A screening of a documentary training sessions by the Laboratory Theater

The 1971 film Training at Grotowski’s Laboratorium in Wrocław (dir. Torgeir Wethal), made in Holstebro, presents a record of Cieślak’s workshop and training work. 

As part of BodyConstitution, practical seminar

This film is comprised of two television programmes featuring Laboratory Theatre actor Ryszard Cieślak and Margaret Croyden, host of Camera Three, a New York-based television show dedicated to the arts. Cieślak was asked to comment on excerpts from a documentary entitled Training at Teatr Laboratorium in Wrocław (1971), a film recording of actor training in Denmark, whose participants included two young Odin Teatret actors. The teacher/instructor was played by Ryszard Cieślak. The film has two 40-minute parts: the first focuses on plastiques, the second on corporals. A voice off camera reads excerpts from Jerzy Grotowski’s Exercises.

Each programme begins with an interview with Ryszard Cieślak, in which the actor discusses the essence of the training at the Laboratory Theatre and the role it plays in the daily work of the actors and in the live creative process. The documentary made at the Odin Teatret demonstrates how elements of training become elements of improvisation.

---

Zygmunt Molik became director of the Acting Therapy Professional Laboratory and led consultation and advisory sessions on acting techniques.

Acting Therapy was initially conceived as a means of assisting professional actors enduring difficulties in their work. We wanted to communicate part of our experiences of overcoming the typical blocks that actors faced in their voice, body, breathing and energy. It turned out to be the case, however, that the most serious physical blocks are in fact so deeply connected to the psyche that in the long-term it was essential to concentrate on the individual, regardless of whether we were dealing with an actor, someone barely connected with theatre activities, or someone interested in the issues raised by Acting Therapy for completely different, often very personal, reasons.

16–29 November, Wrocław – recordings by the French studio Cinopsis resulting in the documentary film titled Acting Therapy, Wrocław 1976

Rules for the film crew:

Although filming must also take place at the very beginning, the participants should be convinced that this is merely to aid ‘familiarisation’. Later, the camera must accompany them at all times in order for the camera to become something quite ordinary (just another participant) even when the camera is ‘blind’ (Source: Zygmunt Molik, personal archive).

---