and devalued in the commercial theatre around him, making theatre itself impotent. He longed to restore the potency of that border, to establish a truly impenetrable plane. But the traditional methods theatre offered for this – proscenium, pit, curtain – had become ineffective by their conventionality. They had lost their ability to “shock.” Kantor needed to confront the audience with an undeniable divider. To him, the only remaining impassable barrier was Death:
let us establish then the limits of that boundary, which has the name of THE CONDITION OF DEATH,
For it represents the most extreme point of reference No longer threatened by the conformity of
the CONDITION OF AN ARTIST AND ART.
…this specific relationship, which is terrifying
and at the same time compelling,
this relationship of the living to the dead… (FON 237)
Kantor’s Theatre of Death equated the division between spectators and performance with the separation of the living from the dead. On one side sat the living audience. Everything that took place on the other side, animate actors, inanimate props, even Kantor himself when he would occupy the stage space, fell into the category of the dead. The uneasy response his performance generated was the result of seeing this dead realm in action – not unlike the
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repulsive fascination inspired by puppets, automatons, and even zombies – the very essence of the uncanny in performance.
Kantor defined this theatre by virtue of a specific spatial designation. The most important element – the infinite boundary – represented the climax of Kantor’s inquiry into the workings of space and matter, an obsession of his from the beginning of his theatrical practice. In his first method, which he called “Annexing Reality,” Kantor took his productions outside of the theatre building and off the stage into spaces with their own meanings and purposes. The corresponding performance to this technique, The Return of Odysseus, was performed in a bombed out room ravaged and stained by the Second World War.108 This decision might seem like a rejection of the very boundary Kantor would later declare
necessary for his Theatre of Death, but what Kantor was rejecting was not the division between spectator and spectacle, but rather, the artificial and impotent division imposed by the
conventional theatre.109
The term “Annexing Reality” demonstrates Kantor’s commitment to replace
comfortable illusion with the harshness of reality itself. The integration of performance and
108"The play, The Return of Odysseus, by Polish playwright and artist Stanisław Wyspiański is a retelling of the last portion of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Wyspiański’s version emphasizes Odysseus’ guilt, and ends with him throwing himself off a cliff. The 1944 production marks one of the last times Kantor would create a performance that so directly enacted a play-text. In the years that followed, he would
increasingly abstract, fragment and distort the plays he worked with, if not abandon the need for such a text altogether. Even in this production however, Kantor’s immersion of the
performance in the actual reality of Nazi occupied Poland transformed the text. He wrote that
“Odysseus refused categorically to be only an image” (FON 41). In this real room, it was necessary that he become a real soldier returning from this very real war.""
109"Of course, it must also be acknowledged that the decision to move outside the theatre was in part, a necessity. The Return of Odysseus was created in 1944, during the Nazi occupation, so the only place to perform such seditious work was in secret. But for Kantor, the practical consideration (though a matter of life and death) was soon overshadowed by the aesthetic and philosophical contribution gained by performing in this “real” space.""
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real life is of course suggestive of another theatrical innovation – the “Happening.” Taking place in 1944, The Return of Odysseus actually preceded the time period of the Happening, at least as it most often understood as the movement led by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. During a trip to the US in 1965, Kantor would in fact meet Kaprow and discover his Happenings in person and recognize their connection to his own practice.110 After this encounter, he would go on to stage several more overt “Happenings” of his own, but he also began to use the term retroactively to describe his earlier productions (JTOS 233). Kaprow’s main goal in the Happening was that “the line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible” (Kaprow 62), an idea which clearly cohered with Kantor’s concept of Annexing Reality.
