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.”

Moving the Empire

ROTters probably know that I go to the Signature Theatre on W. 42nd Street often, though you probably don’t know how I get there.  I take the Broadway BMT subway to Times Square and then the M42 crosstown bus along 42nd to 10th Avenue.  The route passes the AMC Empire 25 at 234 W 42nd, the last street address on the south side of the street at 8th. 

When the bus goes past the AMC movie multiplex, I always think of the move (reported, with diagrams and all, in the NYT) of the entire Empire Theatre from its perch at 236 W. 42nd Street, in the middle of the southern side of the block between 7th and 8th Avenues, to the west end of the block to become the façade and lobby of the AMC Empire 25.  Does anyone else remember that almost-unbelievable feat in March 1998?

(Okay, I can’t explain how the AMC cineplex is at number 234 and the Empire was originally at number 236.  The Empire was in the middle of the block and the AMC is at the west end; house numbers on all cross streets in the Manhattan grid go up from 5th Avenue—on the West Side, that means increasing from east to west.  But the Empire’s old lot was east of AMC, yet it has a higher house number.  Theoretically, that’s impossible.  I double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked the theaters’ addresses, and the numbers are correct.  I can only guess that during the remaking of 42nd Street, the lots along the 200 block were renumbered, perhaps when some buildings were demolished or combined.)

The “New 42nd Street,” as the remaking of the strip was dubbed, was being planned and created.  A builder jacked up the Empire in the center of the block, put it on wheels, rolled it west almost to 8th Avenue, and set it into the south side of the street as the front of a new multiplex.

For those who are too young to know about this odd bit of New York City theater history, or weren’t around the Big Apple, or just plain don’t remember it—let me tell you how it went down.  Or, rather, west, as Horace Greeley (1811-72), great New York City newspaperman, might have pointed out.  (The editor of the New-York Tribune, which was publishing when the Empire was up and running as a Broadway playhouse, popularized the famous phrase “Go West, young man” in an editorial in 1865.)

Let me start with some “real”—that is, old—theater history.  The backstory, as we’d say today.

There have been, in fact, two Empire Theatres in New York City, both Broadway houses.  The first one was built in 1893 at 1430 Broadway, between 40th and 41st Streets.  A 1,100-seat theater, this Empire closed and was demolished in 1953 after 60 years of producing both revivals and first-run plays.  It plays a small role in this story.

(The 41st Street Empire had a shot at a second act, too.  When it was torn down, Robert Porterfield, 1905-71, founder of the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1933—one of the United States’ oldest and most esteemed regional rep theaters, salvaged many of the Empire’s interior furnishings and equipment.  Items recycled by Porterfield included seats, paintings, stage lights, and a lighting control system, some of which are still in use at the Barter today.  Perhaps it was a kind of forecast of what was to come 45 years later.)

The second Empire was originally named the Eltinge 42nd Street Theatre, only the eighth theater built on the street.  It was built for theatrical producer Al (Albert Herman) Woods (1870-1951) by noted theater architect Thomas W. Lamb (1871-1942), one of the foremost designers of theaters and cinemas in the U.S. during the 20th century.  Its Beaux Arts, polychromed (green, blue, orange, and red) terra cotta façade featured an immense arched window several stories high above the marquee.  Inside, a mural by French artist Arthur Brounet (1866-1941) adorned the lobby and the auditorium, with a richly detailed plaster ceiling and proscenium arch, was decorated in Roman, Greek, and Egyptian motifs. 

Woods specialized in light comedies and he named his theater for his most successful and profitable star, Julian Eltinge (1881-1941), who was best known for playing female roles.  Among the other stars Woods presented at the Eltinge were John Barrymore (The Yellow Ticket, 1914), Laurence Olivier (Murder on the Second Floor, his U.S. début, 1929), and Clark Gable (Love, Honor and Betray, 1930).

The 900-seat Eltinge. a small house, opened on 11 September 1912 with Within the Law by Bayard Veiller (1869-1943), which ran for 541 performances despite an outright pan from the New York Times.  The theater fared poorly after the stock market crash of 1929, and in 1931 Woods leased the Eltinge to Max Rudnick (1896-?) as a burlesque house.  Comedian Jackie Gleason (1916-87), later a television star, got his start here as the emcee and in 1935, Bud Abbott (1897-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-59), who’ll feature in the upcoming story of the theater’s move, met doing separate acts at the Eltinge.

Burlesque shows also featured strippers, and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947; in office: 1934-45), determined to close all the burlesque houses in the city, shuttered the Eltinge in 1937.  In 1942, after having been boarded up for five years, the Eltinge reopened as a movie theater called Laff Movie, a first-run house.  

By 1954, the Times Square neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. After the 41st Street Empire was razed, the Eltinge was renamed the Empire, becoming a second-run grindhouse screening low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films.  By the mid-1980s, Times Square had become so sleazy, with porn houses, peep shows, sex shops, drug sellers, and hookers inhabiting every street and corner, that nothing else could survive, and the Empire on 42nd Street closed its doors for good in 1986. 

According to a historic-preservation agreement reached in 1981 by New York City and New York State, the theater building couldn’t be demolished, however, and it stood, along with six others like it, derelict and ignored as the Theatre District went to wrack and ruin.  In 1990, however, the New 42nd Street, a non-profit organization, was formed to oversee the redevelopment of the seven neglected and historic theaters on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, including the Empire, and to reestablish the block as a desirable tourist destination. 

The Empire Theatre site at the center of the block became part of an entertainment complex planned by Forest City Ratner Companies, a Manhattan-based real estate development firm.  It occupied the eastern end of the project’s 42nd Street frontage, so the Empire was, as I already said, lifted and moved westward to 8th Avenue to become the entrance and lobby of the AMC Theatres cinema complex. 

Here’s how that happened.

The plan was announced in June 1996.  Forest City Ratner had been selected in 1994 to redevelop the property occupied by the Empire and the buildings next to it to the west.  AMC Entertainment, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, had already been instrumental in persuading the Walt Disney Company to renovate the New Amsterdam Theatre (built in 1903) at 214 W. 42nd Street, east of the Empire, as the flagship for Disney Theatrical Productions on Broadway.  (That renovation of an architectural jewel of 42nd Street and one of the oldest surviving Broadway playhouses was completed in 1997 and Disney opened the New Amsterdam with The Lion King, which ran there for nine years before transferring to another Broadway house.)

Madam Tussauds, the British wax museum, had agreed to create a branch a few doors east of the AMC entrance using the same transplanted Empire as its space.  As a balance for the AMC entrance through the former Empire Theatre, Tussauds incorporated the façade of the Sam H. Harris Theatre (built in 1914) at 226 W. 42nd; the interior of the theater was demolished in 1997 to construct the museum and entertainment center.  (Madame Tussauds New York location opened in 2000.)

In order to clear the lot at 236 42nd Street, Ratner was confronted with a problem to solve.  The 1981 historic-preservation agreement prohibited razing the Empire Theatre, so Ratner had to choose between repurposing the building or moving it intact. 

Now, across the street from the Empire were situated two other historic playhouses: the Lyric Theatre at 213 W. 42nd Street, designed in 1903 by architect Victor Hugo Koehler, and the Academy Theatre at 223 W. 42nd, built in 1910 by Eugene De Rosa.  Both theaters were slated for demolition by the New 42nd Street, so Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky (b. 1949) of Livent purchased them in 1996 and created the Ford Center for the Performing Arts by combining elements of both old theaters.  (The Ford Center opened in January 1998, but Livent declared bankruptcy in November 1998.  The theater, now under new ownership, was renamed the Lyric in 2014.)

This option, however, was obviated for the Empire because, explained Bruce Ratner, president of Forest City Ratner, the Empire blocked street-level access to large blocks of space along 42nd Street that would become other commercial enterprises in the development.  In addition, the engineers said that it would be easier to move the entire building than to take out parts of the old one and incorporate them into a new structure as Drabinsky had done with the Ford Center.  One proposal, for instance, had been to dismantle the Beaux-Arts façade of the theater and reassemble it up the block, but the architects determined it would cost as much to do that as it would to move the whole building.

So, that left only moving the 85-year-old historic theater without damaging its façade and ornate plaster ceiling and proscenium arch.  New York State hired Robert Silman, a structural engineer, to assure that the Empire’s auditorium with its eccentric interior design, including figures in Egyptian headdresses playing pipes, could be moved without falling apart.  Ratner said that approvals for the move from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and other agencies had all been obtained.

“People have moved bigger things in the world,” said Ratner, but Silman added, “One doesn’t often move buildings of this size in the middle of a congested urban setting."  Common wisdom asserts that the Empire Theater is the largest structure ever moved in New York City.  Silman explained: “It really doesn’t matter how heavy it is as long as you put enough stuff underneath to hold it up.” 

The engineer observed, “The concept is elegantly simple”—as we’ll be able to judge for ourselves shortly.  “This is nothing more than a classical shoring job,” said Anthony J. Mazzo, a senior vice president of Urban Foundations/Engineering of Brooklyn, which did the work.  “The horizontal move is secondary.”  Mazzo explained: “It’s like using a dolly to move a piece of furniture.”

The literally inch-by-inch journey of the Empire Theatre from the middle of the 200 block of 42nd Street to its new resting place was a mere 168 feet, 0.16 of the length of the block.

An earlier moving date—Tuesday, 17 February—had been scheduled, but the job was postponed so that the work could be done over a weekend.  The theater had therefore been hoisted onto its tracks for over a week, reducing the time it took on 1 March to accomplish the move.  Further decreasing the time and distance for the trip west was a test-run on Sunday, 22 February, when the building was shifted 30 feet to make sure the process would work.  It did, and the remaining move on the 1st would be only 138 feet.   It took four hours, from 7 in the morning of 1 March until around 11 o’clock.   

At a cost of $1.2 million (about $1.9 million today), that comes out to $588 an inch ($927 today)!  Some other stats: the Empire Theatre building was estimated to weigh 3,700 tons, or 7.4 million pounds.  (That makes the haulage rate 16¢ a pound—pretty cheap, considering.)  It took three months, starting in November 1997, to prepare the building for transport.  The building moved west at about 35 feet per hour. 

To prepare the theater for transit, a steel platform was constructed inside the building at its base.  To prevent the building from being damaged during the move, steel beams were welded to the underside of the platform and fastened to the building’s walls to support them.  The theater walls were rigidly braced so that the building wouldn’t twist or warp during the move.  

Beneath the building and next to it, eight steel tracks were laid, stretching from the theater’s original site to its new location across the block.  The platform with the theater on top was lifted up one-eighth of an inch by vertical hydraulic jacks so that steel rollers could be installed between the platform and the rails.  The jacks lowered the platform onto the rollers, transferring the weight of the building onto the track system, then the jacks were removed.  Then the theater was separated from its foundation by cutting through the walls at their base.  As I reported earlier, this was accomplished by 17 February, 12 days before the final move.

