Tadeusz Kantor in Spain

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CIT AT ION INFORMAT ION

María J. Sánchez Montes, ‘Tadeusz Kantor in Spain’, in Tadeusz Kantor’sMemory: Other pasts, other futures, ed. by Michal Kobialka & Natalia

Zarzecka (London: PTP, 2015).

CONT RIBUT ORS

María J. Sánchez Montes (author), Michal Kobialka (editor), Natalia

Zarzecka (editor), Duncan Jamieson (general editor), Adela Karsznia

(general editor), Richard Gough (consortium editor)

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2014 PTP and the individual contributors. All rights

reserved. Images in this publication are protected with Digimarc®

Guardian watermarks containing copyright and usage information.

LICENCE

All Rights Reserved

LANGUAGES

English

PUBLISHING SERIES

K EYWORDS

Tadeusz Kantor

Cricot 2

Spanish theatre

Spanish playwriting

Wielopole, Wielopole

Today is My Birthday

Jerónimo López Mozo

La infanta de

Velázquez

José Luis Alonso de

Santos

El album familiar

La Zaranda

Mariameneo,

Mariameneo

A R T I C L E 42

Tadeusz Kantor in Spainby María J. Sánchez Montes

Scene from Marta

Carrasco’s J’arrive...! (2005).

Photograph courtesy of the artist’s

archive.



Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP)

PUBLISHER

Polish Theatre Perspectives is an imprint of TAPAC: Theatre and

Performance Across Cultures; this title is co-published with the

Grotowski Institute and the Centre for Performance Research (CPR).

DOI

10.15229/ptpcol.2015.kantor.14

FORMAT S & IDENT IFIERS

Online ISBN 978-1-910203-04-0

PART NERS AND SPONSORS

TAPAC (publisher), Grotowski Institute (publisher), CPR (publisher)

PUBLICAT ION DAT E

2015-01-01

FIRST PUBLISHED ONLINE

2014-10-20

Vinagre de Jerez

Perdonen la tristeza

Marta Carrasco

Aiguardent

Blanc d’ombra

Mira’m

José Monleón

Primer Acto

Spanish Civil War

posguerra

Spanish Independent

Theatre

Diego Velázquez

Las Meninas

Sara Molina

María José Sánchez Montes is a tenured professor at the

University of Granada, Spain, where she teaches Literary

Theory and Theatre Studies. She obtained her PhD in 2001

with a dissertation later published as El cuerpo como signo.

La transformación de la textualidad en el teatro contemporánea

(The Body as Sign: The transformation of the text in

contemporary theatre, 2004). Her current research

interests include Federico García Lorca’s Yerma in

performance, the theatre director Sara Molina, and the

presence and influence of Tadeusz Kantor in Spain. Since

2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural



2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural

programme, founding an international university theatre

festival and overseeing more than 200 cultural events each

year.

“Kantor: [...] ¿Sabe Infanta? Hoy es micumpleaños.El último…”

“Kantor: [...] You know, Infanta? Today ismy birthday.My last…”Jeronimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (1999)

These are the final words of La infanta de Velázquez

(Velázquez’s Infanta), a play by Jerónimo López Mozo –

1998 National Playwright Award laureate and one of Spain’s

foremost living dramatists – in which Tadeusz Kantor

appears as a principal character. Given Kantor’s ambiguous

presence on the ‘threshold’ of his own haunting

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performances up until his death in 1990 (during rehearsals

for the playfully titled Today Is My Birthday), it is perhaps

surprising that he would have to wait almost a decade to be

revived onstage – albeit as a figure in a fictionalised setting,

‘celebrating’ posthumously and acutely conscious of his own

mortality. And this in a play written, though never

performed, in Spanish. From today’s perspective, it could be

considered a clear, if little remarked, example of the

powerful influence that Kantor has exerted on many

Spanish theatre practitioners during the past three decades,

through his performances as well as his writings.

