Acting Dead and Other Maniacal Stories: The abject work of Cricot2, after Kantor

Abstract

This article addresses the performances of ‘the actors of Cricot2’, after the death of the director of Cricot2, Tadeusz Kantor, in 1990. It examines the nature of the performance methods Kantor employed, particularly in relation to the bio-object, the theatre of death and the work of ‘the reality of lowest rank’ in which the abject object, be it actor, mannequin, prop, or materials from the set, contributed to a brutal challenge to reality. Rather than the savage transcendental sacrifice of the actor in an Artaudian fashion we are left with an apparently bleak array of mad characters, endlessly cycling through repetitive movements, rote phrases and chants—human being at the very limits of any form of representational activity. These were actors from another world, ushered in through the abject poverty of their performance environments and stage relations.The article also explores the work of the company, post 1990. The theoretical structure is elaborated through Bataille and an economy of waste that is articulated in relation to Kantor's own manifestos. The poor object and mad story emerge as means by which to challenge theatre space and generate a performance methodology that does not die with it's theorist but is vibrantly alive through its engagement with the abject—an element often deployed through body art performance processes, but one that encounters difficulty in other modes of representational theatre. The work of the Cricot2 actors finds another marginalised space of ‘acting dead’ through which to ‘show’ the abject, neither as fully present (through blood and bodily waste) but not simply absent (as in the category of artifice in the conventional stage play).