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A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990
Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, is widely recognized as one of the most important theatre artists of this century. Critics have ranked him with such influential directors as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Grotowski. Known in the United States primarily for his visually stunning productions, he is also highly regarded throughout Europe for his theoretically adventurous writings. Michal Kobialka, whom Kantor authorized to translate his work, provides us with the first collection of Kantor's essays in English, together with his analysis of the corpus of Kantor's work, both written and staged.
- GenresTheatre
456 pages, Paperback
First published July 3, 1993
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About the author
Tadeusz Kantor
53 books7 followersTadeusz Kantor was a Polish painter, assemblage and Happenings artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad. Laureate of Witkacy Prize – Critics' Circle Award (1989).
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 17, 2022
Is thatre the space for staging representation? Does it re-present anything at all? Or might its repetitions, its rehearsals (repetitions in the French) and its production, present or let appear what has never been able to appear in reality - that is, the presentation of appearance itself, in the appearance of reality from its unseeable side, through memory and death made to appear?
Kantor's theatre opened the future for theatre by questioning theatre in the very work of unworking "the theatre," displacing it in placing it before itself, in its double which is staged in place of, and in the place of, the theatre. And yet this theatre to come shall never bear the name of Kantor - for with his death his memory has been given wholly over to that other side, to forgetting, never to be repeated - Kantor's theatre cannot be staged without Kantor, without his haunting presence on the stage, conducting the memories in their (re)birth and their dying return. The future came to the past, but it will never return to the present - perhaps it may inform an-other future, unforeseeable in its coming, but never in the name of Kantor. His room of memory, of imagination, has been closed, committed to memory and its embrace with forgetting.
This book, then, collecting and translating most of Kantor's key writings on the theatre, can serve us, in a sense, as a found object, or even, perhaps, a mannequin at the threshold of the ideas liminally marking the space of transition between life and death which we call "art." It can act, (re)enacting, the word, in the repetition of what Kantor had attempted to stage and then reflect in writing, the staging reflecting the writing which would then be reflected (upon) in further writing, informing further staging, ad infinitum. This mise en abyme is not of representation, but its shattering - it exposes the abyss of the threshold, uncorssable and yet always already crossed, of the mirror, the image, at once binding and dividing life and death, reality and art, as intertwined and interpenetrating movements in perpetual struggle and repetition, in the act of appearance, where memory and life collide with forgetting and death. "Further on, nothing..." this, and only this, and yet always further, as the nothing unveils itself in refusing to appear in the letting appear of something which is fated to eventually return to nothing, before, perhaps, returning again. Like a dream, a memory. Or, perhaps, like a play. Like life?
Kantor's theatre opened the future for theatre by questioning theatre in the very work of unworking "the theatre," displacing it in placing it before itself, in its double which is staged in place of, and in the place of, the theatre. And yet this theatre to come shall never bear the name of Kantor - for with his death his memory has been given wholly over to that other side, to forgetting, never to be repeated - Kantor's theatre cannot be staged without Kantor, without his haunting presence on the stage, conducting the memories in their (re)birth and their dying return. The future came to the past, but it will never return to the present - perhaps it may inform an-other future, unforeseeable in its coming, but never in the name of Kantor. His room of memory, of imagination, has been closed, committed to memory and its embrace with forgetting.
This book, then, collecting and translating most of Kantor's key writings on the theatre, can serve us, in a sense, as a found object, or even, perhaps, a mannequin at the threshold of the ideas liminally marking the space of transition between life and death which we call "art." It can act, (re)enacting, the word, in the repetition of what Kantor had attempted to stage and then reflect in writing, the staging reflecting the writing which would then be reflected (upon) in further writing, informing further staging, ad infinitum. This mise en abyme is not of representation, but its shattering - it exposes the abyss of the threshold, uncorssable and yet always already crossed, of the mirror, the image, at once binding and dividing life and death, reality and art, as intertwined and interpenetrating movements in perpetual struggle and repetition, in the act of appearance, where memory and life collide with forgetting and death. "Further on, nothing..." this, and only this, and yet always further, as the nothing unveils itself in refusing to appear in the letting appear of something which is fated to eventually return to nothing, before, perhaps, returning again. Like a dream, a memory. Or, perhaps, like a play. Like life?
February 14, 2023
Amazing!
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May 13, 2023sometimes you read 120 pages of something and you just have to say "alright, man, i get it" and close the book
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews