Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The Polish artist and director Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) began his theatre career in Nazi-occupied Kraków, during World War II, and broke to international fame, from 1975, with the final ‘Theatre of Death’ phase of his Kraków-based Cricot 2 Theatre. Not surprisingly, much of Kantor scholarship has centered on themes like trauma and violence, or, regarding his ‘bio-objects’ and other torturous stage contraptions, his pre-posthuman destabilization of the hierarchy between human being and object. Especially in the 1980s, however, Kantor would also increasingly emphasize his “need to question and protest” – for his “poor room on stage” to “defend itself” against the forces of arbitrary history: the “official History” of mass ideologies, wars, and crimes. The purpose of this paper is read the social implications of Kantor’s work against the grain of tradition, moving the focus from dark despair toward dignity and resistance. Granted, his performances kept repeating episodes of trauma and discipline, but just as often, they would then break into a whirlwind of dance, music, and childlike antics. Against the official history that he so despised, Kantor also staged a people’s history of common types in common rooms, feeding on the commons of memory and imagination. With the radical political theorists Max Haiven and David Graeber, this paper places his work within the social/thematic/cognitive dualities of history and memory, violence and imagination, metaphor and metonymy – the grand implication being that perhaps, a ‘pre-humanist’ hope of social renewal is still there to be found even amid its apparent ruin.