Page 32 - Studio-International-January-1974

at conventional, established and official theatre.
TADEUSZ KANTOR Kantor said 'The Cricot 2 theatre incessantly
AND HIS 'CRICOT 2' undermines the universal principles of the
institutional organization of official theatres. . . .
THEATRE The artificial and so rigorous separation into
Tadeusz Kantor, the most outstanding work and result, into rehearsal and spectacle is
representative of Poland's artistic avant garde abolished. . . . The Cricot theatre is not an
after World War II, concentrates in his institution functioning regularly. . . . The
activities mainly on painting and the theatre. Cricot company includes professional actors,
He often expresses his ideas in manifestoes and non-professionals and ordinary people taken
theoretical works delivered in the form of right from the street, whose part on the stage
lectures or published in print. However the coincides in some sense with their lives. . . .
forms of art, along with the systems of ideas Here is a theatre company wandering in time,
which define them, resulting in their evolution from place to place, a medley of people and
or disintegration, have always been only a objects, an unusual and shocking train, all
starting point for the artist. The basic motif of professions mercilessly mixed, an agglomeration
Kantor's activities is the concept of total art of objects which are spitefully and absurdly
which ought to 'integrate with total reality and deprived of their ordinary functions : people's
be part of it at any time and at any social level'. names mix up with their parts and nobody
A total activity has nothing in common with knows which of them is more real. . .
formalistic tendencies towards the integration The structure of the Cricot theatre and its
of the various branches of art; neither should ovelies and Dowdies 1973 Cracow company has always been the same. Within the
it be placed on the so-called 'interdisciplinary' eighteen years of its ephemeral existence the
level.The reality in art cannot be transferred; these two media are often convergent, although Cricot 2 theatre has given six productions. They
neither can it be interpreted. It can be rejected he does not transfer forms or experiments from are usually presentations of dramatic pieces
or treated as a 'ready-made', 'pre-existing' the one art into the other. Kantor's first by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz ((1885-1939),
reality of its kind. Thus Kantor deprives it of fundamental statement about the theatre is 'the who, during the period between the First and
its aesthetic function by exceeding and Cricot theatre is a theatre of concrete reality and the second World Wars, was the author of
undermining the existing status of the arts, not the art of stage illusion'. It has been like more than thirty dramas, a revelation in the
especially painting and the theatre, with their this from its beginnings in 1956 and since its literary world of playwrights and the originator
established and commercial structures, and on earliest days when Kantor founded a of precursory artistic ideas and philosophical
the gther hand he attempts to remove the `conspiracy' theatre in Cracow, during the concepts; he was also a painter and a writer and
practical and vital functions from the annexed Nazi occupation in 1943. There he would is only now being assimilated into European
elements of the ready-made reality, making it point out that 'the reality on the stage should culture. The fact that Kantor continues staging
purposeless and isolated through the artistic become a reality as definite as the audience'. plays by Witkiewicz does not have any very
process. The dadaistic origin of such a process So the drama was not presented on the stage important significance for his own concept of
forms only a base, from which the individual but it 'came into being and grew before the the theatre. Neither is it a sign of the accepted
Polish artist can penetrate the sphere of moder eyes of the spectator'. The audience, in turn, consistency of the repertoire. Kantor studied
art and reality. The powerful conflicts which `does not only look at a dramatic masterpiece Witkiewicz's works for many years, and
give rise to this activity, the chances it takes, the but takes full responsibility for entering the understood them well; Witkiewicz is his
importance of the problems it tackles and the theatre'. Thus for Kantor the scenic content was intellectually recognized partner in the theatre;
facts it creates, all these place it in the from the very beginning something different but Witkiewicz's works do not describe the
mainstream of present-day thinking. from the dramatic content. The first spectacles essential form and development of the Cricot 2
Kantor's experiences in painting and the of the Cricot 2 theatre in the fifties had the theatre. These ideas are the achievement of an
theatre are parallel. The artist's ideas realized i force of an explosion and were a blow directed artist who has radically analysed the position of