Forget Kantor

FORGET KANTOR Michal Kobialka You are one in your memory. You are another in the time you cannot remember. Carlos Fuentes, TerraNostra The folding or doubling is itself a Memory; the "absolute memory" or memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in the diagrams. Only forgetting (the unfolding) recovers what is folded in Memory (and in the fold itself). Deleuze, Foucault n January 1991, Today Is My Birthdaypremiered in Toulouse and in Paris. It was supposed to be the last production prepared by Tadeusz Kantor. Those interested in his work were anxiously waiting for the opening night to see how he would beget himself to resolve the dilemma of a physical autorepresentation. In I Shall Never Return (1988), Kantor had irreversibly erased the boundary between the three-dimensional world of objects and the multi-dimensional world of the stage ofAbstraction by refusing to join his actors/ his memories pleading him to follow them and, by so doing, to reestablish their and his own physical identity. "[Tihe fate of the most important matters of life and art/was decided in the inn-/in the c I a s h between two alien systems that would never explain or complement each other."' In the closing scene, Kantor sat at the table with an ultimate simulacrum-an emballage parexcellence, "a fragile and 'poetic'/Emballage of/the skeleton and death,/and of hope that it will last/ until Doomsday"-whose identity was the immaterial desired Desire of the Self (see Figure 1).2 Today Is My Birthday is a repetition of the last rehearsal that took place on December 8, 1990. Kantor died that night. "But there is a certain ambiguity here./We cannot be sure whether/the play depicts the environment and the ensemble of actors in a theatre who are preparing [ Today is My Birthday...]/or/ E 1 whether the play plunges us into the realm of 'illusion"' 3 to prepare us for the "real" "Birthday Ceremony" that would take place later. In a split second, such a scenario seemed to be possible: "engulfed within this gnawing turbulence of/ reflections, feelings, doubts, and hopes,/I need to set my past in order,/I need to review my ideas/I need to put old ideas aside into the chest of memory-/simply, I need to clear the field of action/for my new production./My room onstage and! theplot/The action takes place onstage./A real action. Let us assume so./I have decided to move in and live onstage-/I have here my bed, my table, my chair, and, ofcourse, my paintings./I have often imagined my room in a theatre,/inside of the theatre,/onstage, rather than in a hotel./So, my-as I call it-Poor Room of Imagination/is placed onstage./I have to arrange it./It should not look like a stage room./I will assemble onstage, in this room of mine, all the objects/as though I really decided to live here./A bed, a table, a chair,/doors (important),/ an oven with a chimney, and/'canvases' on easels./A ROOM/Mine./Private." 4 The memory of Kantor's presence on stage emphasized his physical absence now, however. The chair, where he was supposed to sit, stood empty. Unlike the people (the Cleaning-woman, a human Emballage, Pedel, Doctor Klein, the soldiers, the generals, the politicians, the dignitaries, the gravediggers) or the objects (a molding book, an oven with a chimney, Kantor's paintings, a family photograph, the machines of power, crosses, a family table) that performed different functions in Kantor's theatre experiments, the chair was one ofvery few objects on stage that did not have its own immediate stage history. Multiple questions came consequently to mind. Was the chair an object-actor from the 1944 production of The Return ofOdysseus?5 Was it here to remind us about that distant act of sitting that was happening for the first time in a new reality-a reality that was a countersite to that reality legitimized and legitimating the prewar systems of power and orders of things?6 Was Today Is My Birthdayan act happening for the...