collège de France, in a series of lectures entitled The ‘organic line’ in theatre and in ritual (1997–1998).