Ryszard Cieślak

This man seems to be an accomplished gymnast with a control of his body so complete as to frighten any actor who is sloppy about his physical condition.

He stripped to his work shorts, agilely performed a series of difficult-looking exercises . . . and then invited us to do them.  The impossible was upon me.

                                                                                                      

So recounted actor Tom Crawley (1940-95) of the first time he saw Polish director and theatrical theorist Jerzy Grotowski’s (1933-99) principal actor and teaching partner, Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90).  It was at New York University on the first day of Grotowski’s first U.S. workshop in November 1967.  It was also clearly a daunting and intimidating experience.

Cieślak was known for his complete dedication to his art; his personal, “confessional” technique; and his total control of all his faculties in service to his performance.  Grotowski defined performing as “not a picture of life as it exists outside the theater, but an immediate act that I call ‘confession with body and blood.’”  He elucidated further: “Creation is always a kind of confession” and one critic dubbed his performances “Theater of Witness.”  Ryszard Cieślak was the embodiment of this philosophy.

Prominent theater critic, commentator, and journalist Margaret Croyden (1922-2015) explained this concept:

Hence, when Ryszard Cieslak says, “I will show you my man,” and Grotowski says, “Show me your Man and I will show you your God,” they mean that the actor will offer up his “confession” within the context of the play to reveal what he really is, his intellectual and biological Self—everything that custom, habit, and mores prevent him from doing in life.  He will reenact his own trauma as in a ritual mass expressed through his own “body and blood.”  Cieslak’s Prince [in The Constant Prince], then, is an exposure of Cieslak’s “naked soul.”

(The Constant Prince was a performance by the Laboratory Theatre directed by Grotowski based on the reworking by Juliusz Słowacki, 1809-49, of the 1629 drama El príncipe constant by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1600-81, which dramatizes the martyrdom of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, 1402-43.  The première took place in 1965 in Wrocław, Poland—formerly Breslau—and the production later played in London and other cities in the United Kingdom in September and October 1969, and New York City, October-December 1969.)

Cieślak was renowned for a kind of mystical release that Grotowski demanded of his actors.  Of Cieślak’s performance in The Constant Prince, for instance, Ronald Hayman (1932-2019), a British critic, dramatist, and writer who was best known as a biographer, reported:

As the prince, Ryszard Cieslak seemed to be in greater danger than a matador in a bull-ring.  There was no faking about the pain he had to suffer; the audience saw his body bouncing and his back going red under flagellation from a folded cloak, and he was genuinely hurting himself when he slapped his own chest.  He submitted to all the pain and humiliation with the same stoical passivity as to the kiss that Rena Mizecka implanted on his groin, but the alternation between supinity and violent animation made his performance seem all the more dangerous.  His physical expressiveness could have emerged only from a profound interiorization of a discipline that allows great scope to spontaneity.

Cieślak stated: “An actor needs above all courage, to reveal himself, to expose to everyone his inner being.”  As one student actor who took part in a workshop with the actor proclaimed: “Cieslak worked . . . with no fear.”

So who was this remarkable man, this artist so totally committed to his profession?  He’s been dead for almost 30 years and he only lived for 53.  Ryszard Cieślak became a member of Grotowski’s 13 Rows Theater in 1961, just 29 years before his death. 

Ferdinando Taviani (b. 1942), an Italian professor of theater history and theater scholar who followed Grotowski’s work for many years, wrote, “When Ryszard Cieslak died, almost nothing was reported in the papers, the announcement confined in most to a couple of lines.  After his work on The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum figuris, Cieslak had ceased to be newsworthy.” 

For such a brief time in the public eye, however, Cieślak left an outsized footprint—an indelible impression on artists who saw him work.  Taviani continued: “Anyone wanting to explain precisely what Cieslak was would have to be able to extend the meaning of the word ‘miracle’ and say it without fear of exaggeration.  For Cieslak really was the miracle actor of the twentieth century.”  Tom Crawley’s response, I daresay, was typical.

