The Actor's Technique Summary and Analysis

In an interview, Grotowski differentiates between aesthetics and methods. While other famous theatre theorists like Brecht and Artaud had wonderful aesthetic and philosophical considerations, they lacked any answer to the question, "How do you do what you are proposing?" There are very few actual methods proposed in theatre acting, and Stanislavski has provided one of them, though his disciples have subsequently mishandled and changed Stanislavski's method, in Grotowski's opinion.

Grotowski is different from these men, because he asks "What must I do?" and also "What must I not do?" His method of teaching actors is not to see what the actor is lacking and provide it to them through teaching, but to find out what is constricting the actor and preventing him from achieving his full potential. In Grotowski's Laboratory, the questions are not along the lines...