ABSTRACT
Right before I left for Italy that summer, I remember my father teasing me about my upcoming journey to Europe. Recently I had given up the saxophone, an instrument I studied seriously for seven years, and began practicing the Japanese shakuhachi flute. As I packed my bamboo flute into my knapsack, my father said, “So, you’re off to play to the mountains, eh?” At the time his comment seemed like a normal father-son jibe. Only later would I be able to see the truth that lay behind his teasing: the danger he sensed was that I might become a dilettante, someone who drifts from here to there without confronting the need for craft, one who meets life without responsibility. Then however, I thought nothing of my father’s joke. I felt he was just steeped in the superficialities of normal life, so I went on my way without worrying more about it. I did not expect that dilettantism and “touristic” behavior were those exact characteristics for which Grotowski, himself, would severely attack me during the work that summer in Botinaccio.