Another set of hydraulic jacks attached to the rails, horizontally oriented, then pushed the platform holding the theater, without putting any pressure directly on the building, along the tracks to the theater’s new foundation.  On 22 February, a week before the final leg, eastbound traffic was halted along the 200 block of 42nd Street and the jacks impelled the theater the first 30 feet of its journey to test the system.  “Everything had to be perfect,” said Heymi Kuriel, vice president of Urban Foundation.  “Every bolt had to be tested.” 

The jacks moved the platform with the building on top five feet along its route in about five minutes (that is, one foot a minute); then the jacks were repositioned and the five-foot advance was repeated until the journey was completed. 

On 1 March, with the south side of the roadway closed again, the Empire Theatre was moved the last 138 feet to its new home.  Leading the way, attached to the front (that is, the westbound) end of the slow-moving theater building were two huge balloons . . . in the shapes of Lou Costello and Bud Abbott, the two renowned comics who met at the Eltinge in its burlesque days and formed a successful partnership that lasted the rest of their lives.  It seemed as if they were tugging the old Empire down the street.

A new foundation at 234 W. 42nd Street had been prepared for the old building and the theater was lowered into place.  New walls between the foundation and the base of the structure filled in the portions that were removed for the relocation.

The Empire was touched up and appointed to serve as the ticket lobby for AMC Empire 25, which opened in April 2000.  Moviegoers ascend escalators through the old theater’s proscenium opening—where the stage would have been (lost, along with the theater’s fly-loft)—to the upper floors where the movie screens are. 

The 25 film theaters on the upper four floors in the complex—only the entrance is on the street level—range from under 200 seats to about 400 (for a total capacity of nearly 5,000 seats).  (Much of the AMC building, designed by the firm of Beyer Blinder Belle of New York City and Washington, D.C., noted for its work in architectural preservation and adaptive re-use, is actually behind the Empire and Tussauds, essentially on 41st Street, although there is no public access from that street.)

“Simple,” as engineer Robert Silman characterized the process, but only because it was straightforward—not because it was easy.  Complicating the operation was the fact that the Times Square Theatre District is built on turn-of-the-century residential lots, so the Empire sat on ground once occupied by townhouses with basements, excavated out of the bedrock which is usually right below the island’s surface. 

Urban Foundations/Engineering had to drive piles down into the now-lowered bedrock along the route of the transfer and the track system was laid over the piles.  This was necessary so that bedrock. that supports Manhattan’s skyscrapers, would bear the weight of the Empire Theatre, rather than the loose dirt filling the old cellars.  “Essentially, we have constructed a temporary steel bridge founded on rock to support the building during its transfer,” Urban’s Mazzo said.  The piles had to be removed after the transfer so that the commercial properties could be built.

When the empire Theatre arrived at its new site, it was greeted by a crowd of dignitaries which included New York State Governor George E. Pataki (b. 1945; in office: 1995-2006).  Kuriel remarked, “It’s amazing how smooth it went.  The birds at the top didn’t even move,” he added, referring to the nests near the old theater’s roof.

[There were many critics of the remaking of 42nd Street in the ’90s.  Most said the New 42nd Street organization was sanitizing the neighborhood; the word “Disney-fy” was used often.  Some advocates for the area’s longtime residents and mom-and-pop shop-owners pointed out that the lower-income residents were being displaced for wealthier folks and big corporations.  That was probably at least partly so.

[I’m not here, however, to argue for or against the renewal of the Theatre District and whether it was an ultimate good or not.  I’m just reporting on one event in local theater history that was, inarguably, an engineering feat that I found fascinating and noteworthy.

[Let me recount an illustrative anecdote from my own experience.  In 1982 or ’83, I took a trip to Egypt.  I was principally in Cairo, but I took a one-day jaunt to Abu Simbel, site of two massive rock temples situated on the western bank of Lake Nasser. 

[Now, Lake Nasser was created as a result of the construction of the Aswan High Dam across the waters of the Nile between 1958 and 1970.  It would have submerged the great temples, which were carved out of the mountainside  along the river in the 13th century BCE . . . if nothing were done to prevent the loss.  So an international team of archaeologists proposed to move them to safer ground—including building an artificial mountain on the shores of the new lake-to-be.

[When I saw the temples from the air—you fly from Cairo to Abu Simbel Airport—my imagination conjured up the meeting of the archaeologists and the Egyptian government when the proposal for the project was broached.  ‘You want to move what WHERE!?’ I heard an official gasp.

[Well, that’s sort of the way I felt about the idea of lifting the Empire Theatre up and rolling it up the block and replanting it.  ‘You want to move what WHERE!?’  But they did.  Astonishing!]

'The Theatre of Mixed Means' & 'The Theatre of Images'

When I was doing research on the avant-garde theater of the last decades of the 20th century, I found two books especially pertinent and helpful.  Since then, I’ve had occasion to refer to them a number of times (most recently for my article on Rick On Theater about Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, posted on 21 January). 

The books, Richard Kostelanetz’s The Theatre of Mixed-Means and Bonnie Marranca’s The Theatre of Images, are both relatively old, so many readers of this blog may not know about them.  So I’ve decided that it’s a good time to make a kind of formal introduction of them to ROTters.  Think of this as a sort of grown-up’s book report.

