A family from Wielopole
Not much has remained of Kantor in his Wielopole Skrzyńskie home-town.
Tadeusz was born in 1915, in the old presbytery of a multicultural Polish-Jewish town on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He spent six years in Wielopole, and all that remains to commemorate his presence there are a few priceless lists, manuscripts, documents and photographs placed in a tiny museum. There are some school registers, diplomas and a 19th-century school desk from Pstrągówka primary school. Marian Kantor – Tadeusz's father – was the school’s headmaster, a teacher and a soldier of the 2nd Brigade of the Polish Legion commanded by General Józef Haller. He took part in the September Campaign, but was arrested by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died.
The past echoes at the theatre. Kantor reconstructed the colourful world before the Holocaust and brought back stories about his “dear, absent” relatives: Mother Helena, Uncle Józef (rector of the presbytery where Tadeusz used to live with his mother and sister), Uncle Staś – the Exile, and Grandmother Katarzyna. His father returns as Marian – The Recruit in the touching play Wielopole, Wielopole. A popular poster designed by Kantor presents the Wielopole Skrzyńskie church in a black and white photograph that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Kantor visited Wielopole Skrzyńskie in his student days, and again later, on 15th December, 1983, when a staging of Wielopole, Wielopole took place in the local church. Years later, Kantor recalled:
All of the foreign opinions […] think of me as terribly national […] if Wielopole, that hole next to Rzeszów is understandable in New York. Then excuse me, but all those critics are saying nonsense and I am terribly national. Even terribly provincial.
In the year 1980, the world of Tadeusz Kantor’s childhood was also accessed by German director Michael Kluth, who accompanied Kantor during his difficult, tense and conflict-filled rehearsals for the Wielopole, Wielopole play, presented on German stages as well. The footage is a part of the A Family from Wielopole documentary.
Sean Connery wearing gaberdine and sidelocks. Cricot 2's breakthrough tour of Great Britain
An avalanche of texts, reviews and English-language publicity in the top British titles after the 6-week long tour of the Dead Class play in 1976 helped to spread Kantor’s fame elsewhere – from Mexico and Los Angeles to Shiraz and Tokyo. The Polish genius was compared to Surrealists and Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Craig, Magritte, Artaud, Genet. By the end of the 1970’s, Kantor was already famous all over the world.
The Dead Class, which tells about the impossibility of returning to the past and childhood, was deemed the world’s best theatre play by Newsweek magazine. The play was vigorously discussed in London, Edinburgh, Norwich, Cardiff and every other place visited by the Cricot 2 artists.
“A horrifying Danse Macabre of the 20th century” – a reviewer wrote after the first few shows presented at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was during this event and the staging of Lovelies and Dowdies that Kantor invited some of the audience members, including Sean Connery and Joseph Beuys, to join him on the stage. Richard Demarco, a charismatic Scottish artist, art promoter, influential director of The Fringe and Kantor’s long-time associate, recalled in an interview with Culture.pl:
I regard it is a mistake to consider Kantor simply in terms of theatre. I always remember the day when he received the Rembrandt Prize for painting. I know of no man of theatre who has ever been the recipient of the Rembrandt Prize. He is essentially a visual artist, a superb sculptor and painter. I think it is very sad when people referred to his stage sets and his costumes as theatre props, that’s a profound misunderstanding. Everything he made was an artwork, manifestations of his genius as a visual artist.
It was Demarco who gave Kantor to the world. Thrilled by his artistic vision during their first meeting in Kraków at the beginning of the 1960s, he provided money for the artists’ travel and visa expenses out of his own pocket. In an interview with Aleksandra Kaniewska for Respublica magazine Demarco explained:
I got into debts, I took a mortgage on my home. But I don’t regret it. I always regarded myself as Kantor’s debtor, never the other way around.
“Kantor shows us what we are missing”
He was a man of the world. He referred to avant-garde and it was universal; understandable all over the world. He was charismatic, and his avant-garde alphabet allowed him to connect with the world’s top artistic environments – explained Maciej Nowak in a film about Kantor produced by TVP.
Whatever this is, it’s excellent – critics of The Glasgow Herald wrote – They do use words, in Polish naturally, but they give the impression of being used as a pure sound, rather as paint might be, to express mood rather than meaning.
The press from the Welsh city of Cardiff were also very enthusiastic:
Kantor is evoking a lost world of Europe… The impact of The Dead Class, another unforgettable production, is indeed like communing with a ghostly world, familiar, but farther from us than the moon… Kantor shows us, with a shudder, what we are missing.
On 9th June, 1982, Tadeusz Kantor left for another 3-week long Dead Class tour of Britain.
Paris-Lille-Toulouse: “Hieronymus Bosch described by Hugo and translated by Beckett”
Kantor visited France multiple times; the first time he left for France was in 1947 for his Parisian scholarship. His last visit took place in 1989, a year before his death. Cricot 2 amused French audiences for decades. After the Dead Class and Let the Artists Die shows in 1977, Jean-Claud Piau wrote in the Nord Éclair column:
Hieronymus Bosch described by Hugo and translated by Beckett.
It was during a staging in Théâtre de La Salamandre in Lille that Nat Lilienstein made his recordings of the show for FR3/La S.E.P.T. television. Kantor himself admitted that he would like to create art understood in all languages. How can one save the value of word and share it without translation?
An autonomic theatre, independent of text and literature – this is when one creates a universal language. During a conference in Lille one of the audience members accused me of being against text. I said that a word is not just a sound, but also a meaning. I’m not using texts that need to be recreated on the scene. The text is being composed along with the creation of the play itself. What’s most important is the content. And it is the content that I throw at the audience – said Tadeusz Kantor in an interview for Radio France Internationale.
The scene described by Kantor took place in the Roger Salengro Theatre in Lille, right after the staging of I Shall Never Return, a play that critics and theatrical historians described as the ultimate manifesto of individual theatre. Besides being the director, the scenographer, and the author of the script and photos, this time Kantor also performed as an actor. He told stories about himself, about his life and work. Why? As he explained at the RFI:
I was triggered by the problem of consumerism, the civilization of the masses, which I am very much against. Art, theatre, politics, wars, economy, communication – everything is becoming mass, while an individual, a private person, becomes endangered, despite freedom and democracy. I do not wish to be an apostle or a missionary – these are my true feelings. I accentuate them by introducing the “I”, my life that withstands the threat of mass culture. The more something bothers me, the stronger I become – he added.
During his last stay in France, Kantor painted some of his famous pieces, including My Last Cigarette prepared for an exhibition at the Parisian Galerie de France. In 1989, Tadeusz Kantor became a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The French première of Kantor’s last play, Today is My Birthday, took place in 1991 in Toulouse after the artist’s death.