Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-94631-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is a collection of Michal Kobialka’s essays, written between 1986 and 2025, that provide a comprehensive understanding of Kantor’s theatre practice.

The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a specific area of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre practice. Part One explores Kantor’s radical departure from, or rupture within, the known and accepted representational categories not only of the 20th, but also of the 21st century. Part Two focuses on Kantor’s productions, which disrupted the preestablished artistic conventions in order to infiltrate and shatter the prevailing political, ideological, and cultural systems of power. Part Three sheds light on Kantor’s 1949-1990 theatre experiments with objects, matter, space, reality of the lowest rank, an autonomous work of art, zero zones, the impossible condition, and complex mnemotechnics, which reflected his unwavering belief that theatre was an answer to, rather than a representation of, reality. The three parts elucidate the central argument of this book, that Kantor’s theatre is an example of refractory art in its double sense: as a negation of the status quo and as a deviation from the dominant artistic conventions in service to any official cultural system and its culture industry.

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, performance theory, theatre history, Polish theatre, and avant-garde art in the 20th century.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kobialka, Michal

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Installations-, Aktions-, Computer- und Videokunst

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part 1: Topography of Representation 1. From the Beginning in his Credo Was. 2. Tadeusz Kantor’s Objects and Machines: Materialism of the Encounter 3. Tadeusz Kantor’s Happenings: Reality, Mediality, and History 4. Of Memory and History: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Minima Moralia  Part 2: Cairological Time 5. Of the Memory of a Human Unhoused in Being 6. Delirium of the Flesh: “All the Dead Voices” in the Space of the Now 7. Of Last Things in Memento Mori: Silence, Eternity, and Death 8. Valences of the Avant-Garde: Of Tadeusz Kantor’s Machine of Love and Death and Spatial Dialectics  Part 3: Refractory Art 9. A Note on Working Through Crisis: Theorizing Polish Socialist Realism, 1945-1949 10. Historical Events and Historiography of Tourism 11. The Meaning of Working Through the Past: Of Awkward Objects and Collateral Memories 12. Specters of the Past: An Installation in the Times of Disquiet Epilogue. Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Personal Confessions: Notes on Late Style

Über Autor(innen)

Michal Kobialka is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota, USA. He has published widely on theatre and performance historiography as well as on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre. His most recent book publication is Staging Difficult Pasts: Transnational Memory, Theatre, and Museums (Routledge 2024), which he co-edited with Maria M. Delgado and Bryce Lease.