Everything you always wanted to know about Tadeusz Kantor
Guests: Katarzyna Fazan, Anna Róża Burzyńska, Marta Bryś, Natalia Zarzecka, Tomasz Pietrucha Moderator: Octavian Saiu The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Tadeusz Kantor’s most famous performance, The Dead Class. This production initiated a new stage in Kantor’s theatrical work -- the Theatre of Death -- which had a profound influence on postdramatic theatre worldwide. It demonstrated, among other things, how theatre can address trauma and difficult memory. Tadeusz Kantor, alongside another Polish director, Jerzy Grotowski, is recognized as one of the most important figures in 20th-century theatre. However, unlike Grotowski, whose work developed into a distinct methodology, Kantor created a theatre that remains singular and resistant to direct continuation. To fully grasp the power of his creative output, multiple individual perspectives are necessary.
The guests of this special conference dedicated to the artist will explore the phenomenon of his most iconic work and highlight examples from contemporary theatre in which the ideological or formal influence of the Polish director can be observed. In the context of the ongoing exhibition at the Brukenthal Museum, Costume/Sculpture/Body. Kantor’s Theatrical Objects, the discussion will also focus on the role of costume and the figure of the actor, as well as the mannequins that served as partners to the living performers in many productions of the Cricot 2 Theatre. With contributions from Cricoteka -- the institution dedicated to the artist -- the process of preserving Kantor’s legacy will be presented, encompassing not only the material heritage, through the care of Cricot 2 artefacts, but also the human legacy, embodied by the actors left behind after Kantor’s death.
Katarzyna Fazan – Kantor’s Costume: A Shell for an Actor’s Metamorphosis Anna Róża Burzyńska – The Influence of Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre on World Theatre Marta Bryś – The Dead Class by Tadeusz Kantor and the Theatre of Death Natalia Zarzecka – The Actors of the Cricot 2 Theatre Tomasz Pietrucha – Cricoteka as a Living Archive of Cricot 2 Theatre
Speaker biographies
Marta Bryś – PhD in the Humanities, graduate in Theatre Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Editor of Didaskalia. The Theatre Gazette and lecturer at the Acting Department of the Stanisław Wyspiański Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. In 2020, she published the book The Experience of Postmemory in Theatre. She served as a juror in the Polish Contemporary Play Staging Competition organized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2014–2015 and 2016–2017). She collaborates with various institutions and organizations as a curator and producer (e.g., Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences, POP-UP Theatre, Krakow Art Salon, CARGO by Marek Chlanda at Cricoteka). In 2025, her book Biography of an Institution, about the acting ensemble and the Ester Rachel and Ida Kamińska Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, will be published.
Anna R. Burzyńska – Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Drama of the Jagiellonian University, literary scholar and theatre researcher. In the academic year 2022/2023, she was a visiting research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Her research interests focus on Polish and German drama from the 19th century to the present, the intersections of science history and literature, contemporary European theatre, radio drama, and music in theatre. She has also worked as a critic and was an editor of Didaskalia. The Theatre Gazette from 2000 to 2024. As a curator, she has collaborated with the Goethe-Institut in Kraków and Cricoteka, and as a dramaturg, she has worked with Lars Jan, Stefan Kaegi, and Barbara Wysocka. She is the creator and long-time curator of Cricoteka’s “Playing with Kantor” project.
Katarzyna Fazan is Professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the Jagiellonian University and at the Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Teatr/Konstelacje series. She specializes in literature and theatre of the modernist period and works on contemporary visual arts and stage design. Her book publications include Projekty intymnego teatru śmierci: Wyspiański–Leśmian–Kantor (2009), Kantor: Nie/Obecność (2019), English edition Kantor. Non/Presence (2025), Pasaże scenografii: Praskie Quadriennale 1999-2019 (2022) with Anna R. Burzyńska and Marta Bryś (eds.), Dziś Tadeusz Kantor! Metamorfozy śmierci, pamięci i obecności (2014); English edition: Tadeusz Kantor Today: Metamorphoses of Death, Memory and Presence, (2014). She also co-edited A History of Polish Theatre (2022) with Bryce Lease and Michał Kobiałka. She is a president of Cricoteka’s Program Board.
