Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context

Abstract

In 2020, American theatre-related circles received an outstanding book covering multiple aspects of the work of Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), an avant-garde Polish theatre artist who inspired theatre theory and practice not only in his own country, but in many other places in the world including the United States and Japan.Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context starts with the introduction by Magda Romańska (one of the editors) mapping the whole project and ponders the relevance of Tadeusz Kantor's theatre and theories for the twenty-first century. She points out that as much as Jerzy Grotowski's focus on the body in his theatre practice made him the exemplary theatre figure of the second-half of the twentieth century, Kantor's disembodied, truncated, object-oriented productions make him the signpost of the twenty-first century post-dramatic theatre that challenges the unified structure of the performance, gets rid of the character and plot, leaving the space for disconnected bits and pieces of transient reality. The theme of Kantor's post-dramatic bent iterates in many other chapters as post-memory (Klaudiusz Święcicki, Anna Róża Burzyńska), or post-human age (Romańska) and is referenced as post-dramatic tragedy by Hans-Thies Lehmann.Another co-editor's, Kathleen Cioffi's short biography of Kantor follows the memory/ post-memory track stressing the significance of the artist's childhood and war memories and the whole historical context (Polish and broadly European) for his art.The book's chapters fall into three categories: theoretical (Kantor in Theory); thematic (Kantor, Locally), analyzing specific aspects/themes from Kantor's work; and the third (Kantor, Globally) highlighting Kantor's legacy in various parts of the world.Part I comments on Kantor's famous concepts relating to the stage such as object/bio-object, puppets, memory, trauma, and theatrical space. Michał Kobiałka emphasizes the process of transformation of the distorted war reality into malleable, voluminous bio-objects, and Jacob Juntunen discusses the connection between the world of things and the dehumanizing reality of war and Stalinism/Communism. Others, like Martin Leach, while discussing the modernist and post-modernist aspects of Kantor's work, brings to our attention a rarely known fact about Kantor's own film (together with Mieczysław Waśkowski and Adam Nurzyński) Attention! . . . Painting discovered in 2010. That film (the only example of Kantor's experimentation with this medium), shows the artist's preoccupations with matter, dehumanization, the crisis of representation through the sole focus on painting as action and paint “in itself” as malleable, fluid “lowly and formless” matter.Some texts in this section evoke the idea of memory and trauma as foundational concepts for Kantor's theatre. Grzegorz Niziołek, for instance, points out how in order to elicit deeply suppressed layers of experience that can hardly be articulated (and often relating to the historical reality of the Holocaust) Kantor employs cramped, shrunk, mutilated space such as a wardrobe into which he packs his actors. Klaudiusz Święcicki while providing meaningful historical/biographical contexts explores a question of two photographs that inspired memorable pieces of theatre—Wielopole, Wielopole (1980) and Today Is My Birthday (1991).Theoretical discussions in Part I, written in a highly specialized language, definitely throw new light on Kantor's formal experiments and will be of interest to the scholars of modern critical theory and some can be even used in a class for the theatre students.Part II continues the main theoretical concerns from Part I but approaches them through much narrower, “local” contexts. For instance, Tamara Trojanowska (whose complex, deep text opens this section) while alluding to Kantor's avant-garde and post-dramatic moments, shows how Kantor's theatre brutalizes the personal space by destroying the boundary between the sacred/personal/individual and the public/historical spheres. Her analysis of Kantor's use of religious music and text (Psalm 110) interchangeably with Polish patriotic songs such as “Grey Infantry” shows how the artist denigrates the Polish Romantic myth of salvation through sacrifice. Trojanowska's focus on music rarely analyzed in Kantor's work greatly enriches her discussion.Many articles in this section trace the transformations of fundamental Kantorian themes and references such as death/rebirth, return, treatment of the body, trauma, remembering, ritual, subjugation, or the use of text and actor. References to Polish-Jewish cultural confluences weave through many articles in this section. For instance, Agnieszka Legutko looks closely at the connections between Dead Class and S. Ansky's Dybbuk presenting an insightful history of the Jewish text, its production by the Habimah theatre directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Kantor's