This essay explores for the first time the broader impact of

Kantor’s thought and practice on Spanish playwrights,

directors, and ensembles. After introducing the Spanish

theatrical context that emerged in the post-Civil War

period, I will offer an overview of Kantor’s performances

there from 1981 to 1991, as well as an assessment of how

his ideas – as published in Spanish-language periodicals and

other publications – took root in Spain. It is hoped that

this effort will contribute to the twin tasks of recovering

certain neglected aspects of Spanish stage history and, more

specifically, of improving our overall understanding of the

international impact made by Kantor’s oeuvre in a country

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rarely associated with his name and sphere of influence.

During the 1940s and ’50s, when the Festival d’Avignon,

Piccolo Teatro, Berliner Ensemble, and Royal Shakespeare

Company (then the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre) had

come to be viewed as emblematic examples of theatre arts in

their respective European countries, Madrid’s Lope de Vega

Company began to set the tone for national theatre in Spain.

Although the company’s work under the leadership of José

Tamayo had many merits, its achievements were connected

more with the enhancement of the zarzuela genre and

innovations in scenic and lighting design than with

modernising tendencies in acting and directing practice,

much less with theoretical approaches to

performance. These differing points of focus serve to

highlight a major contrast between developments on the

Spanish stage and much of the experimental theatre

practised elsewhere in Europe at the time. Franco’s near

forty-year dictatorship isolated the country culturally from

the larger European context and relegated much Spanish

theatre to pre-war standards of commercialism and

provincial populism. While the earlier attempts of Ramón

María del Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca to renew

the Spanish drama and theatre scene at the turn of the

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century cannot be overlooked, it is important to note that

their successes were limited in scope and did not account

for the reality of most theatre performed in Spain during

the ensuing decades.

In order to begin tracing Kantor’s significance for Spanish

practitioners, it is necessary to describe briefly the situation

of Spanish theatre in the long aftermath of the Spanish Civil

War (1936-39), and especially during the transitional period

that followed Franco’s death in 1975, which saw many

emerging directors and authors becoming absorbed with

Kantor’s theoretical and aesthetic proposals. The post-war

years and period of dictatorship (1940-75) saw the majority

of Spanish theatre focused on forms of popular and comedic

performance that foregrounded the officially sanctioned,

predominantly bourgeois values. However, it should be

noted that this mostly conservative theatre coexisted with

various attempts to undermine it. In particular, I refer to

movements towards realist drama and experimental

theatre, both of which emerged in Spain in the 1950s.

Within the first group, we should emphasize Antonio Buero

Vallejo and his play Historia de una escalera (Story of a

Staircase, 1949), which occupies a similar role in the

Spanish context to those of the late nineteenth-century



naturalist theatre manifestos elsewhere in Western

Europe. Lauro Olmo, José Martín Recuerda, and Alfonso

Sastre are other key figures who, continuing along the path

forged by Vallejo, formed the core of the social-realist

movement of the 1960s, which tasked itself with

maintaining resistance to the official culture.

The Franco regime had made it tremendously difficult to

place Spanish theatre in direct dialogue with the European

avant-garde, by imposing official constraints on various

cultural practices. Still, the dictatorship could never succeed

fully in isolating Spaniards from productions that, despite

or indeed because of the challenge they posed to the

dominant tradition, would later come to be seen as integral

to their stage heritage. Indeed, starting in the 1960s, and

developing alongside theatre productions of an obviously

traditional hue, Spanish audiences slowly began to gain

access to new kinds of performances marked by engagement

with ritual practices rather than by a focus on textual

interpretation. Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter

Brook, and Eugenio Barba were the names most commonly

referenced by directors and ensembles interested in pushing

the stage arts towards new frontiers of experimentalism.

Spanish artists whose connections with these theorist-

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practitioners from abroad were particularly evident

throughout their productions included Adolfo Marsillach,

Víctor García, Salvador Távora, Francisco Nieva, Fabiá

Pigserver, Lluís Pasqual, Miguel Romero Esteo, Luis Riaza,

and the groups Tábano, Els Comediants, Esperpento, and

Els Joglars. Any historical understanding of post-war

innovations in Spanish theatre would be incomplete without

considering, for example, Marsillach’s Marat/Sade (1968),

García’s Las criadas (1969) or Yerma (1971), Távora’s Quejío

(1971), Esperpento’s Farsa y licencia de la reina castiza

(1969), Tábano’s Castañuela 70 (1970), or Comediants’ Non

plus plis (1972). However, these productions all debuted

prior to the inception of a democratic government in Spain,

in conditions that severely limited the possibilities for

international dialogue.

