What is a theatre laboratory? Why a theatre laboratory?
This book tries to answer these questions focusing on the experiences
and theories, the visions and the techniques, the differences and
similarities of European theatre laboratories in the twentieth century.
It studies in depth the Studios of Stanislavski and Meyerhold, the
school of Decroux, the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik
Flaszen, as well as Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret.
Theatre laboratories embody a theatre practice which defies the demands
and fashions of the times, the usual ways of production and the sensible
functions which stage art enjoys in our society. It is a theatre which
refuses to be only art and whose radical research forges new conditions
with a view to changing both the actor and the spectator. This research
transforms theatrical craft into a laboratory which has been compared to
the laboratory of the alchemists, who worked not on material but on
substance. The alchemists of the stage did not operate only on forms and
styles, but mainly on the living matter of the theatre: the actor, seen
not just as an artist but above all as a representative of a new human
being.
Laboratory theatres have rarely been at the centre of the news. Yet
their underground activity has influenced theatre history. Without them,
the same idea of theatre, as it has been shaped in the course of the
twentieth century, would have been different. In this book Mirella
Schino recounts, as in a novel, the vicissitudes of a group of
practitioners and scholars who try to uncover the technical, political
and spiritual perspectives behind the word laboratory when applied to
the theatre.
