Jerzy Grotowski in Australia

Jerzy Grotowski in Australia traces the impact and legacy of the late Polish director's visits to Australia in the early 1970s, and the attempts to establish an Australian theatrical avant-garde.

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Jerzy Grotowski's visits to Australia in 1973 and 1974 were preceded by the circulation of his 1968 Towards a Poor Theatre, writings that were received as missives from the avant-garde future, and taken up by theatre-makers seeking an alternative to the vernacular naturalism of the emerging Australian New Wave. In Jerzy Grotowski in Australia, Ian Maxwell traces the impact of those texts, and of Grotowski's time in Australia, upon an emerging avant-garde theatre movement, and the legacy of that impact in the decades that followed. Drawing upon interviews with key figures from that movement, as well as archival and documentary sources, Grotowski in Australia raises questions about the viability and sustainability of avant-garde theatricality in Australia, presenting an internationalist counter-narrative to the history of Australian theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, and prior to the emergence of the vibrant contemporary theatre scene towards the end of that period.