Kantor’s The Dead Class

Abstract

Since the end of the second world war, the Polish artist-director Tadeusz Kantor has been working towards the evolution of an entirely new theatrical form, a form that attempts to merge both art and reality into some coherent whole, a form that would be important, vital and artistically viable. Beginning with a number of traditional ideas about the nature of art and existence, Kantor moved into the realm of Happenings and Events through the 50’s and early 60’s, a field he subsequently rejected because of what he called its “ready-made reality. ” His next major movement was into what he referred to as Theatre of the Impossible, a theatre in which “tangible reality was transformed into its invisible extensions, ” a theatre which attempted to dematerialize the elements of the work of art. This too he ultimately rejected claiming that they quickly became “ritualistic manipulations of reality.” By 1975, Kantor, now the artistic director of the Cricot 2 Theatre in Cracow, began work on a new series of experiments which, with a nod to Gordon Craig, he began referring to as The Theatre of Death. The first production of his Theatre of Death experiments was called The Dead Class and it had its premiere on November 15, 1975 at Cricot 2. So stunning was that performance (which utilized a company of mostly non-professional theatre people, some of them in their 60’s and 70’s) that Kantor was immediately asked to bring the play to Warsaw where it became an immediate cause celebre throughout the Polish theatre community. During 1976 and into 1977, the production toured Europe where it highlighted virtually every festival in which it played. Unfortunately for North Americans, there are no plans right now to tour The Dead Class on this side of the Atlantic. Because of this fact and, even more, because of the general importance of Kantor’s work and its potential influence on theatre people the world over, CTR is pleased to be able to publish the following documentation (the first time it has appeared anywhere in English) as part of its Notes On the Avant Garde series. It begins with Kantor’s own manifesto called Theatre of Death (translated for CTR by Voy T. and Margaret Stelmaszynski of Toronto) and is followed by a scene-by-scene description of The Dead Class by Polish critic Jan Klossowicz. It concludes with some notes by Kantor on the characters who appear in the play. Both the scene descriptions and the notes were translated for CTR by Karol Jakubowicz of Warsaw through the courtesies of the well-known Polish theatre journal, Dialog.