Michal Kobialka Publishes Essays About Tadeusz Kantor

Michal Kobialka (with Natalia Zarzecka) has just published a collection of essays examining Tadeusz Kantor’s performance practices and legacy: Tadeusz Kantor’s Memory: Other Pasts, Other Futures (London & Wroclaw: Polish Theatre Perspectives Press, 2018). 

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) was a Polish visual artist, writer, and theatre director, who can be placed among a select group of the twentieth century’s most influential performance practitioners. The breadth and diversity of his artistic endeavours align Kantor with such varied figures as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Marcel Duchamp, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Oscar Schlemmer, Antonin Artaud, Jackson Pollock, Jerzy Grotowski, Allan Kaprow, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, and Robert Wilson. In significant ways, Kantor’s work with the Cricot 2 company and his theories of theatre consistently challenged and expanded the boundaries of traditional and non-traditional theatre forms.

Tadeusz Kantor’s Memory: Other pasts, other futures – published following Kantor’s centenary year and the 60th anniversary of the founding of Cricot 2, as well as anniversaries of key productions The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), and Let the Artists Die (1985) – gathers international perspectives from across academia and the arts to offer a major critical reappraisal of Kantor’s work. The book includes scholarly contributions by researchers from around the world, alongside reflections by leading collaborators and colleagues, and a selection of rarely seen images. Together, these materials offer an invaluable, contemporary insight into Kantor’s theoretical and artistic practice and an unprecedented view of its global sphere of influence.

Michal Kobialka is Professor of Theatre Arts at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota. He has published over 75 articles, essays, and reviews in academic journals in the US and Europe. He is the author of A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990 (University of California Press, 1993), This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); editor of Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and co-editor (with Barbara Hanawalt) of Medieval Practices of Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) as well as (with Rosemarie K. Bank) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (Palgrave, 2015).