reaction (he saw the production in 1938). Debra Caplan and Kathleen Cioffi continue Polish-Jewish themes through the discussion of the presence of Jewish culture (visual elements, music, sound, gestures, dance) in Kantor's theatre (Caplan), and the affinities and differences between Dead Class and Tadeusz Słobodzianek's Our Class (2009) (Cioffi).No book about Kantor can omit his theatre's connections to the iconic trio—Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz, as well as to Kantor's contemporary Jerzy Grotowski. Nina Kiraly examines Kantor's exploration of the myth and ritual of returning in the context of Bruno Schulz's prose and specifically his “A Treatise on Mannequins.” References to Witkacy run through almost the whole book, but they are most closely examined in the chapters by Łucja Iwanczewska and Mateusz Borowski, who also makes connections to Gombrowicz. Since the majority of the book's authors focus on the Theatre of Death period, the discussion of Witkacy focusing on the 1960s and Kantor's early productions balances the whole collection. I find Iwanczewska's and Borowski's chapters very useful for the students of Kantor's work since they not only analyze Kantor's theories, but also demonstrate Kantor's practice of “playing with the texts” in non-interpretive, non-representational ways when creating his autonomous productions.In congruence with Kantor's own intellectual landscape, Theatermachine presents a very broad spectrum of topics. Katarzyna Fazan leads the reader to the realm of painting and happenings. She discusses Kantor's treatment of the body/corporeality with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson and some other visual artists and artifacts in the background. Kris Salata goes back to the famous controversy between Kantor and Grotowski concerning the concept of “the poor theatre”—teatr ubogi (Grotowski), and teatr biedny (Kantor)—a term translated into English as “poor,” but as Salata explains, in Polish these are two different words denoting different concepts.A couple of authors—Lawrence Switzky and Herta Schmid—look at the intersection of Kantor's and the Bauhaus (of Lothar Schreyer and Oskar Schlemmer) approaches to the actor and the object pointing to the humanitarian bent of Kantor's theatre in opposition to the Bauhaus’ treatment of a “human nature as a scientific object.” Switzky's article discusses Kantor's directorial debut in The Death of Tintagiles by Maurice Maeterlinck pointing to Kantor's fascination with Schlemmer's cubic costumes. At this point it would be useful just to mention Kantor's other noteworthy connection, namely Maria Jarema and the whole Jarema family. Józef Jarema was the creator of Cricot 1 and Maria Jarema (Jaremianka) was an influential sculptor and painter, one of the initiators of the avant-garde Grupa Krakowska (Kraków Group), and shared the same enchantment with geometry and abstraction as Kantor. Together with Kantor she created costumes for Tintagiles and even performed in it.The arrangement of the consecutive chapters indicates how meticulously the editors were choosing the texts in order to continue the main thematic trajectories, but at the same time add a different perspective and a new angle to every section. Thus, the third and the last part of the book shows how Kantor's ideas penetrated into avant-garde theatrical spaces of Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia) Japan, and the United States. The authors of this section pick up the threads creating the fabric of Kantorian themes and discuss Kantor the nomad, the ethos of the actor and director, the status of theatrical space, music, rhythm, movement, the treatment of the body, and Kantor's approach to the costume. These articles show how contemporary artists reuse these themes and weave them into their own work. Thus, the book in a truly Kantorian fashion expands its own frames showing more contemporary stage work and different Kantor-related contemporary theatrical venues.The last part in a truly polyphonic manner shows how Kantor's ideas spread out in Europe, Japan, and the United States. They inspired such directors as Pina Bausch, Christoph Marthaler (Germany), Alvis Hermanis (Latvia), Luk Perceval (Belgium/Netherlands), François Tanguy and Gisele Vienne (France), as well as, Ellen Stewart, Robert Wilson, Elizabeth LeCompte and Wooster Group from the USA, Tadashi Suzuki and Shuji Terayama from Japan. And there are many others dispersed all over the world, who like Kantor, search for a way to present their ideas about the histories and events that change in a fluctuating, unstable reality in a way congruent with their sense of truth.In closing, I want to note that, as Anna Róża Burzyńska points out in her chapter, we cannot talk about one monolithic “theatre of Tadeusz Kantor.” Rather, we are confronted with myriads of his ideas and the book edited by Magda Romańska and Kathleen Cioffi, like a real “Kantormachine,” is the best representation of this phenomenon. And the machine rolls on.