Tadeusz Kantor – Art as an “Answer to Reality”
Tadeusz Kantor – Art as an “Answer to Reality”

Summary/Abstract: Kantor strives to push the actor to what he calls “ground zero”: the impossibility to create the illusion of a character due to the fact that the actor must react to real stimuli received from the space he plays in. Having forced the boundaries of conventional theatrical staging to its deconstruction, having reached the conclusion that life stands out as more valuable than representation, Kantor tries to reconcile these two forces and to return to the classical distinction between the stage area and the space destined to the spectators, who assume the position of reflexive viewers of the theatrical event. The artist’s last creative period, marked by the production of his “theatre of death and love” tetralogy, is also the most complex one. Merging the theories and concepts he had developed during his entire career (the object-actor, mental space, matter in movement, the deconstruction of space), using techniques that still render the discourse discontinuous, however without destroying it anymore (collage, self-reference, temporal leaps, repetitions), Kantor creates a type of theatre of images through which he can shape the physical bodies of the space of memory, turning memory and personal reflection upon the past into a “bio-object” that comes to life under the eyes of the public and of its creator.

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