Cieślak did a number of workshops and master classes after that NYU program and the response was always similar: astonishment, awe, and inspiration.  Another participant in the 1967 NYU workshop, Stephen Wangh (b. 1943), who taught acting in NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, published a book on acting inspired by Grotowski’s work (An Acrobat of the Heart; Vintage Books, 2000).  In it, he revealed his impressions of Ryszard Cieślak upon first meeting him: physically, he was “younger, more physical” than the “rotund” Grotowski (actually, Grotowski was only 3½ years older than Cieślak).  Then the Polish actor started his routine:

Cieślak silently stripped to his shorts, went to the middle of the empty studio and proceeded to demonstrate the “impossible” for us.  With incredible ease and precise physical control, he performed a series of headstands, rolls, and backbends, each flowing into the next, each completely centered and yet somehow off-balance and dynamic.  His body seemed to be made of liquid muscle, enormously powerful, yet utterly soft and supple.  He moved with the strength and precision of an accomplished gymnast, yet there was something in his face, in his searching eyes, that removed his work entirely from the world of gymnastics.  It was as if the enormous muscular energy we witnessed was merely the exterior emanation of an even more intense inner life.

When Cieślak demonstrated his . . . “plastique” body isolations, kinetic and dramatic impulses seemed to flow through his entire body as if it were made of molten metal. . . .   The infinite agility, the intense concentration, and the wonderful precision with which Cieślak glided effortlessly from headstand to backbends to leaps and rolls seemed entirely beyond our abilities.

A report on a 1981 program in Los Angeles affirmed that “[a]ctors’ bodies were tempered, tested and tried like fine steel in a fiery crucible to create sensitive instruments.”  One young participant recounted: “It’s over, and yet not over.  My whole life has changed.  I can’t think of anything else.”

From a 1984 class at Yale. Thomas Richards (b. 1962), a Yale senior whose father was the Yale School of Drama’s director and the Yale Repertory Theatre’s artistic director Lloyd Richards, reported, “This work opened in me something which had been tightly shut . . . .  It introduced me to a physical way of expression; I began to see the importance of the body for the actor.” 

Richards, who would eventually become Grotowski’s successor at the Centro per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale (Center for Experimentation and Theater Research) in Pontedera, Italy, described his reaction following the day’s work: “After each session with Cieslak, I would practically run home dancing in the streets, such was the state of my excitement.  I distinctly remember the impression of the street lamps reflecting light through the flakes of nighttime snow as I danced home.”  (This was a man who’d expressed disappointment when he learned that it wouldn’t be Grotowski who was coming to do the workshop, but Cieślak, who, Richards felt, “must be second best.”)

Here’s Richards’s first impression of Cieślak:

Our acting class was in full swing when Cieslak walked in.  I practically fell out of my chair, I had never seen such presence from anyone.  “My God, this is a dinosaur, people like this don’t exist anymore.  He walks like a tiger.”  Cieslak sat down and with his presence alone he began to take over and dominate our class.  Faced with him I felt like a docile schoolboy, a well-trained circus animal next to a wild panther.  Through his presence alone, and almost silently, he stripped our acting teacher of his authority.

“I was spellboind,” averred the young acting student.  “The work with Cieslak was an eye and body opening period: a taste of some other possibility which had a deep effect on my unconscious,” wrote Richards.

Ryszard Cieślak was born on  9 March 1937 in Kalisz, Poland, a city of 81,000 inhabitants (1939) in west-central Poland.  A regional capital, Kalisz is a commercial and industrial center and a center of traditional Polish folk art.  

During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the Cieślak family was resettled by the Germans in Chęciny, 220 miles southeast of Kalisz.  (Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, which precipitated the war.)  The town became a killing ground for the Jewish population, with mass shootings in  the town square or in the nearby forest; thousands of Jews, including many from other parts of Poland, were transported from Chęciny to death camps. 

The Cieślaks escaped to Krakow and took refuge in a monastery there.  They returned to Kalisz in 1944 and seven-year-old Ryszard began his primary school education.

In 1954, Cieślak graduated from Adam Asnyk High School in Kalisz and began studying exact sciences at the Lodz University of Technology.  He transferred to the Cracow University of Technology to study medicine a year later; he wanted to study psychiatry.  In 1957, however, he discontinued his medical studies and began studying in the Puppetry Department of the Ludwik Solski State Theater School in Cracow (now spelled Krakow), from which he graduated in 1961.

