Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990)

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) JanKott NOT LONG AGO I wrote of the impression he created in his black suit, trousers on suspenders and soft felt hat, always present on stage. With an almost imperceptible motion of his hand, quick as the snapping of fingers, he "ferried" his actors across the river Styx like Charon to the land of forgetfulness, so that they could come back as memory. He changed the living into the dead, and then the dead again into the living. Now having crossed the Styx forever, Kantor himself has become only a memory. He was one of the greatest, the most consistent, and the most determined innovators in the contemporary theatre. Anyone who had a chance to see Kantor's theatre will never forget his mannikins as actors and actors as mannikins, the obsessive, recurring musical refrains, houses, and rooms that have long ceased to exist, recreated on an empty stage out of a few wooden planks. Yet Kantor's greatness lies not only in the revival of the long dead art. I have seen Kantor's productions in many places: at La Mama in New York, in Paris, in Berlin and every time it seemed to me that I was sitting among the same spectators. And unlike the superficial innovations and deceptive forms constantly offered us, Kantor's theatre restored our common , universal memory; the memory of war, the memory of cruelty, and the testimony of the dead. Kantor's theatre was the only and is probably the last wandering theatre: they have traveled from Cracow to New York, from Florence to Tokyo, and from Europe to North and South America and Asia. In each of these 28 places, Kantor has restored to the spectators their long forgotten memories and those of their ancestors, and he has done this speaking to them in his own language which has become theirs. He called his theatre a place of death. But last year, during a seminar in Paris, he talked of his art as a theatre of love and death. The title of his last production was I ShallNever Return. Tireless to the very end, mocking death whose presence he felt everywhere, Kantor kept working on his new production, Today Is My Birthday. The last Polish Charon of contemporary world theatre, Kantor already is and will remain only a memory. But this memory contains more than death: there is birth. And birth is the negation of death. Memory is always life-giving. A return of the dead to the living. Translated by Jadwiga Kosicka. 29 ...