While initially inspired by Kaprow’s work and experimenting with several
“Happenings” of his own, Kantor eventually felt the need to move in a different direction. He was skeptical of any theatrical doctrine not of his own invention, especially so as it became more broadly accepted. Kantor began to speak of the Happening as “almost a museum piece”
and “impotent” (JTOS 90).111 What Kantor began to resist most about the Happening was the coherence it established between performance and audience. He felt the need to establish action in “two directions: towards the actors and towards the audience” (JTOS 100).112
110"“Kantor brought the term ‘happening’ and, as he said, ‘the whole mythology of that phenomenon’ back from the United States. But not the method, for the definition of
happening could in fact be applied to what he had already been doing” (Pleśniarowicz 98)."
111"Such critiques did not seem to disturb Kaprow or other creators of Happenings. Kaprow noted in 1966 that “The end of the Happenings has been announced regularly since 1958” and yet they kept happening (59). Part of the power of these events was actually their resistance to commoditization and popularization; so the more public attention tried to condemn the activity, the more meaningful it could be for the select few who would participate. See Kaprow 59-65.""
112 Though he did not overtly say so, I suspect that Kantor’s frustration with the “happening”
also stemmed from its limitations with regards to time and space. In any theatrical
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Even before he made the conscious decision to move away from the Happening as a method, Kantor’s use of reality was distinct, in a way that laid the groundwork for the Theatre of Death. The Return of Odysseus confronted the audience with something inextricable from their own reality, something inherently “similar.” But similar was decidedly not equal: there was still and already a certain distance – that of the drama of Odysseus, playing out within this space. Though he aggressively engaged with “reality” in this production, the performance was still divided from that reality. It was the same, but different – “deceptively similar.” He was already negotiating the tension between familiar and foreign that would become essential in his Theatre of Death.
Kantor’s “last discovery,” was as much the recognition of what tied all of his previous theories together as a discovery in and of itself. Looking back to The Return of Odysseus he noted:
The return of Odysseus established a precedent and a prototype for all the later characters of my theatre. There were many of them. The whole procession that came out many productions and dramas – from the realm of FICTION. All were “dead,” all were returning in to the world of the living, into our world, into the present. This contradiction of death-life perfectly corresponded to the opposition between fiction-reality. (FON 350)
Kantor appreciated tension and dissonance in all things. Each side of the paradox was
dependent upon the other – death can only be understood through life, fiction only presented through reality. The Happening, which Kaprow once described as “Doing life, consciously”
performance, there are at least two temporalities at work – the real time of the audience, and the show time of the performance. Kantor manipulated space to overlay even more forms of time into his productions – he made time submit to his unique spatiality. In creating the various doubles of Today is My Birthday, Kantor expressed his sense that present time
“impoverishes” the full complexity of a self. By conflating the audience with the performance, Happenings reduce the temporal potential of theatre to a single time, the present. (“Whatever is to happen should do so in its natural time” Kaprow 63). Happenings become, to a certain extent, an art form ruled by time. Kantor’s theatre served a different master – the rule of space."
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(195), provided only one side of this necessary duality. Kantor’s own Theatre could never be complete without the opposing presence of death.
Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, director of the Cricoteka and author of the first full-length book on Kantor’s Theatre of Death writes, “For Kantor, the stage – that Realm of Fiction – turned out long before the definition of the Theatre of Death to be a country of the dead”
(Pleśniarowicz 43). It was this affinity for the dead that created the powerful uncanny
response in his theatre. Kantor’s necromania manifested in several interconnected techniques, which can be observed as the primary methods of uncanny performance. He brought past and present into dialectical tension in a single complex space. He created an unusually symbiotic treatment of bodies and objects on stage, most overtly expressed in his use of the figure of the mannequin (the quintessential body-object). All these methods can best be understood as in service to his unique conception of memory: a process of spatialization by which Kantor revealed memory’s physical presence, in things, in our bodies, in the space all around us. His Theatre of Death was at all times an engagement with living memory, played out in the self-aware sentient space of the stage. "
"
Reviving The Dead Class – An approach
The first production of Kantor’s “Theater of Death” was The Dead Class. This iconic production can still be experienced through recordings and film versions, images, countless descriptions, and Kantor’s own extensive writings about it, both during its creation and in his reflections that came after. By gathering together these vestigial traces, each spectator today must reconstruct their own version of the original – an appropriate act of resuscitation.