Let me do the bibliographic and biographic business first.

Both books appear to be still in print in later paperback editions.  The first of the two books originally had the formal title of The Theatre of Mixed-Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Other Mixed-Means Performances.  It was originally published in 1968 by Dial Press and was reissued (with the variant subtitle An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Presentations) in 1980 by RK Editions.  There also seems to be a 1981 edition from Archae Editions, the latest publication. 

The Theatre of Images, of which Bonnie Marranca is credited as editor, also has multiple editions.  First published in 1977 by Drama Book Specialists, it was rereleased in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press.  The Theatre of Images is a collection of texts of three performance pieces that exemplify what Marranca labeled “the Theatre of Images”: Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) by Richard Foreman, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974) by Robert Wilson, The Red Horse Animation (1970; revised 1972) by Lee Breuer. 

The Theatre of Images’ 1977 edition had an “Introduction,” composed in 1976 by Marranca, a discussion of the avant-garde theater of the time (almost a decade after Kostelanetz wrote about that scene in The Theatre of Mixed-Means).  Twenty years later, when she reedited the book, Marranca added an “Afterword to the 1996 Edition” which she called “The Avant-Garde at the Century Turning.”  In it, Marranca updated her assessment of the experimental theater as it was in the ’70s.

Richard Kostelanetz was born in New York City in 1940; he is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz (1901-80).  A writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields, including contemporary art and literature, Kostelanetz has a Bachelor of Arts degree (1962) from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Master of Arts in American history (1966) from Columbia University in New York; he’s the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, New York State Regents, and International Fellowships, among many other grants and fellowships, and studied at King’s College London as a Fulbright Scholar.  Kostelanetz has lectured widely and served as a visiting professor or guest artist at a variety of institutions.

Among Kostelanetz’s other pertinent writings are The New American Arts (Horizon Press, 1965; Kostelanetz edited and contributed two essays), On Innovative Art(ist)s (McFarland & Co., 1992), and A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (A Cappella Books, 1993; Chicago Review Press, 1993; Schirmer Books, 2000; Routledge, 2001).  He’s also worked in audio, video, film, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. 

Bonnie Marranca was born in 1947 in New Jersey and works in New York City as a writer, editor, critic, and publisher.  She received a B.A. in English from Montclair State University in New Jersey and an M.A. in theater from Hunter College of the City University of New York.  She also attended the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  In 1975, she married a fellow theater student from Calcutta (now Kolkata), Gautam Dasgupta (b. 1949), and the following year, they launched The Performing Arts Journal, which became one of the most respected and successful theater journals in the country. 

Now entitled PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, the triannual publication has a particular interest in contemporary performance art and features extensive coverage in video, drama, dance, installations, media, and music.  It eventually spawned PAJ Publications, the book division, which issued the 1996 edition of The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books on contemporary theatre.  Marranca’s writings have been translated into twenty languages.

Marranca is a professor of theater at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of New York City’s New School.  She’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the 2011 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, and was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the United Kingdom.  Marranca’s a Fulbright Senior Scholar who’s taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, the Free University of Berlin, the Autonomous University of Barcelona Institute for Theatre, the University of Bucharest, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means is a critical examination of the new theater composed of language, music, dance, light, kinetic sculpture, painting, as well as modern technology as it was emerging in the late 1960s.  Though many of the nascent performance forms, like Happenings, have mostly disappeared from the current scene, their influence on contemporary theater and performance was permanent.  The Theatre of Mixed Means predicted the kind of performance milieu the next generation of theater-makers would be entering and the kind of theater they’d be drawn to. 

Kostelanetz observes that the “recent development in American theatre represents such a great departure from traditional practice that it has acquired a plethora of new names . . .” (xi).  He lists “happenings,” “the new theatre,” “events,” “activities,” “painter’s theatre,” “kinetic theatre,” and “action theatre”; I have found myself using terms such as “performance event,” “theater piece,” and “performance piece” because the presentations are clearly not simply “plays” but something more—but what?  What can we call them?

After dismissing for solid reasons all the designations he listed, Kostelanetz comes up with his own answer: “I prefer to christen the entire movement ‘the Theatre of Mixed Means,’ a term that encompasses various strains of activity and yet makes the critical distinction between this theatre and traditional, predominantly literary mono-means practice . . .” (xi).  His “Foreword” introduces and defines this new theater.

Kostelanetz’s explanations of what went on on the stages and in the performance spaces of 40 and 50 years ago bears examining to understand what we’re seeing today.  Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (première, 1985; Broadway, 1986), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (première, 1991; Broadway, 1993-94), Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman (Off-Broadway, 2001; Broadway 2002-03), Golem from the London troupe 1927 (London, 2014; Lincoln Center Festival, 2016), and other multi-media productions on mainstream stages might not have ever been staged if the type of theater Kostelanetz describes had not been so influential.

The body of the book is a short “art-historical” introduction to mid-20th-century multi-media performance, followed by a series of conversations with artists on the edge of art and performance in the 1960s, such as composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912-92); painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance; painter, assemblagist, and pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), who essentially invented the Happening; and sculptor Claes Oldenberg (1929-2022), who was another pioneer in Happenings; among others. 