One of his teachers in Cracow was Jerzy Grotowski, who taught acting.  Cieślak was invited to join Grotowski’s 13 Rows Theater (Teatru 13 Rzędów) in Opole and became a member of the theater’s acting company on 1 October 1961, eventually becoming its leading actor.  He became the model for Grotowski’s “poor acting.” 

Poor acting is an essential element of “poor theater.”  Grotowski eliminated all superfluous spectacle from his productions, leaving the actors to communicate with only their bodies and voices, plus a few essential props, costumes, and sets, which were generally abstractions and symbols and often represented many different things depending on their use by the actors.  This was poor theater, and poor acting was similarly stripped down to the actor’s inner core, creating a bond with the individual spectator as the artist, not via the fictional character as a kind of buffer.  As described earlier, this is what Cieślak did, baring his very self to his audience. 

Cieślak starred in all Grotowski’s productions, including  Kordian (1962), Akropolis (1962), The Tragic Fate of Doctor Faust (1963), Masks (1963), Hamlet Study (1964), and the aforementioned Constant Prince, among others.  In 1965, Grotowski moved his company to Wrocław, renaming it the Teatr Laboratorium [Theater Laboratory—usually known in English as the Polish Theater Lab]  Cieślak worked with the theater troupe until its dissolution in 1977.

Akropolis by Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) brought Grotowski and his troupe international renown—and did the same for Cieślak.  The actors represented concentration camp prisoners acting out stories from the Bible and Greek mythology as they build a crematorium around the audience.  (The première of Akropolis was in Opole; Auschwitz is only 70 miles away—about an hour-and-a-half drive.)  A film of the production was made in 1968, making the performance available to a wider audience.

When Grotowski’s productions of The Constant Prince, Akropolis, and Apocalypsis cum figuris (1968) were presented in New York in 1969, Cieślak became the first non-English-speaking actor to be recognized for Outstanding Performance at New York’s annual Drama Desk Awards in 1970 for his role in The Constant Prince.  Theater critics called Cieślak “Off Broadway’s most outstanding creator and the actor with the greatest promise.”

Akropolis had brought Grotowski, the Theater Lab, and Ryszard Cieślak to international notice, The Constant Prince made Cieślak a star in the world of international, avant-garde, and experimental theater.  His performance as the Prince astonished almost everyone who saw it.  In Poland, writing in the monthly culture journal Odra, Józef Kelera said:

In my opinion the force and, moreover, the success of The Constant Prince are mainly due to the principal character.  In the actor’s creation, the essential elements of Grotowski’s theory take precise tangible forms which can be verified not merely in the demonstration of his method, but also in the beautiful fruits it produces.  

The essence of this does not in reality reside in the fact that the actor makes amazing use of his voice, nor in the way that he uses his almost naked body to sculpt mobile forms that are striking in their expressiveness; nor is it in the way that the technique of the body and voice form a unity during the long and exhausting monologues which vocally and physically border on acrobatics.  It is a question of something quite different.

We have always followed—and often acknowledged—the remarkable technical results achieved by Grotowski in his work with the actor. We have nevertheless retained a certain scepticism with regard to the arguments he uses which compare the work of the actor to a psychic act of transgression, an exploration, a sublimation, a displacement of deep-lying psychic substances.  However, when faced with the creation of Ryszard Cieslak, this scepticism is called in question.  

In my profession as a theatre critic I have never yet felt the desire to use that dreadfully banal and overworked expression which, in this particular case, is quite simply true: this creation is “inspired”.  I cannot help considering this word with a certain amount of surprise, examining it through a magnifying glass, but if it still has a legitimate place in the world of theatrical criticism, I certainly could not find a better opportunity to use it.  Until now, I accepted with reserve the terms such as “secular  holiness”, “act of humility”, “purification” which Grotowski uses.  Today I admit that they can be  applied perfectly to the character of the Constant Prince.  A sort of psychic illumination emanates  from the actor.  I cannot find any other definition.  In the culminating moments of the role, everything  that is technique is as though illuminated from within, light, literally imponderable.  At any moment the actor will levitate . . .  He is in a state of grace.  And all around him this “cruel theatre” with its  blasphemies and excesses is transformed into a theatre in a state of grace.