Without attempting to cover in these few paragraphs every

aspect of the recent history of Spanish theatre – nor even of

the period immediately following the dictatorship – we

should note that these practitioners nonetheless represent

a set of extraordinary efforts made to ‘catch up’ with the

rest of the Europe, by diversifying the tastes of the Spanish

theatregoing public. Their productions were evidently

informed by practical investigations emergent elsewhere on



the continent. Each departed from bourgeois models of

representation, each engaged in dialogue with the aesthetics

developed by peers around Europe, and each ultimately

helped prepare the ground so that later, other international

artists such as Kantor could be not only seen but also

understood in Spain.

Although some had become familiar with Kantor’s work well

before his productions arrived in Spain, it was not until the

1980s that Kantor was to make a significant, ‘direct’ impact

in Spanish theatre circles. The reception of his

performances and theories during Spain’s celebrated

transición to democracy must be understood in the context

of a wider theatrical ‘explosion’ that ushered in freedoms of

expression for which Spaniards had long thirsted. A new

openness regarding theatre management, censorship

policies, project selection, and design practices took hold

quickly and inexorably, and was shown most clearly in public

theatre programming. Festivals were organized throughout

the country during the 1980s, and many Spanish

playwrights had their work performed for the first time

after years of dictatorship, thus leading to an improved

quality and range of repertoire and many visually stunning

performances that continue to be studied and remarked by



critics (Kantor’s notable among them).

A selection of Kantor’s writings was first published in

Spanish in 1971 in Primer Acto, a theatre periodical driven

by the indefatigable José Monleón, who has remained at the

journal’s helm since 1957. Monleón dedicated a special

issue section to the work of Kantor and the Cricot 2

ensemble following their participation in that year’s World

Theatre Festivalin Nancy. On the group’s production of

Witkacy’s The Water Hen, the issue included a glowingly

positive review by Ángel Facio, theatre director and special

correspondent to the Festival. However, after this initial

incursion of Kantor materials onto the Spanish theatre

scene, another decade would pass before local audiences

had the chance to witness the performances themselves. On

the initiative of the Centro Dramático Nacional, 1981 saw

the first staging of Kantor’s work in Spain, with Wielopole,

Wielopole. The production was interpreted by Monleón as a

cultural-political act par excellence. Indeed, the committed

response of this seasoned critic on viewing the performance

provides a key gauge of its impact, as evidenced in his bold

claims that Wielopole, Wielopole constituted a ‘new kind of

event’, and that all previous occasions or self-styled

attempts to revolutionalize the Spanish theatre had been

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[6]

[7]






merely ‘incidental’ by comparison. According to Monleón,

prior to Kantor’s arrival, a few groups of the calibre of Cricot

2 had made sporadic forays that held the potential to spark

more widespread reforms in Spain, but never with the

continuity or scope needed to prompt a genuine avant-garde

movement. Or else not with the impact that Monleón

considered might awaken in Spanish audiences a more

expansive sensitivity to body, image, and composition

onstage. Instead, the dramatic text and the spectacle had

historically reasserted themselves as primary concerns

across the spectrum of theatre arts and genres. As Monleón

commented in the context of Kantor’s arrival: ‘[Spain is] a

country where literature, the moral or political message, the

“carpentry” of the dramatic action, the profile of the actors

or the elaborateness of the production still tend to count for

everything…’

To this broad yet apt assessment of the Spanish theatre of

the period, we may add some further observations

concerning the particular legacy of Kantor, whose work

would become seminal for many artists in the region over

the ensuing decade. Firstly, the growing presence of Kantor

and certain other experimental artists could not counter the

widespread perception that theatre programming continued

[8]




to have an incidental rather than essential relationship to

local innovation. In this regard, the scholar José Antonio

Sánchez, in his essay ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación

escénica contemporánea en España’ (The Origins and

Context of Theatrical Creativity in Spain), expresses his

surprise that Kantor’s presence in Spain, while resonating

widely in a relatively short period of time, did not prompt an

enduring institutional shift. Situating Kantor’s work in the

context of a general regress toward a more traditionalist

state of affairs, Sánchez writes:

