Contested Pasts and the Ethics of Remembrance in Tadeusz Kantor’s “Theatre of Death”

Abstract

“To say of Kantor that he is among Poland’s most outstanding artists of the second half of the twentieth century is to say very little,” states Jaroslaw Suchan, curator of the exhibition “Tadeusz Kantor — Impossible” (qtd. in Kitowska-Lysiak, 2002: 3). “Kantor is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys was to German art, what Andy Warhol was to American art,” continues Suchan. “He created a unique strain of theatre, was an active participant in the revolutions of the neoavant-garde, 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” (ibid.: 3).¹ While he was certainly one of Poland’s foremost theatre artists of the second half of the twentieth century, as Suchan’s praise suggests, Kantor theatrical oeuvre also undoubtedly left a deep and lasting imprint on theatre and performance arts in Europe and wider.