ABSTRACT
On 3 March 1997, I witnessed the meeting of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards with Polish public in Wrocław Teatr Polski. The meeting lasted seven hours and turned out to be an excellent opportunity for the Master to summarize his creative path, his relations with his homeland and its cultural legacy, to talk about the current research carried out in the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, and to introduce his successor to the Polish audience. Richards, in turn, described in detail the technical aspects of daily, long-lasting work of the doers from Pontedera on perfecting their ‘creative opus’, which enables them to transform ‘coarse’ energy into ‘subtle’ energy.
During the meeting, Grotowski was not spared a few questions about his and the Polish Laboratory Theatre's relationship with the communist dictatorship in Poland. The Master answered them honestly, without diplomatic evasions.
The report from the meeting at the Polish Theatre is supplemented with extensive excerpts from the recording of Master's speeches from the press conference held at the Grotowski Center in Wrocław on 10 January 1997 (courtesy of the Grotowski Institute).
