The Polish Cultural Institute and the Performance Studies Department of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University are presenting Tracing Grotowski’s Path: Year of Grotowski in New York starting February 6 and continuing through July 13, 2009. The program is curated by Professor Richard Schechner.

Tracing Grotowski’s Path: Year of Grotowski in New York celebrates the work and legacy of world-renowned Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski.

Considered one of the most important and influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century, Grotowski revolutionized contemporary theatre in a number of ways. Beginning in 1959 with his early experiments and productions in the Polish town of Opole and subsequently with the Polish Laboratory Theatre in Wrocław, Grotowski changed the way Western theatre practitioners and performance theorists conceive of the audience/actor relationship, theatre staging, and the craft of acting. UNESCO has designated 2009 as —The Year of Grotowski— —“ 50 years after the founding of the Polish Laboratory Theatre and 10 after the death of the world-renowned Polish theatre director,

The opening program: The Theatre of Thirteen Rows (1959) and the Frotowski Institute in Wrocław (2009) will take place on Friday, February 6, 2009, 7:30pm at the Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street, New York, NY

This event brings together former literary director and co-founder of the Theatre of Thirteen Rows (later the Polish Laboratory Theatre), Ludwik Flaszen and the current directing team of the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Poland: Jarosław Fret and Grzegorz Ziolkowski. What brought the Polish Laboratory Theatre into existence? What was the Polish theatre scene like in those days of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain? What is the current work of the Grotowski Institute? How is the Institute preserving, researching, and using Grotowski’s archives and his Polish heritage? The panel discussion, moderated by Richard Schechner, will be preceded by a screening of a film on Jerzy Grotowski. The event will conclude at 11:00 PM.