Kantorowskie wynalazki. Między przedmiotem magicznym a maszyną

• Authors: Fazan Katarzyna

Title variants

EN

Kantorean Inventions. Between Magical Object and Machine

Abstracts

EN

Objects of Kantor’s imagination filled his paintings, theatrical productions and writings. The article reflects upon their material existence in the performances and their subsequent “museum life”, freed from the context of theatrical performance. Objects of Kantor’s art are viewed here both as embodiments of an eternal dream of theatre involving a mechanical invention that would live in art and as consequences of the avant-garde search for form arising from critical reflexion on technological and cultural progress. Such an object is, thus, a magical form yielding circus-like and ludic effects within a theatrical performance and a machine, or apparatus, employing modern technology and entering into ambivalent relationships with human presence. Machine is a human invention (made by a miracle man, artist, engineer, researcher) and a projection of dreams and anxieties experienced by the individual subjected to pressures of technological progress. Tadeusz Kantor had a peculiar way of taking note of this function; during the Second World War he introduced Goplana not through a performing actress that would represent the fairy-tale character of Julisz Słowacki’s Romantic drama but through the “razor of history”, a formal construction threatening in its expressive qualities (Balladyna, 1943). He created intuitive spaces of exclusion in the form of the Aneantisation Machine for his production of The Madman and the Nun (1963) based on Stanisław I. Witkiewicz’s drama and the Final Judgment Trumpet in Gdzie są niegdysiejsze śniegi (“Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear”, 1973). He treated his inventions as discoveries of unbridled artistic imagination (emballages, cambriolages, ready-mades feeding off reality), as objects of prophecies, apocalyptic visions or historiosophical and metaphysical conclusions: Mr Daguerre’s Invention (Wielopole, Wielopole, 1980), Bodies of Power (“Organa władzy”) in Dziś są moje urodziny (“Today Is My Birthday”, 1990). To him, an object was an actor.

Keywords

EN

theatre studies; theatre history; Polish theatre; Tadeusz Kantor

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Pamiętnik Teatralny
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 2(254)
• Pages: 67-96

Contributors

author

Fazan Katarzyna

• Uniwersytet Jagielloński

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