Though any act analysis of a non-current production will require a similar method, Kantor made a point of preparing his work for just such future acts of reconstruction. Recognizing
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the impossibility of accurately preserving the production as it was viewed live, he opted for a variety of alternate methods of preservation. He had his productions filmed and
photographed, wrote about them extensively himself, and held on to many of the key objects and materials. He even founded a center for the preservation of his work, called Cricoteka, in Kraków in 1980, to function as a “Living archives.”113 He fully intended for his productions to metamorphose from the original performances into this alternate form of existence.
Below, I offer a version of my own re-creation, drawn primarily from the film
recording made in 1976 by Andrejz Wajda, supplemented with clips available on the internet (mostly taken from a performance in 1989 at the Théatre National de Chaillot). These two performances are further enhanced by Kantor’s own writing, the 1991 documentary film, The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, and descriptions by audience members including Kantor’s two main investigators, Kobialka and Pleśniarowicz. From these various sources, I distill a singular version, and describe it in a series of vignettes offered below. To a certain extent, I treat these fragments of the Dead Class as objects themselves, shards of an experience that cannot
authentically be re-presented, but that retain a certain inherent integrity nevertheless. This method is part of my argument – that however suggestive or informative the theory of the production may be, the performance is also capable of speaking for itself. The excerpts included are linked to the ideas I develop in tandem, but they should not be viewed as straightforward examples. Rather, these snippets of the performance make their own
assertions, and question as much as they support the ideas moving forwards. These fragments are neither strictly chronological, nor comprehensive, but that does not prevent their effective portrayal of the production as an experience. In fact, a single chronology would not reflect Kantor’s unique appreciation for the fluidity of time. His temporality was many things –
113"www.cricoteka.pl"
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cyclical, horizontal, recursive, but a simple forward progression perhaps least of all. Instead I draw these episodes together architecturally, symbiotically, in relation to the ideas that they inspire. The very movement into and out of the recalled space of the production is itself a tribute to the mechanism of Kantor’s unusual spatiality.
Kantor envisioned The Dead Class as a schoolroom inhabited not by ordinary students, but by their ghosts. It was not a play, not in any recognizable sense. More accurately, it was a place – a “desolate and forgotten storage-room” of childhood (FON 243) marked in and through time. The inhabitants of this room, the ‘students’, hovered in some liminal temporal realm on the very threshold of death. They are simultaneously ancient and young, dead and dying. They struggle to reinhabit the space of their memory, engaging in a series of scenes and rituals, cycles and repetitive actions. This fruitless and futile effort is in fact its own
fulfillment. Even as it performs resurrection, the production enacts the impossibility of bringing the dead back to life.
The Dead Class – A room, alive
!
! First there is the room – a ruin of a classroom, really a corner of a room, separated off from the larger space on two sides by worn and weathered ropes. The rope designates a limit, a boundary for both the audience and the performers. It keeps the audience out, but equally, it keeps the performers within. The sort of existence owned by those on one side of the rope is not the same as those on the other.
Five wooden pews – the students’ desks – form a kind of nucleus. The wood is old, older than the desks themselves. Any scribblings that their former occupants may have carved into the surface now merge with the grooves and pockmarks of time, like ripples reverberating through water but inexplicably flash frozen. At the front of the classroom is a lectern/latrine. A simple box, enclosed on three sides, but open at the back. It serves occasionally as a pulpit, but more often as the classroom’s lavatory.