Fernando Taviani, the Italian theater scholar, asserted, “Even from the complex point of view of theatre culture, The Constant Prince was extraordinary. . . .  What it did was to change the way in which our culture conceived of the actor.”  (Along with my earlier quotation of Ronald Hayman’s comments, I could write a long separate post just on Cieślak’s work in The Constant Prince.  This will have to suffice for the present article.)

After the Theater Laboratory ceased to function in 1977 (it officially disbanded in 1984), Cieślak and Grotowski collaborated on many theater projects.  Grotowski having ceased directing in 1970, Cieślak followed his teacher into the realm of what Grotowski dubbed “paratheater” (literally, beyond or above [from Greek para-] theater; also known as the “theater of participation” or “active culture”). 

In this phase of his work, Grotowski shifted his focus away from conventional theatrical performance—that is, new play production—toward eliminating the distinction between actors and spectators in events that involved spontaneous contact between experienced leaders and outside participants and were heavily influenced by rites and rituals—both historical and traditional, and invented.

Cieślak described this new direction as “progressing beyond theatre to paratheatre.  In the theatre, people come to see, to watch.  In our new theatre, all participate. . . .  This is a quasi-performance, very warm, with open places where people can participate . . . .”

In September 1984, having been invited by British director and theater innovator Peter Brook (b. 1925) to join the Centre International de Recherche Théâtrales-Bouffes du Nord (or C.I.R.T.—International Centre for Theatre Research), his international company in Paris, Cieślak worked on developing a performance based on The Mahabharata, the classic Sanskrit epic, with the actor creating the role of the blind ruler Dhritarashtra.  (The Mahabharata premiered at the 39th Avignon Festival on 7 July 1985.  The Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the nine-hour production at the Majestic Theatre in Fort Greene in 1987.)  

From September 1989, Cieślak was employed as a visiting professor at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts (where, coincidentally, that first Grotowski workshop had happened in 1967).

Ryszard Cieślak died on 15 June 1990 of lung cancer in Houston, Texas.  Some people believe that the actor’s premature death was caused (or accelerated) by the psychological and physical abuse through which he’d put himself all his career.  (There’s no evidence for this theory.  The fact is that the actor smoked several packs of cigarettes a day and later also became a heavy drinker.)  

Cieślak’s remains were brought back to Poland and buried in Wrocław.  His tombstone sculpture was carved by contemporary Polish-Italian sculptor Krzysztof Bednarski (b. 1953 in Cracow). 

It’s hard to separate Ryszard Cieślak’s art from Grotowski’s theories and practices.  Not only did Cieślak learn from Grotowski—almost exclusively, when it comes to acting and theater—but the actor so took to his master’s principles that he essentially became Grotowski’s surrogate. 

Though the actor declared, “I am not Grotowski,” Cieślak was the living embodiment of Grotowski’s ideas.  “Grotowski’s closest collaborator in this research,” says Towards a Poor Theatre (Simon and Schuster, 1968), “is Ryszard Cieslak who, in the opinion of a critic from the French newspaper ‘l’Express’, is the living image of this method” (punctuation sic).

So, if you hear in reports of Cieślak’s acting or quotations of his explanations of what he does and how he works echoes of Towards a Poor Theatre or any other writings by or about Grotowski, there’s a reason for that.

Let’s start with the attribute on which my opening remarks focused: Cieślak’s astonishing control of his body.  The exercises that Tom Crawley found so daunting were Grotowski’s “corporals” and Cieślak demonstrated, discussed, and analyzed them on the CBS television program Camera Three in the second half of a two-part episode called “The Body Speaks” on 21 December 1975.  New York Times TV reviewer John J. O’Connor described the series of exercises intended to prepare the actor’s body as “an instrument for acting”:

Mr. Cieslak. rolls and tosses his body about the hard floor of a studio with astonishing abandon. Using basic yog[a] position[s], the motivational thrust is transformed from contemplative to outrageous extroversion.  The wild movements are constructed not mechanically or automatically but with a “sense of play toward discovery.”

The corporals are designed to engage the entire body.  On 14 December, the first part of the episode, Cieślak demonstrated Grotowski’s “plastiques,” exercises which train each set of muscles to move independently of the others (also sometimes called “isolations”).  O’Connor’s report:

Mr. Cieslak throws his body into contortion, contraction, jerking, twitching and belly‐dance gyrations.  It is an opening of the body and, as he explains it, a “going beyond the body.”  The individual exercises are described as notes on a musical scale.  Turning toward the “first moments of improvisation,” the notes finally “begin to make a melody.”