The ferment of those years, full of anxiety and hope on

both the political and cultural levels, can be seen in the

plurality of theatre programming [...] and, most

strikingly from our current perspective, in the

presentation of performances rooted in specific visual

or corporeal dramas, such as Wielopole, Wielopole, by

Tadeusz Kantor; Lindsay Kemp’s adaptation of A

Midsummer Night’s Dream; Laetius by Els Joglars; and

Marcel Marceau. Evolución de las ‘Pantomimas de estilo’

(Marcel Marceau: Evolution of the Pantomimes de style),

or Juan sin miedo y antología (Juan, Without Fear and

Anthology) by La Claca.

Considering the debilitated state of recent Spanish theatre –

which Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla has aptly characterized for the

[9]




most part (across both publicly and privately funded

institutions) as politically, socially, and intellectually

innocuous and ‘anodyne’ – I would add that Kantor’s arrival

on the Spanish stage constituted an especially striking event

that unfortunately has no parallel on the contemporary

scene. Nonetheless, as I attempt to demonstrate below,

even that somewhat incidental and discontinuous presence

allowed a handful of Spanish authors and directors to

incorporate Kantor-inspired dramaturgies into their work.

Followers of Kantor know well that 1976 was the year that

brought international renown to Cricot 2 thanks to the

touring performances of The Dead Class (1975). Yet it was

not until 1981 that one of the company’s productions would

be performed in Spain. Wielopole, Wielopole, for reasons we

are now in a better position to examine, is still remembered

as a watershed moment in Spanish theatre history. In

connection with the touring performances of this

production, Primer Acto would dedicate a whole issue to

Kantor, naming issue 189 Kantor entre nosotros (Kantor

Among Us) and publishing a full-page photograph of the

director, followed by forty pages of coverage of the events

programme associated with his visit. Aside from a Cricot 2

chronology prepared by Monleón, the special issue included

[10]




an interview with Kantor by José Luis Alonso de Santos and

Monleón, the already translated ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot

2?’ (What is the Cricot 2 Ensemble?) by Kantor, along with

his ‘El teatro de la muerte’ (The Theatre of Death), and a

review of Wielopole, Wielopole. Most of the articles had

been re-compiled from Kantor-related materials linked to

his performances that summer during the fifth Festival

Internacional de Teatro de Caracas, where Kantor had

staged the production now being received by Spanish

audiences. Several prominent figures from Spanish theatre

circles had duly made the trip to Venezuela, among them

Monleón and the influential writer and theatre director

Alonso de Santos.

Following the ‘event’ of Kantor’s theatre debut in Spain, his

contact with the region progressed during several

appearances by him and/or Cricot 2 during the course of the

next decade. Aside from its inaugural performances at

Madrid’s Teatro María Guerrero and at the Festival

Internacional de Vitoria-Gasteiz (October 1981), Wielopole,

Wielopole was presented later in Valencia and Mallorca

(March 1983), and in Barcelona and Santander (March and

July 1987). Audiences had the chance to see The Dead Class

in Barcelona (March 1983), then in Murcia, Las Palmas,

[11]




Seville, and Madrid (March to April 1984), and finally in

Pamplona and Zaragoza (April 1991). The Spanish premiere

of Let the Artists Die took place in Madrid’s Sala Olimpia

(March 1986), with subsequent performances in Barcelona

(March 1987) and Bilbao (May 1987). I Shall Never Return

was performed in Mallorca (October 1988) and in Barcelona

and Madrid (March to April 1989). Finally, Today Is My

Birthday came to Spain during the Eighth Festival de Otoño

in 1991, a year after Kantor’s death. Indeed, this final

production by Kantor closed the cycle of Cricot 2’s

productions in Spain.

In assessing this series’ impact among local theatre

practitioners, it is important to consider the many

differences in their respective profiles and in the ways in

which Kantor’s influence manifested itself in their work.

Prominent among those who took direct inspiration from

Kantor and Cricot 2 were authors and directors who, though

early in their careers, were already well-established artists.