The mixed-means theater, as Kostelanetz defines it, incorporates “the means (or media) of music and dance, light and color (both natural and chemical), sculpture and painting, as well as the new technologies of film, recorded tape, amplification systems, radio and closed-circuit television” (4).  (Since Kostelanetz was writing in the late 1960s, we should add video and computer technology as well as digital sound recording techniques, all of which are currently used on stage.)  This line of development is continued by what Bonnie Marranca describes as “the Theatre of Images.” 

The mixed-means theater is not a new phenomenon and it’s linked quite specifically, like both 19th-century Romanticism and Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) concept, to “primitive ceremonies” which integrated singing, dancing, acting, sculpture, and painting (3).  Kostelanetz observed that the various arts probably became separated when societies began to see “Art as distinct from life” and a principle of the mixed-means theater—also a tenet of Native American epistemology, for example—is that life and art are not distinct, but rather “continuous, if not identical” (3, 34). 

“Not only does the Theatre of Mixed Means descend from the formally chaotic tendencies in the arts it encompasses . . . ,” asserts the author, “so it also contributes to that great modern tendency that would blur the traditional lines separating one art from another, in order to synthesize means from all the arts, as well as non-artistic technologies and materials, into a single, great, catholic super-art” (283).

In the final chapter of The Theatre of Mixed-Means, Kostelanetz lays out what he sees as the “critical values” applicable to mixed-means performances.  Kostelanetz notes that, at its beginning, such work was rejected by everyone except the artists as “ugly and chaotic” (276) because, he contends, “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful . . .” (275). 

(This statement echoes art philosopher Suzanne Langer’s definition of beauty as she explained it in her 1953 book Feeling and Form.  Langer, 1895-1985—on whom I posted a two-part article on ROT; the discussion of her views on beauty is in Part 2: 8 January 2010—was quite clear about what could be beautiful and what might not be:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

(This interpretation can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.)   

Both Kostelanetz and Marranca stress that the new theatrical conventions minimize text and accentuate visual and aural imagery in an Artaudian vein.  Ultimately, however, Kostelanetz observes that the mixed-means theater doesn’t altogether reject language, as did Artaud ostensibly, but opts “for a more elliptical, poetic, or simplistic use of words” (278). 

Bonnie Marranca, in her book, picks up where Kostelanetz leaves off in The Theatre of Mixed-Means.  She defines the “Theatre of Images” as the “particular style of the American avant-garde which . . . exclude[s] dialogue or use[s] words minimally in favor of aural, visual and verbal imagery that calls for alternative modes off perception on the part of the audience” (x). 

The avant-garde critic explains in her June 1995 afterword that her book “grew out of my own search for a new critical vocabulary to describe the art I was seeing” (160) in the 1970s, which she characterized as “a glorious period” (159) when “[a]rtists, critics, and audiences together created a genuine avant-garde community and an expansive discourse, which evolved naturally from all the performance activity and discussion about it in the air” (159-60).

Before presenting the three examples of imagistic theater texts, Marranca intends “to demonstrate the significance of this Theatre of Images, its derivation from theatrical and non-theatrical sources, its distinctively American roots in the avant-garde, its embodiment of a certain contemporary sensibility and its impact on audiences” (x). 

The editor adds that she “will perhaps suggest an attitude to bring to this theatre” and hopes also to “offer helpful, new tools of analysis—an alternative critical vocabulary—with which to view contemporary theatre” (x).  In these aims, we can see that Marranca and Kostelanetz share a belief that, at least in the beginning of the last third of the 20th century, audiences and critics alike were unprepared for the emerging theater they were describing.  (Nor were they the only critics of the contemporary theater and art scene who felt this way.)

Marranca specifically names several avant-garde companies she feels were the progenitors of imagistic theater, specifically the Living Theatre (Julian Beck and Judith Malina), the Open Theatre (Joseph Chaikin), the Performance Group (Richard Schechner and Elizabeth LeCompte), the Manhattan Project (Andre Gregory), and the Iowa Theatre Lab (Ric Zank).  She adds a few troupes with more political agendas: El Teatro Campesino (Luis Valdez and Agustin Lira), the San Francisco Mime Troupe (R. G. Davis), and the Bread and Puppet Theater (Peter Schumann).  Of course, the three artists whose work she presents in the book are high on her list of avant-gardists of the Theatre of Images: Foreman and his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and Breuer of Mabou Mines.

In the Theatre of Images, Marranca explains, “The absence of dialogue leads to the predominance of the stage picture . . . .  This voids all considerations of theatre as it is conventionally understood in terms of plot, character, setting, language and movement” (x).  Marranca links this imagistic theater to the then-newly emerging form of “art-performance”—what we now call performance art (see my post, “Performance Art,” 7 and 10 November 2013). 

Marranca continues: “Actors do not create ‘roles.’  They function as media through which the playwright expresses his ideas; they serve as icons and images” (x-xi).  You can see, I imagine, how this style of theater would attract visual artists like Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, and Kaprow to shift between painting and sculpture and this new kind of performance, and how performance art might be born of the amalgamation of the two art fields. 

You can also see how works like Richard Jones’s Hairy Ape and Judgment Day as they were mounted at the Park Avenue Armory (see my reports on 18 April 2017 and 16 January 2020, respectively) might spring from more conventional scripts from earlier in the 20th century after mixed-means and imagistic theater invaded the mainstream stage.  Marranca asserts that “the innovations of the Theatre of Images have filtered into the staging, performance styles, and design concepts of other older and younger generations, traveling off-Broadway, to regional mainstream theatres, to Broadway, and the opera” (184).  Her book, as well as Kostelanetz’s, connects the dots from then to now.