“A more demanding regime of physical exertion is difficult to imagine,” declared O’Connor.  The Times writer concluded:

The two parts of “The Body Speaks” constitute a compelling portrait of the sheer physical discipline required for the serious performing artist.  Another, more appropriate title might have been cribbed from the recent National Geographic special called “The Incredible Machine.”

(The Incredible Machine was a video journey inside the human body, using advanced technology—for 1975—of microscopic photography and sound, including scenes of heat radiation, color x-rays, and camera exploration of a living human heart.  It was a NatGeo documentary aired on the Public Broadcasting System/WNET-13 in New York City on 28 October 1975.)

Cieślak’s “physical discipline” that O’Connor described is the key to Grotowski’s poor acting as exemplified by Cieślak.  Grotowskian acting is an extension of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s concept of “the method of physical action”—the Polish theorist admired his Russian predecessor greatly for having been the first to devise a system of actor training (I guess he discounted François Delsarte)—which is why Grotowski and Cieślak placed so much emphasis on the training and discipline of the actor’s physical instrument.

In order to communicate with an audience by using only what actors often call their “instrument,” without the artificial aid of costumes, make-up, elaborate sets, inorganic sounds or music, and so on—the production elements Grotowski eschewed—an actor must be in total control of his or her body, to make it obey on command and to endure the physical strain, even pain, the “confession” requires. 

Tom Crawley quoted Grotowski from the 1967 workshop as demanding: “Creation involves effort, obstacles, something achieved.  It is not something simply avoided or arrived at by whim.  It is an effort brought out of commitment, risk and, in many cases, pain.”  Probably no actor lived this dictum to the extent that Ryszard Cieślak did.

It’s not hard to understand Cieślak’s regimen of physical fitness—it’s hard to do but not to understand—but one part of what he was preparing for is harder to grasp.  A focal aspect of the Grotowskian confessional acting style for which Cieślak was most renowned was “secular holiness.”

While the Stanislavskian actor’s goal is to merge with the character, to understand his or her motivations and goals and Brecht wanted his actors to find intellectual connections and, as he put it quite literally, demonstrate the actions of the character, the Grotowskian actor’s goal is to reveal that which is “most personal and closely guarded” within him- or herself. 

One important difference between Grotowskian acting and the Brechtian style lies in precisely what the actors reveal.  Grotowski, like Brecht, prohibited his actors not only from identifying with their characters—that is, pretending that the actor and the character are the same person—but also from demonstrating or showing anything that doesn’t spring from immediate and organic impulses. 

Ryszard Cieślak, as a Grotowskian actor, became an instrument for revealing “the innermost core of our personality—in order to sacrifice it, expose it.”   It is a nearly mystical experience for both the actor and the spectator.  While Stanislavsky wanted his audience to feel and respond to the emotional experience communicated by the actor and Brecht created a dialectic in which the actor demonstrates the situation that the play is presenting to the audience, commenting on the circumstances and inviting criticism from the spectators, Grotowski saw the shared experience as “shamanistic.”   This is what Cieślak practiced on stage.

We should note that emotions are part of this process, not eliminated from it; Cieślak’s feelings were part of his performances.  The emotions Cieślak expressed on stage weren’t those of the character, however, as a Stanislavskian actor would project, but his own. 

In his book An Acting Method Using the Psychophysical Experience of Workshop Games-Exercises (Edwin Mellon Press, 2000), Jerry Rojo (1935-2018), award-winning set designer, Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, and pioneer in Environmental Theater, asserted, “In Grotowski’s notion of the ‘holy actor,’ an actor—in a direct, willful act—offers up the extreme of her own psyche and emotion, and this is, in fact, an act of sacrificial giving.”

