Towards a Poor Theatre by Jerzy Grotowski

"Ours is not a deductive method of collective a "bag of tricks". Here everything is concentrated on the "ripening" of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bare of one's intimity- all this without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the "trance" and of the integration of all the actor's psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of "trans-lumination." 

"It is capable of challenging itself and its audience by violating accepted stereotypes of vision, feeling, and judgement- more jarring because it is imagined in the human organism's breath, body, and inner impulses. This defiance of taboo, this transgression, provides the shock which rips off the mask, enabling us to give ourselves nakedly to something which is impossible to define but which contains Eros and Caritas." 

"The spectator had thus a renewed awareness of his personal truth in the truth of the myth, and through fright and a sense of the sacred he came to catharsis. It was not by chance that the Middle Ages produced the idea of "sacral parody." 

The words "actress" and "courtesan" were once synonymous. Today they are separated by a somewhat clearer line, not through any change in the actor's world but because society has changed. Today it is the difference between the respectable woman and the courtesan which has become blurred." 

"If the actor, by setting himself a challenge publicly challenges others, and through excess, profanation and outrageous sacrilege reveals himself by casting off his everyday mask, he makes it possible for the spectator to undertake a similar process of self-penetration." 

"He must be able to express, through sound and movement, those impulses which waver on the borderline between dream and reality. In short, he must be able to construct his own psycho-analytic language of sounds and gestures in the same way that a great poet creates his own language of words." 

"One most resort to a metaphorical language to say that the decisive factor in this process is humility, a spiritual predisposition: not to do something, but to refrain from doing something, otherwise the excess becomes impudence instead of sacrifice. This means that the actor must ct in a state of trance." 

"At any rate, the decisive principle remains the following: the more we become absorbed in what is hidden inside us, in the excess, in the exposure, in the self-penetration, the more rigid must be the external discipline;" 

"We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyse himself. We are concerned with the spectator who does not stop at an elementary stage of psychic integration content with his own petty, geometrical, spiritual stability, knowing exactly what is good and what is evil, and never in doubt. For it was not to him that El Greco, Norwid, Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky spoke, but to him who undergoes an endless process of self-development, whose unrest is not general but directed towards a search for the truth about himself and his mission in life." 

"But if this process is followed through to its extreme limit, we can in full consciousness put back our everyday mask, knowing now what purpose it serves and what it conceals beneath it." 

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Unfortunately I don't have the patience- as good as it is- to read the whole book. But- from what I've read- this can be applied in "REAL" life as well. One must always strive towards self-understanding and therefore be able to communicate one's own humanity to another.

Pub by: Simon and Schuster

Farewell Waltz by Kundera

"It seemed to him that with every oversalted mouthful he was tasting Kamila's tears, and it was his own guilt that he was swallowing."

"For a moment his photograph had acquired a three-dimensional reality, a warmth, a weight, and then had again become an impalpable. colorless image reproduced in thousands of copies and thus all the more abstract and unreal."

"Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, while blonde hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, weaness, and passivity.Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman."

"I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul," said Bertlef doubtfully."

"If black hair became a universal fashion, life in this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved."

Now, he's just making fun...

"Why do you think they try to seduce us? Solely to defy and humiliate their fellow women. God instilled in women's hearts a hatred of other women because He wanted the human race to multiply.

Both Klima and Ruzena have groups of their own sex trying to advise them what to do in situation. Basically: what men and women do in case of an unwanted pregnancy.

"Just as love makes the beloved woman more beautiful, anxiety inspired by a woman one fears brings her smallest flaws into disproportionate relief..."

"[...] the sadness that emanated from these words of Klima's had for her a pleasant odor. She sniffed at it as if it were roast pork."

Sadness is very attractive in a vain kind of way.

"Only now having lost its charm, was the mouth suddenly what it was, a real mouth, an nonindustrial orifice through which the young woman had already taken in cubing meters of dumplings, potatoes, and soups, a mouth containing teeth pocked with fillings and saliva that was no longer an intoxicating liqueur but the cousin of a glob of spit."

Pregnancy = Power

"It thrills me so to think of giving you a child."

This is such power- overrides that he has a wife!! She isn't even in a position of saying such a thing, but just because she's pregnant- he has to pay for it. It's funny, but some women take pleasure in blaming the man for his natural "reaction". It takes two to tango.

Marriage Metaphor:
"Every time we climbed up there," Skreta went on, "Suzy tried to convince me we should get married. And I'd be so worn out by the climbing that I felt old and that there was nothing left for me but to marry. But in the end I always controlled myself, and when we came back down from the scening view my strength would come back and I'd no longer want to get married. But one day Suzy made us take a detour, and the climb took so long and I agreed to get married even before we got to the top. And now we're expecting a child, and I have to think a bit about money."

"Olga was actually one of those modern women who readily divide themselves into a person who lives life and a person who observes it."

"If Olga had been a little more foolish, she would have found herself quite pretty. But since she was an intelligent girl, she considered herself much uglier than she really was, for she was actually neither ugly nor pretty, and any man with normal aesthetic requirements would gladly spend the night with her."

"I picture my soul with a strong chin and sensual lips, but my chin is small and so is my mouth. If I'd never seen myself in a mirror and had to describe my outside appearance from what I know of the inside of me, the portrait wouldn't look at all like me! I am not at all the person I look like!"

"You need to have at least one certainty: to remain in control of your own death and o the ability to choose its time and manner. You can put up with a lot of things. You know you can get away from people whenever you want."

"It's incredible that hideous-looking individuals decide to procreate. They probably imagine that the burden of ugliness will be lighter if they share it with their descendants."

"Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up something itself on this small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile." 

"Something that always utterly disgusts me about mankind is seeing how its cruelty, its baseness, and its stupidity manage to wear the lyrical mask. She sends you to your death, and she experiences it as a romantic feat of wounded love. And you mount the scaffold because of an ordinary narrow-minded woman, feeling that you are playing a role in a tragedy Shakespeare wrote for you." 

"They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper in men's ears: Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as the breast you so madly adore." 

"When he is more mature he will find out that things are transient, and he will become aware that beyond one woman's horizon there opens up a horizon of yet more women." 

"Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty." 

A reference to a toothache (Notes from the Underground):
"He cannot sit down. Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth." 

"[...] it was because of her that their marriage was menaced by a bomb deposited in another woman's belly, by a charge timed to blow everything up in seven months." 

Everyone is death with anxiety- with things that mean the world to them- and in a second don't matter. Like for Ruzena and Jakab- they eventually become indifferent to their world/anxieties.

Kima and Mrs. Klima have a very sick love. They know everything about each other and the relationship is seeping with jealousy and regret, They have lost the connection long ago but don't want to admit it.


Further CONNECTIONS with Dostoevsky:
References Crime and Punishment

"Yes, there was something that brought him close to Raskolnikov: the pointlessness of the murder, its theoretical nature." 

and

"Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character's hysterical feelings." 

"'The police don't have much influence over the infernal powers,' the inspector said."

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He spun around this controversial topic very elegantly. I really liked each person's perspective/incentives towards abortion and pregnancy. Klima had to remove this from his wife's knowledge so wanted an abortion. Ruzena was a "stupid slut" apparently with a "good heart" and used her pregnancy as a way of getting money/fame. The poor girl was very CLOSE to thinking though!  Mrs. Klima is a typical housewife suffering from paranoia and yet beautiful. The Doctor helped Klima because he wanted fame.

Interesting story- of course I take it more of a farce than discussing the topic of abortion seriously. I guess it shows what happens to certain individuals when such a situation presents itself.

Pub: Harper Perennial