The Theatre of Images posits that on the imagistic theater, “the painterly and sculptural qualities of performance are stressed, transforming theatre into a spatially-dominated one activated by sense impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear narrative” (xii).  See if that description doesn’t approximate my depiction of Judgment Day earlier this month. 

You might even note that those who disparaged aspects of the production complained about what Marranca sees as an asset in imagistic theater: “Sound and visual images dominate in performance in an attempt to expand normal capabilities for experiencing sense stimuli” (xiv).

“The significance of the Theatre of Images,” declares the editor, “is its expansion of the audience’s capacity to perceive.  It is a theater devoted to the creation of a new stage language, a visual grammar ‘written’ in sophisticated perceptual codes” (xiv-xv).

Of somewhat less importance to my point here is Marranca’s disappointment 20 years after publishing The Theatre of Images, expressed in her 1995 afterword.  Less important because the book’s value to me is its real-time assessment of a vital and influential period in American theater and performance.  That Marranca felt that by 1995, that brief candle had gone out, as sad as it is, doesn’t detract from her description and analysis of what was happening in the theaters of the 1970s while she was seeing it.  Whatever happened later, that chronicle and explication is still there—and still true.

Marranca saw that the avant garde she wrote about in 1976 dissipated in the 1980s and 1990s when art ran into sociology and politics.  While artists like Wilson, Foreman, and Breuer continued to strive to make meaningful art—even extending their reaches—the culture out of which they had emerged had turned to entertainment and socio-political agendas (161-65).  It’s a sad commentary on the art-vs.-politics struggle in this country at a time when the culture wars (see my post of that title, 6 February 2014), and at the same time as Marranca was writing her addendum, I saw its toll on artists I knew (Leonardo Shapiro) and many more I didn’t (The NEA Four, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Ofili, 2 Live Crew). 

But even if the aura of the ’70s is lost, for one brief, shining moment, it glowed—and Marranca captured it for us today.  And so’s the influence that’s palpable in all the theater of the ’80s. ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s that we had (and have) that exists because of Marranca’s Theatre of Images and Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means.  Their books help us understand how that work got that way.

'Gesamtkunstwerk'

In the Western world—that is, Europe and the societies formed around its cultures—the performing arts are generally separated into dance, music and singing, and drama.  (The split seems to have occurred during the post-Roman era when theatrical performances essentially died out in Europe.  When they returned in the Middle Ages, dance, music, and drama seem to have become separate forms.)  We tend to keep these separate, only occasionally mixing them in experiments or for special events, but ordinarily, we don’t combine them. 

The division of the arts extends to the performers as well.  The artists began specializing—“dancers,” “actors,” “singers”—until in the middle of the 19th century, the separation was virtually complete.  As a rule, we don’t train our stage performers to be multi-faceted artists. 

(My friend Leonardo Shapiro, whom I’ll mention again later in this discussion, described in an interview what his ideal rep company would be like: the members would be trained to “speak in many languages at once . . . so that this piece is meant to be . . . in music and in movement and in circus and in verse and in theater.  Each of these things isn’t used for decoration but the story jumps from mode to mode, and still moves forward.”)

When we do blend the arts, one or the other dominates the performance.  Consider opera, which employs music/singing and drama (and sometimes also dance)—though through most of its history, the vocal music has been the prime focus.  In musical theater, formerly called “musical comedy,” though the music is important (and the dance increased in significance with Oklahoma! in 1943), it was the drama that usually dominated.

In the East, however, this kind of separation of the arts is less common in the indigenous classical performances.  Indian Kathakali, Japanese Kabuki and Noh, and Chinese (or Beijing) Opera are total works of art, melding dance, music, singing, and acting (as well as acrobatics and martial arts in many cases) into a single, integrated performance form.

In Asia, the performers in these classic forms don’t consider themselves exclusively “actors” or “dancers” or “singers.”  We in the West put them in categories—Kabuki performers are often called “dancers” by Europeans, and Chinese Opera is no more “opera” than Kabuki is (they’re actually related forms)—but in their own cultures, they’re all just “actors.” 

It happens that Noh, Kabuki, Chinese Opera, and Kathakali actors are all also master dancers, singers, martial artists, and acrobats—because their performance forms require them to be so.  (For a  look at how Kabuki actors, for example, are trained, see my article “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010.)  The distinctions we make in the West simply don’t exist.

In the West, when the integration of arts happens, it’s noteworthy.  In India, Japan, and China when it’s seen, it’s traditional.  Western theater history suggests that it may have been that way in classical Europe as well: what we know of Greek theatrical performances, admittedly very little, indicates that classical Greek drama may have looked (and sounded) more like Chinese Opera than a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth.

But the “total work of art” revived as an ideal for at least one important European artists, German opera composer-librettist, theater director, and essayist and writer Richard Wagner (1813-83).  He wrote in passing of das Gesamtkunstwerk (which he spelled Gesammtkunstwerk) in two essays, “The Artwork of the Future” (“Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft”) and “Art and Revolution” (“Die Kunst und die Revolution”), both first published in 1849. 

In “The Artwork of the Future,” Wagner described the Gesamtkunstwerk as “The great total work of art, which has to combine all forms of art . . . .”  This is the base definition of Gesamtkunstwerk as it’s generally understood in Western art, especially theater—but it requires some discussion.  By “all forms of art,” Wagner assumed the arts of the 19th-century stage, namely  poetry (that is, the text, language), orchestral music and singing, dance, pantomime (or acting), architecture (three-dimensional scenery), and painting (two-dimensional painted scenery, or flats).

