ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the New Age becomes transformed in Jerzy Grotowski’s work through distinct forms of experimentation with the body and the spirit. Building on Hanegraaff’s scholarship on the New Age movement, it presents an overview of the growing interest in yoga, shamanism and ritual that was part of the New Age from the late 1970s onwards, which had an impact on Grotowski’s work because of his reading of these elements through the body. The chapter also explores the influence of yoga philosophies on Grotowski’s work and its presence in his early work, as well as Grotowski’s inference that linked yogic disciplines with shamanism. It examines how the New Age understanding of shamanism influenced Grotowski’s own explorations of shamanism in order to then draw out these embodied correlations. Grotowski’s interest in India and the Hindu tradition was focused on aspects relating to interiority and the self.
