The Solitude of Theatre
The Solitude of Theatre

Summary/Abstract: This text is elaborated from a public meeting with Vassiliev in Kraków during the UNESCO ‘Year of Grotowski 2009’, during which he spoke at length about the impact of Stanislavsky’s and Grotowski’s respective approaches on the evolution of his own practice, his dispute with Moscow authorities and difficult departure from Russia to France in 2006, and about the ‘inevitable defeats’ that he asserts are integral to any genuinely exploratory theatre research – ‘to the real growth, the real development of the theatre’. Beginning from his time studying with Stanislavsky’s former collaborators Maria Knebel and Andrey Popov at GITIS (now the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts), Vassiliev outlines how his ongoing creative struggles with Stanislavsky’s notions of action and intentionality contributed to the development of his own ‘theatre of play’ [igrovoy teatr] approach, elaborated over years of research in an ongoing dialogue with Stanislavsky’s ideas and other, diverse sources. A particularly distinctive feature of Vassiliev’s reflections here is his account of the central place that Grotowski has had in his thinking about theatre – an influence rarely addressed in published writing on his work – as well as his particular take on Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ [teatr ubogi]. Katarzyna Osińska, who led the Kraków meeting and has also followed Vassiliev’s frequent visits to Poland, provides a helpful introduction to the talk for Anglophone readers, who still have a relatively limited bibliography available on the director’s work.

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