What Cieślak accomplished on stage, what his performance in The Constant Prince exemplified, was what Grotowski called the “total act,” which he described in the Polish journal Dialog in 1969:

This act can be attained only out of the experience of one’s own life, this act which strips, bares, unveils, reveals, and uncovers.  Here an actor should not act but rather penetrate the regions of his own experience with his body and voice. . . .  At the moment when the actor attains this, he becomes a phenomenon hic et nunc; this is neither a story nor the creation of an illusion; it is the present moment.  The actor exposes himself and . . . he discovers himself.  Yet he has to know how to do this anew each time. . . .  This human phenomenon, the actor, whom you have before you has transcended the state of his division or duality.  This is no longer acting, and this is why it is an act [.  . .].  This is the phenomenon of total action.  That is why one wants to call it a total act.

Grotowski and Cieślak’s goal in acting, what all this preparation and training was aimed at, was a combination of spontaneity and discipline.  Grotowski instructed that “spontaneity and discipline, far from weakening each other, mutually reinforce themselves; that what is elementary feeds what is constructed and vice versa, to become the real source of a kind of acting that glows.”  So, while Cieślak is always “receptive to what will happen” at any given moment on any given night, he has a technique that gives his performance a shape that remains true and repeatable from show to show.

Despite what it sounds like from this simplistic examination, Cieślak’s acting wasn’t entirely free-floating.  The actor spoke of constructing a “score” for each role which would remain constant, a vessel for the flexibility of the moment-to-moment responses of the actors.  This is what allowed him to create freely at each performance but still repeat the play and scenes show after show. 

Grotowski used the metaphor of the banks of a river to illustrate this concept:

[T]he score, of course, is fixed—but it’s not fixed in the sense that something is absolutely fixed, but in the sense of having two banks—in having two banks of a river.  In other words, between this and that [indicating each hand], a human reaction, which has its limits—its borders—is different.  If the spectator can see a production three times, he thinks that it’s absolutely the same.  But if he’s seen it ten times, he will then observe that each time, it’s something totally different.  It’s only between the same banks (transcribed from videotape by the author).

Cieślak explained how the score functions:

We work in rehearsals to find an objective set of actions and relationships that, understood apart from  anything we the performers might feel, communicate to the audience the images, actions, and meanings we want to communicate.  This process takes months and it is a via negativa—that is, we  reject more than we accept and we search so that we can remove obstacles to our creativity.  We  play out the actions at hand, the associations that offer themselves to us. Grotowski  watches.  He helps us remove blocks, things that prevent us from fully confronting and experiencing the actions at hand.

Finally we construct a coherent score. This score, which grows minutely day by day, includes all the objective things a spectator sees from night to night.  For example, in Akropolis my score includes how my body lies in the wheelbarrow, what tone my voice has, how I breathe, how my fingers move. The score even includes the associations I have, what I think about from moment to moment.  These associations I change from time to time, as they get stale.  And as it is for me, so it is for everyone else.  Ideally the score is whole and does not need completion or revision. In practice, it is never that way.  Only a percentage of each production is scored when we begin performing it for audiences.  After four years of performing Akropolis about 80 per cent of it is scored for me.

Cieślak provided two analogies to explain the technique: a glass with a candle burning inside it and the bed of a river.  The glass, as the score, contains the flame, but the flame changes with each performance, responding to the moment, just as the riverbed channels the water, which is always “new and unknown.”  While the score remains constant, even unyielding, but imperceptible, it is the flame or the river that the spectator sees, and which alters in response to the audience and the environment.  The actor described his technique in terms of the candle burning inside a glass chimney:

The score is like a glass inside which a candle is burning.  The glass is solid; it is there, you can depend on it. It contains and guides the flame.  But it is not the flame.  The flame is my inner process each night. The flame is what illuminates the score, what the spectator see through the score.  The flame is alive . . . so my inner life varies from night to night, from moment to moment.  The way I feel an association, the interior sense of my voice or a movement of my finger.  I begin each night without anticipations.  This is the hardest thing to learn.  I do not prepare myself to feel anything.  I do not say, “Last night, this scene was extraordinary, I will try to do that again.”  I want only to be receptive to what will happens if I am secure in my score, knowing that even if I feel a minimum, the glass will not break, the objective structure worked out over the months will help me through.  But when a night comes that I can glow, shine, live, reveal—I am ready for it by not anticipating it.  The score remains the same, but everything is different because I am different.

