Tadeusz Kantor's Practice: A Postmodern Notebook

When I was invited to contribute an essay for one of the thirtieth-year anniversary issues of PAJ, there was no question in my mind what the topic of the essay should be. Even though medieval theatre and theatre historiography are the primary focus of my scholarship, the obsessive nature of my encounters with Tadeusz Kantor and his theatre over the last 20 years has unequivocally proven to me that I could never fully abandon his theatre. "Forget Kantor," an essay which I wrote in 1994 [PAJ 47], was my attempt to close that chapter of my academic life. But then, by the end of that essay, it became clear to me that forgetting, like Kantor's Emballage, would shelter, protect, preserve, and restore his shape trying to escape the passage of time.¹

Now, in 2005, I am thinking about Kantor's theatre practice again. This year, 2005, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Cricot 2 Theatre, the thirtieth anniversary of The Dead Class, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wielopole, Wielopole, the twentieth anniversary of Let the Artists Die, and the fifteenth anniversary of Tadeusz Kantor's death. To celebrate them, the Cricoteka Archives in Kraków as well as people who were closely connected with Kantor, or his visual and performance art, organized a series of events, a public forum if you will, to rethink and reevaluate his contribution to the fine arts and non-traditional performance practices.²

There is also another reason why I am thinking about Kantor's theatre practice. The existing conditions call for political theatre that will challenge globalization of the image in service of capital and the culture industry, a belief that modern technological society based on a narrative of progress will create a bright future, or a rationalization justifying violence as indispensable in its mission of bringing liberty and democracy to the world. The models for political theatre that we currently have and refer to—Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, Erwin Piscator's political theatre, or Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed, for example—have outlived their promise to give us an alternative representational praxis, which could challenge the existing political regimes. Kantor, in an uncanny way, created such a praxis. No matter how hard we try to gloss it over with words of nostalgia, even today, 15 years after his death, it carries the promise of a theatre which is an answer to reality, rather than a representation of a utopian alternative. His theatre is in reality, but not of it—a phrase used by Alain Badiou to define the ethics of a radical event:³

World War II. Genocide,
Concentration Camps,
Crematories,
Human Beasts,
Death,
Tortures,
Human kind turned into mud, soap, and ashes,
Debasement,
The time of contempt . . . .

And this is my (and our) answer:
THERE IS NO WORK OF ART [. . .]
THERE IS NO "HOLY" ILLUSION,
THERE IS NO "HOLY" PERFORMANCE.
THERE IS ONLY AN OBJECT WHICH IS TORN OUT OF
LIFE AND REALITY [. . .]
THERE IS NO ARTISTIC PLACE [. . .]
THERE IS ONLY REAL PLACE [. . .]
ARTISTIC ATTITUDE IS DESCRIBED BY:
PROTEST,
MUTINY,
BLASPHEMY AND SACRILEGE OF SANCTIONED
SHRINES. ⁴

Could it be that Kantor's theatre at that time was a radical departure from, or rupture within, the known and accepted normative representational theatrical categories and structures? To paraphrase Gerhard Richter, could it be that Kantor's theatre created a possibility of seeing that which cannot really be grasped or understood, because in its most concrete stage form it shows "nothing" or, at best, a nostalgia for the impossible? Could it be that Kantor's theatre with its components, such as a poor/real object, reality of the lowest rank, an autonomous work of art, zero zones, the impossible condition, the complex mnemotechnics, and an Emballage, which were given different shapes and meanings depending on the pressures of the historical, cultural, and ideological networks of relations within which Kantor found...