Memories, Far from Dead, of Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor moved to Cracow from the Galician hinterland upon graduation from an excellent secondary school, studied here and risked his life by staging clandestine plays under the Nazi occupation, conducted a running skirmish with the communist bureaucracy while existing on the black-market fringes of the cultural market, and ended up winning world renown and laying a substantial claim to the title of foremost avant-garde theatrical artist of the late twentieth century without ever forsaking the imaginative space of his provincial origins. Ho hum, another Cracow-conquers-the-world success story. Not exactly. Kantor gave more than a few signs that he was exasperated to the point of animosity with local pettifogging and backbiting. Cracow, in turn, repeatedly indicated that the feelings were reciprocal. The titles of two of his last plays, Let the Artists Die and I Shall Never Return, hint at the sentiments involved. When asked where he would never return, he replied: "To Cracow." Kantor rarely staged his later work here, even while regularly winning praise in New York, Milan, or London. Yet he died here on a December night in 1990, after rehearsing a new work in a humble cultural center on the road to Nowa Huta. His life, his work, and the way it ended are in fact a pessimistic Cracow morality tale about the impossibility of escaping from memory or of assigning an unambiguous significance to the things that matter most. If the Nazis had known what Kantor was up to when he staged Wyspianski's Return of Odysseus (in a private apartment) as the tale of a defeated Wehrmacht veteran trudging home after the defeat at Stalingrad, they would have sent him to Auschwitz. His father, on the Germans' blacklist of Polish patriots, had already died there. Once Kantor began winning acclaim, various segments of Cracovian opinion saw him as a hippie threatening to drag the city's youth off the straight and narrow, or as a cosmopolitan opportunist who succeeded abroad despite never having made anything of himself in Poland. Envy had something to do with the latter view, along with ignorance, sometimes willful, of the fact that Kantor never tried very hard to fit into the restricted official scene in People's Poland. His persona, productions, theoretical work and pronouncements were a long, uproarious attack on conventionality, including the banal conventionality of the institutionalized avant-garde: the cultural bureaucrats who made it difficult for him to work in his own city, and the official critics who then pilloried him for going abroad to take advantage of the creative freedom he could not find at home. Eschewing professional actors generally (his artistic program compelled him to regard actors as disreputable impostors hired from a low-rent employment agency), Kantor put together a troupe of local painters, craftsmen, and hangers-on, and took them on a triumphant, quarter-century-long tournee through

Scotland, Italy, France, Iran, Germany, Wales, England, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Australia, Venezuela, Austria, the United States, Sweden, Japan, Togo, Spain, Switzerland, Israel, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Greece, and Iceland. He called his group Cricot2, an allusion to an earlier Cracow "painters' theatre" that flourished at the Artists' Club on ul. Lobzowska when Kantor was a student before the war. Cricot2 often made its debut in a given country at a major festival; enthusiastic reviews and return invitations followed almost invariably. The troupe mounted Kantor's major productions 191 times, but only eight of those occasions were in Cracow. **** Uninformed holidaymakers idly looking for amber as they trudged head down along the margin of the beach and the Baltic Sea near the Polish village of Osieki in 1967 may have sensed at a certain moment that they had wandered into the middle of something unusual. Looking up, they saw a gaunt, angular figure in a frock coat standing atop a lifeguard's seat and waving his arms about as if--get this, says Kowalski in the unbuttoned check shirt he is wearing over his blue nylon swimming trunks to Kowalska, who is in her best bra and has a leaf stuck on her nose--that guy thinks he's a conductor and the sea is his orchestra. Look at him, beating time and coaxing the waves out of the depths. Behind the conductor, his audience sat in rows of beach chairs. The conductor, that is, the author and performer, was Tadeusz Kantor. At the time, he seemed to be an academically trained, professional stage designer and painter gone wrong. On artistic scholarships to France in the fifties, he took in the guiding principles of the avant-garde, and then started mixing things up. He added three-dimensional elements that extended beyond the frames of his paintings, and then began wrapping them. He became obsessed with "packaging" things, but, as opposed to the grandiose, static draping practiced by Christo (an artist he scorned as a commercialized lightweight), Kantor sent his packages out into the world and made them move. He employed official letter carriers to deliver an outsized envelope through the streets of Warsaw, and released multiple compositions featuring his favorite object, the umbrella, in the Polish capital. One of Kantor's umbrellas even turned up as a subversive element in the official May Day parade. A leading "happener," or arranger of happenings, Kantor also worked in overtly theatrical modes, often in the cellars of the Krzysztofory Palace on the Rynek. He specialized for a time in the dramas of Witkacy, the 1930s hallucinogenic portrait painter and absurdist writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, who had divided his time between Cracow and Zakopane. In Kantor's hands, Witkacy's plays became traps not only for the audience, who found themselves manipulated and manhandled into the action, but also for the texts and the actors. In one Witkacy production, Kantor confined his cast to a clothes cupboard. ***

