Everyone I know had the same reaction when I told them I was going to California to give lectures on European Theater: how can people actually study there when it’s so sunny and beautiful? And the truth is San Diego and La Jolla, where the UCSD campus is located are incredible beautiful cities. But there was much more in sight than the tall palm-trees one could see everywhere and that is a lot of serious work and study in a perfectly organized campus looking like a colony of busy bees.

Theater and Dance students are among the most fortunate in UCSD campus. It is enough to see the theater halls in the campus, starting with the famous La Jolla Playhouse, where they can work on their own projects or collaborations with guest directors, choreographers and set-designers to understand how true this is.

Finding together Artaud’s and Grotowski’s traces in contemporary European Theater of different generations was an interesting project for the students of the theater department at UCSD, coordinated by director Tompa Gabor. They enjoyed seeing the fragments I chose and presented from the work of the creators I talked about and to discuss in detail the artistic trajectory of Grotowskian ideas both in European and in the American theater, through his numerous disciples or artists deeply influenced by his personality.