Here I refer to two such figures already mentioned above:

Alonso de Santos, whose El album familiar (The Family

Album, 1981) appeared shortly after he met Kantor and saw

Wielopole, Wielopole; and López Mozo, who also met Kantor

in the early 1980s but experienced a longer gestation period



with his ideas, displaying his influence almost two decades

later with La infanta de Velázquez.

The name Alonso de Santos is intimately linked to the

Independent Theatre movement during the period of the

Francoist dictatorship and to the directorship of Madrid’s

Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (National Classical

Theatre Company) from 2000 to 2004. Among the more

than twenty dramas written by Alonso de Santos, many of

which he also personally directed, we can make special

mention of La estanquera de Vallecas (The Tobacconist of

Vallecas) and Bajarse al moro (officially translated as Going

Down in Morocco). Following his initial exposure to Kantor’s

writings and debut within the Spanish-language theatre

context, Alonso de Santos wrote and directed El album

familiar, which premiered on 26 October 1982 at the Centro

Dramático Nacional, Teatro María Guerrero, in

Madrid. The play had been written in the summer of

1981 during the Caracas festival, where Alonso de Santos

had the opportunity to see Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole

ahead of its tour to Spain. The original manuscript is located

in the author’s personal archive and begins with the

following words:

In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,

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[13]





In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,

or Tadeusz Kantor, to enter or better to leave, opening

the door of the nursery, latent images of my past, not

as they were (which is impossible!), but as they are

stored in different places in my mind. It is not a

confession, it is a search for a true foundation (not

what I have fabricated with my artificial

remembrances).

It is notable that although Wielopole, Wielopole triggered the

writing of El album familiar, this particular family album

awakens in its young protagonist memories of a past left

behind in a manner that also echoes Kantor’s inspiration for

another of his productions, The Dead Class.

El album familiar could be considered an exercise in cultural

remembering emerging from the Francoist posguerra (post-

war period). A family photo album given to the protagonist

before he begins a journey away from his family and his past

becomes the starting point for a journey through time,

through diachronic modalities of memory. Alonso de Santos

uses the stage not only as a site for personal remembrance

but as a cultural witnessing to the impact of war and

destruction. Several features common to Kantor’s work are

also interwoven in Alonso de Santos’ play: explorations of

the temporalities of remembering, staging memory as a

historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the

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historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the

stage; all set against the background of the Spanish Civil

War. In El album familiar, the dead assist in reconstructing

the past and in shifting the protagonist's self-

understanding. But while this play shares certain

fundamental aspects of Kantor’s poetics, unlike Kantor’s

own ‘texts’ – which were prepared according to the logic of

musical partytury (scores) – Alonso de Santos’ work more

closely resembles a conventional dramatic script. As Michal

Kobialka indicates, for Kantor – perhaps due to his visual

arts background – ‘the process of staging a drama did not

signify [...] the process of interpreting the text or finding its

stage equivalent’. Despite the influence of Kantor’s

thematic and aesthetic concerns during the writing

process, Alonso de Santos remains largely within his familiar

genre. It is interesting to speculate whether this text would

maintain the same Kantorian connections if staged by

another director. Nonetheless, most critics, with the

exception of Monleón, did not explore the Kantorian

connections when the play premiered, and this feature was

downplayed in the majority of reviews.

López Mozo’s link to Kantor first materialized directly in La

infanta de Velázquez: a play written in 1999, recognised with

an award in 2000, and published in 2001, though not yet

[16]




staged. The text is clearly a self-styled homage to Kantor,

especially to the trajectory of his central theatrical ideas and

performances, all of which have a prominent place in López

Mozo’s narratives. The action is drawn from Kantor’s visit to

the Prado Museum on his first visit to Spain, and specifically

from the profound impact that Diego Velázquez’s paintings

had on him. Indeed, the title of López Mozo’s play directly

echoes a set of paintings by Kantor on the theme of

Velázquez’s Infanta, housed at Kraków’s National

Museum. Throughout his text, López Mozo ranges

across some 300 years of European history, with Kantor and

other Cricot 2 members as characters/facilitators who serve

to actualize the simultaneity of various pasts. The play

opens with Kantor visiting the Prado and inviting the

Infanta Margarita, a prominent figure in the foreground of

Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, to visit him in

Kraków. The seventeenth-century Infanta promptly takes

up Kantor’s invitation and journeys with him to late

twentieth-century Kraków. The story integrates a diverse

series of historical moments: the act of painting Las

Meninas and the later evacuation of Velázquez’s work from

the Prado during the Spanish Civil War (both of which are

represented onstage before the Infanta’s trip to Kraków);

the Spanish War of Independence; the Second World War

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La Zaranda, Futuros difuntos (2008). Photograph courtesy of La Zaranda.