It was during a stay at the seaside where he conducted the waves that Kantor happened upon the concept that would catapult him into world prominence. Out for a walk, he spotted an abandoned one-room wooden school. Peering in through its windows, he saw his own past as a pupil in the Galician shtetl of Wielopole. Where now were the schoolmates with whom he had shared the benches in the lost world of that little town, with a synagogue on one side of its archetypical square and a church on the other? And what relation did Kantor himself, the grown-up artist, have to the uniformed schoolboy he had once been? That moment at the seashore marked the birth of The Dead Class, the seminal play in what Kantor called his "Theatre of Death." Krzysztof Plesniarowicz's The Dead Memory Machine takes Kantor's major works apart and discovers the design that underlays them. Drawing extensively on Kantor's theoretical writings and his own interviews with the artist, Plesniarowicz reconstructs each work and demonstrates that they all share a common circular or spiral structure and a characteristic rhythm. Kantor's episodes start with a static image, like an old photograph (to be precise, one of the small glass negatives used before the triumph of flexible film) that, in many cases, comes from his own childhood. Kantor was always onstage during performances, cajoling, directing, berating, or lamenting the actors. Plesniarowicz shows that Kantor's task, as the theatrical demiurge, was an attempt to bring these old images to life, a task shared by the actors, who were, in a sense, the futile victims of Kantor's endeavor. Resurrection of those images, those memories, is impossible. Yet Kantor makes the actors keep trying over and over. That, in simple terms, is the drama. In The Dead Class, the pupils from the little Galician schoolroom are now old people, still dressed in their uniforms. Furthermore, they carry burdens consisting of Kantor's mannequins of themselves as children. At moments, the child-mannequins alone occupy the school benches; then the old people who were once those children struggle to rise up from beneath them. Kantor, whose only official employment was as a stage designer, broke down the division between actors, stage design, and props. He turned his actors into "bio-objects," attaching them to or imprisoning them in the props, and he also brought props to life and made them actors. Plesniarowicz shows how Kantor summoned his old people, burdened by the children they once were, into a series of processions around the stage. The processions range from the tragic, as in the Hebrew lesson suggesting the loss of so many members of the class in the Holocaust or the heartbreak of the childless woman haunted by the hollow knocking sound of the Mechanical Cradle, to the nonsensical and vaguely suggestive drivel of an old man in the toilet. Each of these processions ends with the "intervention of the cleaning woman"--death--who sweeps the pupils back into their benches. Then it starts all over again. It develops differently each time, but always collapses

back into impossibility. Kantor's later plays reach out to embrace the rituals of his own family background, the pallor of Polish history, the studio from the artist's own youth, and always, in a central role, death. Indeed, in a later play, "Madame de la Morte" comes on stage, a fatal character not unrelated to the great love of Kantor's final years. Plesniarowicz uses diagrams and convincing analysis to show how Kantor kept enriching and adding variations to the basic scheme. The image--the memory--is always there, the motive for action and the burden from which the actors can never disentangle themselves. Yet it can never be brought fully to life. Memory is the stuff of life, yet memories remain stubbornly dead. One of Kantor's final plays includes a photographic studio with an old-fashioned studio camera mounted on a tripod; when the actors are finally in place and ready to be captured for eternity, it suddenly turns out that the camera is in fact a machine gun. Kantor died in Cracow at the age of 75 in 1990. His onstage presence was central to his work, which was always as close to performance art as it was to the conventional understanding of theatre. Therefore, it is no longer performed. For those who witnessed the performances or who watch them today on video, Plesniarowicz's book casts them into an analytical framework with explanatory power. For those coming to Kantor fresh, the book is an adequate starting point for imaginative reconstruction. The performances have turned out to be "ecological art," biodegradable, fading into the Cracow background from which they arose. Or, in their own terms, they are fainter and fainter images, but also part of the burden of Cracow's cultural past, which we can try to bring back to life in our minds, even if we know that the effort is finally futile.

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All material on this page Cracow Letters 2003

Krzysztof Plesniarowicz. The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre of Death. Translated by William Brand. Cracow: Cricoteka, 1994.

The author of the book reviewed here, Krzysztof Plesniarowicz, is professor of theatre at the university in Cracow. He served during the 1990s as director of the Cricoteka, the archive, studio and museum that Kantor established to preserve his heritage. The Cricoteka published this volume in English in 1994; a revised and updated version, including additional biographical material to place the artist more fully in his local context, is forthcoming from Black Mountain Press, the prestigious publishers in Aberyswyth, Wales, who specialize in contemporary theatre.