ABSTRACT
Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre has a valid place in the context of contemporary thinking on religion. Grotowski can be acknowledged as a key figure in the major religious movements of the last fifty years; his work should be legitimately recognized as developing, exploring and contributing to religious themes. Initially, Grotowski’s work used the theatre as a realm for exploring many of the questions proposed by Michel Foucault, challenging the boundaries and the cultural suppositions regarding mythic, religious, cultural and spiritual stories. The notion of an identification of the body as a location for spiritual experience provides the link between a post-structuralist religious experience and a New Age embodied experience of the self. Hank Hanegraaff’s scholarship on the New Age has been useful for contextualizing Grotowski’s explorations of the elements of yoga, shamanism, ritual, trance states, notions of channeling and the presence of the ancestors within the self.
