ABSTRACT
Campo: Yes, I understand. Now we are talking about caring, like taking care or taking something as important. I think something is important so I pay attention to it. But there’s another kind of attention that’s very important in the work. You can think of the attention itself, and as you told me once, this kind of process of attention is something like taking something from the external and then working with that internally, and then giving it back to the external. For example, for Simone Weil,1 the attention itself is the vehicle. Her concept of highest attention is very similar to the ‘highest connection’, using Grotowski’s late terminology. I remember Grotowski used to talk about attention, in some important but still unpublished lessons he gave at the University of Rome in 1982, referring to a ‘colleague’ coming from a distant culture, a Mexican Huichol. This ‘performer’(in a Grotowskian sense2) was trying to explain in another language what he was doing and what it was important to do in such a specific activity, and the translation was basically ‘being attentive’, having ‘the feet well placed on the ground’.
