Metamorphosis – The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor

The use of the word metamorphosis in the title of this roundtable refers to the changes that took place in the various periods of Kantor’s career as an artist, shifts that are on display in the exhibition, ranging from happenings to his notion of a theatre of death, but it is also intended to be understood as an invitation to the participations in the discussion to approach the various questions that will be raised from an array of perspectives. The primary inspiration for Kantor’s productions was painting, the series of drawings which were the first visual expressions of objects, motifs, literary experiences, and reminiscences “accidentally” stumbled upon. This was followed by rehearsals in which these images and visions were given form in flesh and blood and in objets d’art. Then came the texts, which sometimes were selected by Kantor and sometimes were improvised by the actors. The complete score of a production, the musical choreography, came into being only as the product of these stages, as did the manifesto, which, as a summary of the production, adhered to the poetics of the Avant-Garde and offered a kind of theoretical self-interpretation of the work.

• Participants: Béatrice Picon-Vallin (a French scholar of Tadeusz Kantor and the Russian Avant-Garde), Katarzyna Fazan (a member of the faculty at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the author of a monograph on Kantor), Imre Katona (director and Hungarian translator of “The Milano Lessons”), László Beke (art historian, publisher of the Hungarian book Halálszínház [Theatre of Death]), Natalia Zarzecka (director of the new Cricoteka Museum) and Justyna Michalik (curator of the Kantor exhibition).

• The roundtable will be organized together with Tadeusz Kantor.

(14 March 2016)