He debuted as a director in 1957 in Kraków with Eugène Ionesco's play Chairs (co-directed with Aleksandra Mianowska)[3] and shortly afterward founded a small laboratory theatre in 1959 in the town of Opole in Poland.

Grotowski made his individual directorial debut in 1958 with the production Gods of Rain,[5] which introduced his bold approach to text, which he continued to develop throughout his career, influencing many subsequent theatre artists.

"[6] Among the many productions for which his theatre company became famous were Orpheus by Jean Cocteau, Shakuntala based on text by Kalidasa, Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, and Akropolis by Stanisław Wyspiański.

Akropolis received much attention and could be said to have launched Grotowski's career internationally due to inventive and aggressive promotion by visiting foreign scholars and theatre professionals.

In 1965, Grotowski moved his company to Wrocław, relabeling them a "Teatr Laboratorium", in part to avoid the heavy censorship to which professional "theatres" were subject in Poland at that time.

[8] In one of his final essays, Grotowski detailed how he worked individually with actor Ryszard Cieslak for more than a year to develop the scenes of torture and martyrdom intrinsic to the play.

Entitled Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, it uses texts from the Bible, this time combined with contemporary writings from authors such as T. S. Eliot and Simone Weil, this production was cited by members of the company as an example of a group 'total act'.

Theatre - through the actor's technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives - provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions.

It is true that the actor accomplishes this act, but he can only do so through an encounter with the spectator - intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a cameraman, wardrobe mistress, stage designer or make-up girl - in direct confrontation with him, and somehow " instead of" him.

This was a fitting vehicle for Grotowski and his poor theatre because his treatment of the play in Poland had already achieved wider recognition and was published in Pamiętnik Teatralny (Warsaw, 1964), Alla Ricerca del Teatro Perduto (Padova, 1965), and Tulane Drama Review (New Orleans, 1965).

In this period of his work, Grotowski traveled intensively through India, Mexico, Haiti and elsewhere, seeking to identify elements of technique in the traditional practices of various cultures that could have a precise and discernible effect on participants.

Key collaborators in this phase of work include Włodzimierz Staniewski, subsequently founder of Gardzienice Theatre, Jairo Cuesta and Magda Złotowska, who traveled with Grotowski on his international expeditions.

Always a master strategist, Grotowski made use of his international ties and the relative freedom of travel allowed him to pursue this program of cultural research in order to flee Poland following the imposition of martial law.

His dear friends Andre and Mercedes Gregory helped Grotowski to settle in the US, where he taught at Columbia University for one year while attempting to find support for a new program of research.

Unable (despite the best efforts of Richard Schechner) to secure resources for his projected research in Manhattan, in 1983 Grotowski received an invitation from Robert Cohen to come to the University of California, Irvine, where he began a course of work known[13][14] as Objective Drama.

During this time Grotowski continued several collaborative relationships begun in earlier phases, and Maud Robart, Jairo Cuesta and Pablo Jimenez took on significant roles as performers and research leaders in the project.

[17] "It seems to me," Brook said, "that Grotowski is showing us something which existed in the past but has been forgotten over the centuries; that is that one of the vehicles which allows man to have access to another level of perception is to be found in the art of performance."

[16] Jerzy Grotowski was among a small group of actors and directors, including Peter Brook and Roy Hart, who sought to explore new forms of theatrical expression without employing the spoken word.

Alan Seymour, speaking of Grotowski's 1963 production of Faustus noted that the performers' voices 'reached from the smallest whisper to an astonishing, almost cavernous tone, an intoned declaiming, of a resonance and power I have not heard from actors before'.

For he believed that they 'embodied myths and images powerful and universal enough to function as archetypes, which could penetrate beneath the apparently divisive and individual structure of the Western psyche, and evoke a spontaneous, collective, internal response'.

But, for Grotowski, as for Hart, there was, between the psyche's reservoir of images and the bodily and vocal expression of that imagery, a series of inhibitions, resistances and blocks, which his acting exercises set out to remove.