the Spanish War of Independence; the Second World War

and the deployment of the División Azul (Blue Division) at

the Russian Front; and Margarita’s relationship with

Emperor Leopold I (her mother’s brother, whom she

eventually married). The text also leads the characters

and audience across the Iron Curtain; within the Francoist

dictatorship (to Franco himself); to the events of May 1968;

and to other episodes of recent history. As in the cases of

Kantor and Alonso de Santos, López Mozo refers

extensively to the experience of war, here approaching

European conflicts involving Spain as a starting point for

dealing with time, memory, and cultural traumas.

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Kantor’s influence has extended beyond playwriting to

companies and directors whose performance aesthetics

have evidently developed in ways close to his own. La

Zaranda and Marta Carrasco, respectively, provide two such

examples. La Zaranda (Lower Andalusian Unstable

Company) a theatre group formed during the 1970s whose

origins are in the Spanish Independent Theatre, are widely

considered the outstanding ‘respondents’ in Spain to

Kantor’s aesthetics. Kantorian motifs ‘haunt’ their

repertoire. One of their early performances, Mariameneo,

Mariameneo (1985), tells the story of an old Andalusian

woman alone with her memories, who keeps her dead alive

by recounting episodes from the pasts they shared. Vinagre

de Jerez (Jerez Vinegar, 1989) takes us from the garden

patio to an Andalusian tavern, where scattered barrels and

carafes bear witness to three lives spent in failure and

inaction. The three protagonists – a guitar player, a

flamenco singer, and a flamenco dancer – watch their lives

pass them by, both figuratively and literally, as they witness

their own corpses walk past at the end. A similar realization

strikes the characters of Obra Postuma (Posthumous Work,

1995), who discover they are dead during the course of the

performance, as they encounter their unfulfilled and

irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A

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irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A

Shadow of our Former Selves, 2002), a merry-go-round

signals the circular repetition and inertia from which its

characters cannot escape.

Like Kantor’s productions, La Zaranda’s work is notable for

building layered, self-reflexive, ‘poor’ performance spaces.

Perdonen la tristeza (Pardon the Sadness, 1992), set within a

theatre building, uses the motif of a street carnival to reflect

on the perceived crisis of contemporary theatre while posing

questions about the status of its own performance. Cuando

la vida eterna se acabe (When Eternal Life Comes to an End,

1997) presents an old mattress as the main object of a space

that seems to exist only in the memory of the four

protagonists, while Homenaje a los malditos (Tribute to the

Damned, 2004) gathers a few old chairs and tables around

which a groups pays homage to their maestro, who is

transformed into an inanimate puppet before the audience.

La puerta estrecha (The Narrow Door, 2000) frames a debate

on questions of access and immigration using a series of

closed doorways. In Los que rien los últimos (Those Who

Laugh Last, 2006), a wandering troupe of ragamuffin street

artists use the ‘vehicle’ of an antique tricycle-cart to

transport actors about the stage as they raise existential

questions about who and where they are. Finally, in Futuros



La Zaranda, Los Que Ríen los Últimos (2006). Photograph courtesy of the company.

difuntos (Defunct/Deceased Futures, 2008), a group of

asylum inmates are abandoned and struggle for control

until, overcome by anxiety at the absence of any higher

authority, they give themselves up to chance and to death.



La Zaranda, Nadie lo quiere creer (2010). Photograph courtesy of the company.

La Zaranda’s productions combine living and dead

characters and the remnants of their pasts, with old objects

often prompting the flow of memories that drive the action.