Tomasz Pietrucha – Assistant Curator in the Archives and Library Collections Department at the Tadeusz Kantor Museum. He is responsible for managing Cricoteka’s collections and acquiring new artefacts. He is the author of lectures and presentations on Tadeusz Kantor and his museum and has curated exhibitions of Cricoteka’s collection.
Natalia Zarzecka – Director of Cricoteka since 2004. In 2006, she initiated efforts to build a new headquarters for the institution, which opened on September 12, 2014. She co-curated exhibitions such as An Impossible Journey: The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich and Tadeusz Kantor. Où sont les neiges d’antan at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, as well as numerous projects at Cricoteka’s venue. She is the author of texts and presentations on Kantor’s work and the history of Cricoteka for exhibition catalogues, publications, symposia, and conferences.
Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990). An avant-garde artist, painter, draughtsman, art theoretician, stage designer and director, author of happenings, a prominent 20th century theatre reformer, one of the most renowned artists on the Polish art scene. Between 1934 and 1939, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. During the German occupation he founded the experimental Underground Independent Theatre, where he staged clandestine productions of Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna (1943) and Stanisław Wyspiański's The Return of Odysseus (1944). Instrumental in forming the Young Artists' Group, a hub for Kraków's avant-gardists. In 1948, he co-organised the 1st Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków, where he exhibited his metaphorical paintings. From the mid-1940s to the mid-70s, he designed sets and costumes for professional theatres. In the period 1950-1954, in protest against the socrealist doctrine, Kantor withdrew from the official art circuit. In 1955, drawing on the tradition of the pre-war Cricot the Artists' Theatre, together with Maria Jarema and Kazimierz Mikulski, he founded the Cricot 2 Theatre. In 1957, with a group of artists, he re-activated the Kraków Group. As part of the Cricot 2 Theatre, where he based performances on plays by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and later on his own texts, he created a theatre laboratory, progressing from the Autonomous Theatre (The Cuttlefish,1956), through the Informel Theatre (The Country House,1961) to the Zero Theatre (The Madman and the Nun,1963), the Happening Theatre (The Water Hen,1967) and the Impossible Theatre (Lovelies and Dowdies,1973), culminating in the Theatre of Death (1975). Kantor's painting was inspired by the contemporary art that he came into contact with during his numerous journeys abroad, in particular in Paris and New York; thus, his paintings experimented with informel, Dadaism and conceptual art.
In the early 1960s, Kantor gave up on depicting reality in any form and concentrated on his new concept: emballages (wrapping). Starting in 1965, he embarked on a series of artistic actions and happenings (such as The Anatomy Lesson after Rembrandt, 1968), working closely with the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.
In 1975, he published the manifesto of his Theatre of Death; its corollary was his world-acclaimed production The Dead Class, made in 1975. It is widely considered a masterpiece of the theatrical art of the 20th century. With this production, Kantor embarked on the last stage of his theatrical oeuvre. Kantor used the concept of death in order that the theatre could once mare evoke feelings. Death or even thinking about death has mare emotional impact than those stemming from the awareness of life, Isabel Tejeda observed in the catalogue of the exhibition of The Dead Class.
This is how, in his text School Class, Tadeusz Kantor described the moment that the idea of the production came to him:
The year is 1971 or 72. Seaside. In a small village. Almost a hamlet. A single street. Small, poor, single-storey buildings. One is probably the most shabby of all: the school. It was summer and the summer holidays. The school was empty and abandoned. It had just one classroom. You could look inside through the dusty panes of the two abject windows, placed low down, just above the level of the pavement. This gave the impression that the school had sunk below the street level. I glued my face to the window pane. I stared for a long time into the dark, murky depths of my memory. Once more, I was a small boy, with my inky fingers, wetted with spit, turning the pages of the reading primer; the grain of the floor had been warn away with constant scrubbing and the bare feet of the country lads suited the floor very well. Whitewashed walls, render crumbling at the bottom, on the wall - a black cross.
During the 1980s, the Cricot 2 Theatre staged such well-known productions as Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985) and I Shall Never Return (1988). In 1990 Kantor produced his ultimate performance Today Is My Birthday but did not live to see it on stage. The production was staged by the Cricot 2 Theatre posthumously. Event in English, with translation into Romanian Poland