I can’t think of a more fitting ending to this brief profile—and make no mistake: there’s much more to say about Ryszard Cieślak that I can’t manage on this blog—than to quote Jerzy Grotowski’s own homage to his student, friend, colleague, and collaborator.  After Cieślak’s death, Grotowski, who only outlived his leading actor by nine years when the innovator himself died in 1999 at the age of 65, spoke of him:

When I think of Ryszard Cieslak, I think of a creative actor.  It seems to me that he was really the incarnation of an actor who plays as a poet writes, or as Van Gogh was painting.  We can’t say that he is somebody who played imposed roles, already structured characters, at least from a literary point of view, because, even if he kept the rigor of the written text, he created a quality entirely new. . . .

It is very rare that a symbiosis between a so-called director and a so-called actor can go beyond all the limits of the technique, of a philosophy, or of ordinary habits.  This arrived to such a depth that often it was difficult to know if there were two human beings working, or a double human being. . . .

Now I am going to touch on a point which was a particularity of Ryszard. It was necessary not to push him and not to frighten him. Like a wild animal, when he lost his fear, his closure we can say, his shame of being seen, he could progress months and months with an opening and a complete liberation, a liberation from all that in life, and even more in the work of the actor, blocks us.  This opening was like an extraordinary trust.  And when he could work in this way for months and months with the director alone, after he could be in the presence of his colleagues, the other actors, and after even in the presence of the spectators; he had already entered into a structure which assured him, through rigor, a security.

Why do I think that he was an actor as great as, in another field of art, Van Gogh for example? Because he knew how to find the connection of gift and rigor.  When he had a score of acting, he could keep to it in the most minute details.  This—it is the rigor. But there was something mysterious behind this rigor which appeared always in connection with trust.  It was the gift, gift of self—in this sense, the gift.  Attention!  It was not the gift to the public! No. It was the gift to something much higher, which over-passes us, which is above us and also, we can say, it was the gift to his work, or it was the gift to our work, the gift to us both. . . .

The text [of The Constant Prince] speaks of tortures, of pains, of an agony.  The text speaks of a martyr who refuses to submit to the laws which he does not accept. . . .  But in working as director with Ryszard Cieslak, we never touched anything which was sad.  The whole role was based on a very precise time from his personal memory linked to the period in which he was an adolescent and had his first big, extraordinary amorous experience.  All was linked to that experience.  This referred to that kind of love which, as it can only arrive in adolescence, carries all its sensuality, all that which is carnal, but, in the same time, behind that, something totally different that is not carnal, or which is carnal in another way, and which is much more like a prayer. It’s as if, between these two sides, appears a bridge which is a carnal prayer. . . .

And even during months and years of preparatory work, even when we were alone in this work, without the other members of the group, one can’t say that this was an improvisation.  This was a return to the most subtle impulses of the lived experience, not simply to recreate it, but to take flight toward that impossible prayer.  But yes, all the little impulses and all that which Stanislavski would call physical actions (even if, in his interpretation, it would be much more in another context, the one of social game, and here it was not at all that)—even if everything was like refound, the true secret was to go out of the fear, of the refusal of himself, to go out of that, to enter into a big free space where he could have no fear at all and hide nothing. . . .

The first step toward this work was that Ryszard dominated totally the text. He learned the text by heart, he absorbed it in such a way that he could start in the middle of a phrase of any fragment, still respecting the syntax.  And at this point, the first thing we did was to create the conditions in which he could, as literally as possible, put this flow of words on the river of the memory, of the memory of the impulses of his body, of the memory of the small actions, and with the two take flight, take flight, like in his first experience: I say first in the sense of his base experience.  That base experience was luminous in an indescribable way.  And with that luminous thing, put in montage with the text, with the costume which makes reference to Christ or with the surrounding iconographic compositions which also allude to Christ, there appeared the story of a martyr, but we never worked with Ryszard starting from a martyr, all to the contrary. . . .

We can say that I demanded from him everything, a courage in a certain way inhuman, but I never asked him to produce an effect. He needed five months more?  Okay.  Ten months more?  Okay.  Fifteen months more?  Okay.  We just worked slowly.  And after this symbiosis, he had a kind of total security in the work, he had no fear, and we saw that everything was possible because there was no fear.

Taviani reported that among the young people who’d worked with Cieślak, some “explain that Ryszard was not only capable of teaching them technique, but could teach them about courage.”