Tadeusz Kantor was born in 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, in the province of Tarnów. He died in 1990 in Kraków. The founder of the Cricot 2 theatre was also a stage director, creator of happenings, painter, set designer, writer, art theoretician, actor in his own productions and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
He was a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic and an ironic conceptualist. These are only a few of his many incarnations. Apart from that, Kantor was a tireless animator of artistic life in post-war Poland; one could even say he was one of its chief motivating forces. Kantor staged his first productions - Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna and Stanisław Wyspiański's The Return of Odysseus with an underground theatre company that gave performances in private homes.
His early productions, based on the plays of Stanisław Wyspiański and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (The Madman and the Nun, 1963, and Dandies and Frumps,1972) are held in high esteem and helped popularise these plays, which are generally considered to be difficult. However, Kantor only gained international recognition with his later productions, many of which were inspired by the prose of Bruno Schulz. Remarkably, Kantor made reference to his own biography through these plays, reaching into the private archive of his memory (a theatrical form known as the Theatre of Death, which includes productions such as The Dead Class (1975), Where are Yesterday's Snows? (1979), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Vanish (1985), I Shall Never Return Here (1988) and Today is My Birthday (1991).