"The Milano Lessons" by Tadeusz Kantor: Introduction

Abstract

Tadeusz Kantor, the late Polish visual artist and theatre director, is most widely known as the creator of The Dead Class (I975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), and I Shall Never Return (1988). Kantor is less well-known as a teacher. In June 1986 he taught a group of I I students at the Milan Civica scuola d'arte drammatica and, after a month of explorations, the students presented The Wedding Ceremony in two versions: one built according to the principles of constructivism, the other, surrealism. The Wedding Ceremony was not, however, a finished spectacle, but a theatrical journey into the process of artistic cognizance. In the constructivist Wedding Ceremony, the student performers raised onstage an assemblage made out of stock pieces found in a prop room-a slanted rostrum, wooden boards, a scaffold, a ladder, a bicycle wheel, hoops. A bishop, an altar boy, a sacristan, a chronicler, a bride, her sister, a bridegroom, and their parents gathered to participate in a holy matrimony: