O.C. THEATER : Avant-Garde’s Jerzy Grotowski Returns to UCI : Polish stage artist, here to help revive an ‘Objective Drama’ program he started in 1983, premieres a videotape of ‘The Constant Prince,’ one of his most famous productions.

Jerzy Grotowski, the 57-year-old Polish theater artist who established a program in “Objective Drama” at UC Irvine in 1983, is back on the campus through Monday to help put the program back on track.

Sunday evening, Stephen Barker, the university’s new drama department chairman, said the program has been “on the wane” and that he and Grotowski would be spending the week discussing ways to organize future workshops.

Barker added that a free lecture, which was to begin a few hours later at the university Concert Hall, might offer a glimpse at what Grotowski is thinking. But, on the other hand, Barker offered a quote from British director Peter Brook: “Just when you think you know where Jerzy is, he’s not there anymore.”

Sure enough, at the beginning of the lecture, Grotowski announced--in French, with his longtime associate and workshop leader James Slowiak translating--that he was not going to talk about Objective Drama. As if following the central precept of his workshops--to go back to the original sources of performance--he was about to take us back to his theater stagings of the ‘60s: We would be the first U.S. audience to see a videotape--the only visual record--of his arguably most famous production, of Calderon’s “The Constant Prince.”

Grotowski has shunned public performances of his theater work for more than 20 years. Instead, he has turned toward an epic study of ancient ritual and performance practices. The range of cultural forms was reflected in the range of assistants he began recruiting when he started his UCI workshops: a Sufi dervish master; a Balinese performance artist; Haitian voudoun practitioners; a Japanese karate master; and artists from Taiwan, China, Mexico and Colombia.

He looked for a few good students, typically novice young performers interested in applying new techniques to their craft. They worked long hours, usually from 4 p.m. until sunrise, and sometimes in 30-hour stretches without sleep. Discipline was the watchword: No talking during work or even during breaks.

“The Work” involved exercises, movements, rituals--some strenuous (students have been known to break down and cry in mid-session), some a lot more fun (such as running through Irvine meadowlands). Everything was pushed to an extreme. The goal, in Slowiak’s words, was to produce “excellence in the performer.”

“The work is not for the weak,” former Grotowski student Philip Winterbottom wrote in a diary report on the UCI workshop that appears in the current issue of the Drama Review. Another former student recalls Grotowski as “abusive at times, pacing the room and mumbling under his breath, as if he was centered completely on himself, so that you had to get inside his head.”

“As far as I can tell, he has no other life than this,” says UCI professor and stage director Robert Cohen who, during his 26-year tenure as the school’s drama department head, was instrumental in bringing Grotowski to the campus. “He’s very meticulous and demanding, but no more demanding on anyone than himself.”

His workshops can be impenetrably private. But Grotowski the lecturer--his face framed by a wild gray beard and hair and dressed in an absent-minded-looking assemblage of wrinkled clothes--was intent on getting his points across, and clearly.

He recounted the background and making of “The Constant Prince,” noting that his monastic-like work of the ‘80s and ‘90s would not have been possible without such earlier productions.

He further wanted his listeners to understand that the evening’s subject was not so much “The Constant Prince” as it was the ways an audience sees a performance--”the montage,” in the cinematic sense, in the spectator’s mind.

The play depicts the imprisonment of a Christian prince by Islamic North Africans. The prince is subjected to physical and psychological torture and becomes a martyr, preferring death to life in chains. Grotowski’s crucial changes in the original text included turning the Islamic masters into Stalinist oppressors dressed in the robes of Polish judges.

His production, he said, was built on two key personal experiences--one from his own childhood, another from the teen-age years of the late actor who played the Prince, Ryszard Cieslak (who last appeared in Los Angeles in Brook’s “The Mahabharata”).

Grotowski recalled that when he first read the text, at age 10, he was so affected by the language that he “sung” the words--an experience that he incorporated into each actor’s performance. Cieslak, meanwhile, dredged up an event of his own--”sensual and joyous” was all Grotowski would reveal about it. Grotowski said he and Cieslak used the episode as the physical and emotional basis for three extraordinary monologues the Prince utters during the play.

Such was the commitment and intensity of the production that Cieslak rehearsed in isolation with Grotowski, away from the rest of the company, for eight months.

The videotape Grotowski showed has a history of its own.

The first act of the play, showing the subjugation and conversion of another prince to the ways of the torturers/dictators, was filmed with Grotowski’s permission only because it would not include Cieslak (“If he ever saw this, it would hurt his process”).

The second act was filmed without permission by an unknown amateur during one of the group’s European tours; the film eventually ended up at the University of Rome’s theater department. The film is silent; Norwegian radio happened to have recorded another performance two years later. “They work together,” Grotowski noted. “Why? Because each performance was enormously precise. Everything was elaborated to the tiniest detail, so that there would be virtually no difference from performance to performance.”

The third act was recorded by Norwegian television. Grotowski had forbidden its broadcast because of what he had considered poor quality. But when the recording was discovered last year, there was then a complete recording of a legendary production.

What the audience at UCI saw was a group of actors--including Cieslak and renowned actress Rena Mirecka--seemingly caught in a medieval nightmare, the torturers becoming increasingly powerless as the martyred Prince rises in potency, laughing into the maw of death.

The roots of Grotowski’s subsequent interest in trance ritual are right here: Seldom have actors submitted themselves to such extremes of verbal speed and stamina, of physical precision and strength (Cieslak is literally whipped on stage).

Grotowski patiently responded to audience questions, lighting and relighting his pipe, sometimes taking long pauses between thoughts. “We were always in rehearsal,” he explained. “There was never the final, complete performance. It’s why, after doing the play on and off for five years,” it remained strong.

Has he left the theater for good? “I stopped public performances 21 years ago, and I still get these questions. There’s no going back.”

Why were “Constant Prince” audiences deliberately kept to a minimum size? “I never looked for a big public, which is why I’ve always worked in towns and small cities. But my first problem wasn’t limiting spectators, but getting them at all. Sometimes, I was the only one there, and those were among the best performances.

“Later, they came . . . but in order to connect with subtle acting, you can’t have a mass audience. For ‘The Constant Prince,’ the audience looked down onto the stage, like medical students in an operating room theater or viewers at a bullfight or like voyeurs. We were telling them, ‘You are voyeurs, because what we are doing is real.’ ”

He is always talking about the actor’s “impulses.” What are they?

“The actor must ask, ‘Am I like an empty channel, so I may let energy pass through me and not block it?’ If so, the actor is feeling impulses.”

Can theater be separate from politics?

“In ‘The Constant Prince,’ I communicated directly to the audience and over the heads of the political establishment. True art is profoundly rebellious. True art is not an obedient dog. It was natural that romanticism ushered in irrationality during an industrial age trying to engineer all of life. And in the middle of irrational Nazism came the offensive of (Bertolt) Brecht’s rational theater.”

Another pause, as if Grotowski was weighing each word like gold nuggets on a scale.

“Art is a very risky job if you do it honestly.”