The room already has three occupants. Kantor leans against the lectern/latrine, hiding his face with his hand, appearing already somewhat exhausted by the performance that has barely begun. Just behind the latrine and partially obscured by it, an androgynous figure in a long black dress and dumpy heels stands motionless, facing away from the audience. The cleaning woman.114 On the opposite side of the classroom, a
114"Kantor frequently ignored gender, age and appearance when casting, and often selected his actors before he knew the roles they would be playing. The kind of actor was more important than any resemblance to a particular character. In fact, the tension created by a
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man is seated with a moldy newspaper in his lap. He is likewise completely still. It is unclear if either of these figures is actually alive. There is something false about the way the man holds his paper – under his hands, rather than in them, that suggests that he, at least, is not human. Perhaps she is not either.
In the corner closest to the audience, moldy and rotting books are piled in a heap. They are damp and floppy, heavy with the weight of long passages of time.
This room and its props are the descendants of one of Kantor’s earliest “discoveries”:
the importance of the “poor object.” Related to his manifesto on “Annexing Reality,” this discovery was also about valuing reality over representation. Kantor chose to reject “artistic”
objects – props – and to replace these with “The real object wrenched from reality” (FON 113). The act of replacing the art object with the undeniably real initially seems to be
derivative of Dada, which likewise valorized ordinary everyday objects: it summons memories of Duchamp’s Fountain – a urinal signed and displayed as art. Kantor had great respect for Dada’s innovation and refusal of convention. But he claimed to have come into contact with Dada belatedly, in the 1960’s, and only then to have recognized a “similar pattern of artistic
‘conduct’” in his own work (JTOS 258). He saw in Dada a like-minded spirit of revolt and protest: “I realized that my protest of 1944 was the protest of Dada in 1914,” but with one important distinction: Kantor’s approach “contained… a dose of LYRICAL tone and (heaven forbid!) EMOTIONS, which were foreign to dada” (JTOS 260).
Grabbing up the poor object was, for Kantor, more than just an act of rebellion. It was also a validation, a summoning of an inherent power within the object itself. In The Return of Odysseus, he chose objects like a “board” and “a gun barrel” and treated them as independent authorities. But he selected not just any “board” or “gun”: the board was rotten, the gun-barrel
contradiction in age or gender greatly appealed to Kantor’s taste for dissonance. The role of the Cleaning Woman was actually played by a middle-aged man, the Old Man in the WC was an older woman, and so on. The character’s gender, to the extent that it mattered, would be revealed through costumes and props. For the sake of simplicity, I default to pronouns appropriate to the character, rather than the actual gender of the actor.""
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rusty. Their poverty was essential: “This condition of being ‘poor’ disclosed the object’s deeply hidden objectness” (FON 113). They presented reality, but it was specifically an independent reality – reality distinct from whatever purpose or interpretation Kantor or another human might try to assign to it. The objects and spaces of Kantor’s theatre declared, by virtue of their age and abuse, their own inherent existence.
Kantor’s embrace of the “poor” will, for many, inevitably evoke director Jerzy
Grotowski, and his concept of “poor theatre.” Grotowski’s adoption of this same term became one of several causes for antipathy between them. In her 2012 comparison of these two titans of 20th century Polish theatre, Magda Romanska argues that the verbal connection between them is misleading. Like Kantor, Grotowski believed that poverty in theatre “revealed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of the art-form” (Grotowski 21). But this is where any similarity between them ends. Romanska notes that in Polish, each artist used a subtly but significantly different word for their
approach that English translation reduces to the same term: “poor”. Grotowski used the word
“ubogi” which translates as “poor means”: poor as in simple, rather than extravagant or lavish.
Kantor used the adjective “biedny” which “denotes both material poverty and a psychological condition of complete destitution, loneliness, and loss” – poverty with an attached affective component (Romanska 12). This, in part, helps to explain why they arrived at entirely
Kantor used the adjective “biedny” which “denotes both material poverty and a psychological condition of complete destitution, loneliness, and loss” – poverty with an attached affective component (Romanska 12). This, in part, helps to explain why they arrived at entirely