Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor

Translation, prologue and notes: Elka Fediuk

México, 2001
264 p.

These are the documentary records made by Miklaszewski —interviews and conversations, chronicles, criticisms, film scripts— which keep a record of the creative process and the theoretical formulations of Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990). It focuses specifically on the plays made by the Polish theater master together with his group, Cricot 2 (founded with an official grant in 1955 in a basement of the Krzystofory Galery in Krakow). Many of these plays were performed successfully around the world: Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes (1973); The Dead Class (1975); Wielpole, Wielpole (1980); Let the Artists Die! (1985); Love and Death Machine (1987); his last play, I Shall Never Return; and the preparation of Today is my Birthday, a play he could not stage. In parallel, it also records how Cricot 2 continued up until 1997 without Kantor. The following manifestos are reviewed: Informal Theater, Clandestine Theater, Emballage, Zero Theater, Happenings Theater, Happening Cricotage, Autonomous Theater, Komplexes Theater, Impossible Theater, Theater of Death. Kantor accompanied, analyzed and interpreted his own work with such manifestos starting from the pre-war avant-garde ideals (constructivism, and the experiments and achievements of the futuristic-dadaistic revolution, until the deepening in the terror of “the lowest rank reality”). These manifestos are reviewed by using an aesthetic philosophy that found - in the affirmation of the personalized, individualist and autonomous dimension of his theater - its path to survive and surpass the dark captive nights - Hitler’s (1939-1945) and the Soviet’s (1945-1990) - that subdued Poland for more than half a century. It includes photos of the plays, Kantor’s theatrical chronology, an index of names, and a prologue by Elka Fediuk, who was the translator of the book.