First, let me acknowledge that I’ve provided my own translation of Wagner’s German because the standard English version, first published in 1895 by William Ashton Ellis (1852-1919), is a little stiff.  For instance, Ellis renders Gesamtkunstwerk as “United Art-work.”  The most common English translation of the German word is “total work of art,” but there are other possibilities: “ideal work of art,” “universal artwork,” “synthesis of the arts,” “comprehensive artwork,” or “all-embracing art form.” 

Each of these phrases denotes some aspect of the German word but has a slightly different connotation from any of the others—and from Wagner’s original word.  I think it’ll be easier, for this discussion, if I stick with the German word with all its implications.  (Like Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [defamiliarizing effect], Gesamtkunstwerk has been accepted into English as part of the jargon of theater aesthetics.)

Second, I should acknowledge that Gesamtkunstwerk originally referred to Wagner’s ideal operatic production.  It’s been adopted by opera’s cousin, drama, and is part of the discussion of the aesthetics of theater since at least the middle of the 20th century.  In the last century, some writers about architecture, film, and other media have applied the term to their fields as well.  For this examination, I’ll confine its use to theater.

Now for a little language lesson, German edition.  Bear with me.  In German, gesamt is a polysemous word: it can mean ‘total’ or ‘whole’ or ‘entire’; but it can also mean ‘unified’ or ‘united’ or ‘integrated.’  (The verb sammeln means ‘to collect,’ ‘to gather,’ or ‘to assemble’; zusammen means ‘together’ or ‘collectively.’  Kunstwerk, incidentally, simply means “artwork” or “work of art”: Kunst is ‘art’ and Werk is ‘work’; Germans, as Mark Twain observed, like to stick words together to make long compound words.)  So here’s the first variation in the term’s application.

In English, when someone speaks of a “total work of art,” the implication can be, and usually is, that the piece encompasses many art forms.  If we’re talking about theater today, then we imagine a performance that includes text, acting, dance, singing, music, acrobatics and circus arts, lighting and sound effects, visual arts (scenography, costuming, and make-up), technology such as computer imagery, electronic effects such as sampling, holography, television and video, and perhaps many other arts and techniques. 

From Wagner’s thumbnail definition—and that’s really the only place he says what Gesamtkunstwerk is—this picture seems correct.  Lots and lots of sensory in-put from the stage and the entire performance venue.  And it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

Just a little short-sighted.  Because, remembering that Wagner was a stage director for both opera and drama, we’re talking about an artist who needs to be in control.  So it’s not enough that he has all these arts in his show.  They must be ‘unified’ or ‘integrated.’  This is where the “synthesis of the arts” sense comes in. 

All those different arts and technologies (and, no, Wagner wasn’t thinking in 1849 of all that tech because it didn’t exist then—but it does now, so the implication of the word expands to cover 21st-century applications) have to be coordinated to achieve the director’s artistic vision for the production.  (I’ll talk some later about what happens when it’s not the director who’s got the reins of the amalgamation.)  In Wagner’s ideal Gesamtkunstwerk, all the allied arts incorporated in the show were subordinated to the drama—which was heavily reliant on language or text.

So now there are two quasi-competing notions of what a Gesamtkunstwerk stage production is.  Wagner never really addressed this dichotomy and there are some directors who understand the concept to mean that all the arts that are brought into the production will operate independently and comment on one another and generate counterpoint.  My friend Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater, thought this.  In his creation of Strangers (see my two-part post published on 3 and 6 March 2014), he called the technique “Tracks.”

Others, taking their lead from Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), want the whole thing to work together like a gigantic artistic machine, with all the parts meshing.  Meyerhold wrote in 1930:

There was a time when Wagner’s idea of a new theatre which would be a dramatic synthesis of words, music, lighting, rhythmical movement and all the magic of the plastic parts was regarded as purely utopian.  Now we can see that this is exactly what a production should be: we should employ all the elements which the other arts have to offer and fuse them to produce a concerted effect on the audience.

I’m convinced that Wagner intended gesamt to include ‘unified’ and ‘coordinated’ in its meaning.

(One more word on this dichotomy: there are several famous theater artists who reject the whole idea of Gesamtkunstwerk and aim for something more in the realm of the “poor theater” of Jerzy Grotowski, 1933-99, who eschewed all spectacle for his theater.  

(Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956, saw the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk as a “muddle.”  He didn’t reject the presence of the allied arts, but he merely demanded that in his Epic Theater, the director practice “a radical separation of the elements. . . .  Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another” [italics original].)

Outside the classic Asian forms I mentioned at the top of this article, very few producers are making modern Gesamtkunstwerk theater in the West.  The reason is principally money: the cost of a total-theater production as Wagner envisioned it would be astronomical.  Wagner, of course, was working in a subsidized 19th-century theater—but that world is gone now (and never really existed in the U.S.)

Other deterrents are size—for a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a producer’d need a huge theater with state-of-the-art, even futuristic facilities, or a prepared outdoor site.  Those are rare—if you can even find or arrange for one—and expensive.  And the coordination it would take to put together such an endeavor would also be monumental; I can’t even imagine the staff that would be necessary to keep all the (temperamental, artistic) balls in the air! 

So directors and producers interested in Wagner’s vision always end up settling for experiments that approximate a Gesamtkunstwerk: a show incorporating a number of arts—theater arts and non-theater arts—to the extent they can raise money for and recruit artists to collaborate on them. 

That latter consideration is no small issue, by the way.  Leonardo Shapiro was able to convince some astounding artists to work with him on projects—jazz percussionist Max Roach, saxophonist Gretchen Langheld, “improvisational violinist” and composer Julie Lyonn Lieberman, dancers Kei Takei and Eiko and Koma, visual artists David Wojnarowicz and Polly Walker, sculptor Leonid Sokov, and videographer Maria Venuto, among others—but that was largely due to Shapiro’s personal persuasiveness and the fact that in his productions, collaborators were given extraordinary artistic freedom and participation in the development of the production concept.  (Wagner would likely have never stood for such an arrangement.)

Now, Wagner, as I suggested earlier, was imagining a theater in which the complexities of the Gesamtkunstwerk were all selected, designed, conceived, and blended together in production by the director.  Playwright Paula Vogel characterized this system as

a director-run process modeled on [George II,] the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen [1826-1914], the German Duke who reigned not only over his duchy but as the artistic director of the Meininger players, and who exacted complete obedience and exercised rigid authority over his actors and designers, very much in the mold of Wagner.  Wagner insisted that the director, as the visionary genius, should have control over all artistic functions in the theatre as a synthesizing force. 

What I had in mind when I raised the notion of a total-theater work where somebody other than the director was in charge was something along the lines of Tennessee Williams’s (1911-83) “Plastic Theater,” about which I blogged on 9 May 2012 (“‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater”).  There’s a connection between Williams’s concept and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, except Wagner was talking about the director and production, while Williams pushed the idea back to the playwright and the creation of the text. 

Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk refers to the integrated production with all the artistic elements working together under one, ruling vision (that is, the director’s concept).  Williams’s idea also means employing all the available aspects of stage art, but the playwright was referring to writing scripts that draw on all the theater arts—and can’t be staged successfully without employing them. 

Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and designers to be aspects of the script and part of the playwright’s creative process.  Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his team of theater artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical experience, Williams envisioned a theater which begins with the playwrights who create the theatrical experience in the script because they aren’t just composing words, but theatrical images.  Here’s an example of how I see these competing concepts working:

Imagine a modern production of Hamlet, say Michael Chekhov’s expressionistic one in November 1924 (see part 2 of my profile of Michael Chekhov, posted on 5 November 2019).  It would need to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, with Chekhov (1891-1955) coordinating all the elements of his remarkable production—stylized acting, scenic design, costumes, make-up, sound, music—to serve his vision. 

But Shakespeare’s play is not Plastic Theatre since it doesn’t require anything but language and good acting to work.  Sets, costumes, and other effects are all unnecessary since Shakespeare didn’t write for their use.  Nothing in Hamlet requires visual or aural imagery—except what the poetry conjures up in a viewer’s own mind.  You can do “Alas, poor Yorrick” without the skull and, God knows, the play’s been done in modern clothes and even jeans and T-shirts.

Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1948), on the other hand, must have the visual image of the scenic triptych to work.  The two open-sided houses on either side of the fountain with the stone angel, the anatomy chart, the fireworks, and so on, are all images Williams wove into the text.  They have meaning independent of the words, which don’t communicate as clearly without them.  That’s Plastic.

By extension, Richard Kostelanetz in Theatre of Mixed Means (RK Editions, 1980) and Bonnie Marranca in Theatre of Images (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) wrote about theater which went beyond the stage arts to incorporate non-theatrical arts and technology into performances.  Unlike Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, though, these later notions don’t require that all the various elements “coordinate.” 

The Post-Modern theater which was born in the second half of the 20th century mostly used the different aspects of production to speak independently of one another, complementing, counterpointing, or commenting on one another, but not necessarily “coordinating.”  As Kostelanetz (b. 1940), a writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields, including contemporary art and literature, put it: “the components generally function nonsynchronously, or independently of each other, and each medium is used for its own possibilities.”

This all, of course, leads to Happenings and performance art, as well as the theaters of Robert Wilson (b. 1941), Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Robert Lepage (b. 1957), Wooster Group, the Théâtre de Complicité (later called just Complicité), and my friend Shapiro, among others.  This stuff isn’t exactly gesamt, in Wagner’s sense, but it is “plastic,” in Williams’s. 

To carry on the Hamlet allusion, Charles Marowitz’s (1932-2014) Hamlet collage (first staged in 1964, but continually revised over the decades) used visual stimuli independently of the text in order to point viewers in different directions.  The characters appearances and actions were often logically unrelated to what they were saying. 

Wagner felt that Aeschylus’ tragedies were the finest models in Western performance of the total synthesis of the arts.  This synthesis has been diminished since the classic period, he felt, and during the rest of the history of Western culture, up to his day (and beyond, I might add), the arts had drifted further and further apart. 

But there are always those who envision a modern Gesamtkunstwerk and keep trying to stage one.  Now and then, someone does—or comes damn close.  But it largely remains a theater person’s castle in the air, something to reach for but never attain.

On the other hand, maybe it should be the exceptional happening and not the rule.  Consider the effect a true Gesamtkunstwerk could have on the viewer—from all that stimulation.  We’d be exhausted!  Maybe we’re better off if it remains the rara avis and not the commonplace.  Then, when we do get to see one, we can revel in its specialness, like the unicorn it is.