+/-: .The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor.

I believe in God. My God is Polish. His name is TADEUSZ KANTOR.

Tadeusz Kantor was a key figure in European avant-garde theatre. He was once called "the best artist of the world from amongst Polish artists and the most Polish one from amongst artists of the world"

One of the most outstanding artists of the second half of the 20th century: painter, drawer, art theoretician, set designer and theatre director, creator of happenings, theatre reformer and major figure on the Polish art scene.Kantor was an inspired creator who treated art very seriously.His unconditional belief in art was the most important feature of his attitude.Like Artaud, Grotowski or Brook, Kantor travelled extensively and came into contact with a wide range of religions and cultures.
Kantor had the charisma of a leader, a prophet; he could gather other creators around him and encourage them with enthusiasm.

He held exhibitions and created a series of artistic actions and happenings. Kantor's greatest achievement was The Cricot 2 Theatre. Its performances, beginning with The Dead Class (1975), attained the level of masterpiece. The unusual formula of his Theatre of Death consisted in creating artistic illustration for mechanisms of memory. He went on to stage the multiple award-winning play Dead Class according to the principles of the Theatre of Death.

Sequences of unreal pictures, snatches of memories, obtrusively returning scenes, and absurd situations: everybody knows this from his own experience. And all of us are confused in a similar way: series of painful resentments, daring longings, remembered fragments of sentences, comical scraps of the past. We are physical, and it appears that our memory and imagination are also physical. We do not exist without form; we think and even feel with images. And Kantor could show it on the stage. He created an unusually suggestive space in which the living and the dead have been mixed, where the shyest desires and most cruel experiences, i.e. war, love and crime, fear, passion and hatred have been revealed. On faded photographs of his family album, the personal biography intertwined with history, where national myths and private obsessions returned with tiresome echoes, like in the distorting mirror.