Although profoundly rooted in the baroque traditions of

Andalusia, where Semana Santa (Holy Week) processionals

remain integrally tied to popular culture, the company’s

visually intense performances – full of penumbra, evocative

objects, and revenant figures – clearly call to mind many

diverse elements of Kantor’s theatre.



Marta Carrasco’s Blanc d’ombra (1997). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s archive.

Marta Carrasco is a dancer whose work combines theatre,

dance, and artes plásticas (visual arts). Kantor’s influence is

noteworthy in her performances Aiguardent (Firewater,

1995), Blanc d’ombra (Recordant Camille Claudel) (White of

Shadow (Remembering Camille Claudel), 1997), and Mira’m

(Look at Me, 2000). In Jose Antonio Sánchez’s terms, these

three works are similar insofar as they are ‘situated in a

space “between”: of memory or of death’, where the stage

functions as a kind of Kantorian ‘memory

machine’. Aiguardent deals with alcoholism and its

attendant anguish and solitude, foregrounding its

protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs

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protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs

of confusion on a stage littered with pitchers of ‘firewater’

alongside a trunk full of memories, a wedding dress, a chair,

and a table with wheels. Blanc d’ombra concerns the

sculptor-lover of Rodin; in the performance, Carrasco

unveils what lies behind various canvasses onstage: a series

of objects through which the audience is able to trace the

protagonist’s past. Rodin himself appears only as a kind of

cloth-covered mannequin, which Carrasco, as Claudel,

appears to seduce with her movements, until ultimately she

inhabits him. Mira’m – in which Carrasco does not perform –

is replete with intertextual references to The Dead Class and

Wielopole, Wielopole, with ‘characters’ crossing the stage in

the form of actors and mannequins. A large closet full of

furniture and old objects fulfils the role of ‘memory

machine’.

[21]




Scene from Marta Carrasco’s Mira’m (2000). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s

archive.



Scene from Mira’m. Photograph courtesy of Carrasco’s archive.

Throughout this article, I have sought to sketch out the

history of Kantor’s presence in Spain, highlighting the

ongoing impact of both his theoretical and artistic practice.

Following Wielopole, Wielopole, the Spanish theatregoing

public enjoyed relatively broad access to Kantor’s

performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –



performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –

significantly – in smaller and less internationally renowned

locations. Through Kantor’s ensuing influence on, for

example, the central practitioners mentioned above, I

suggest that he has contributed to significant openings in

Spain’s often-insular theatre tradition – even if I would also

argue that further work is required to explore the potential

of his ideas to invigorate the contemporary Spanish theatre

scene. The homogeneity and tameness to which Pérez-

Rasilla alludes above is a reminder that – despite a political

climate in which Spain can claim to be a mature democracy

engaged in the project of a borderless Europe – inspirational

leadership is still required in order to push the arts beyond

unreflective traditionalism. I would even venture that if

Kantor’s theatre were to make its Spanish debut in 2014

rather than 1981, it would be considered just as radical and

innovative today. His influence thus constitutes a strange

and somewhat problematic heritage, though Kantor himself

would no doubt have savoured the irony that his work has

been able to remain fresh and challenging over time, unlike

certain other cases of modernist innovation in the arts.

Nonetheless, the four principal examples I focus on in this

article – spanning playwrights, directors, and performers –

establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor



establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor

legacy in Spain. Indeed, I would argue that the work of

several of Spain’s leading theatre practitioners could not be

fully understood or appreciated without reference to

Kantor. Given this unmistakeable imprint, perhaps one way

of understanding Kantor’s promise that he ‘shall never

return’ is simply to acknowledge that – when it comes to the

Spanish theatre scene – he never left.

Notes:

1. ^ Jerónimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (Madrid: Primer Acto, 2006,p. 162). Unless otherwise noted, all citations appear in my own translation.

2. ^ Today is My Birthday was staged in Spain following Kantor’s death, inOctober 1991 at Teatro María Guerrero.

3. ^ Zarzuela refers to a genre of popular musical stage performance in whichactors alternate between speaking and singing, whose predominance on theSpanish stage has been intermittent since it first emerged during theseventeenth century. The name of the genre derives from the place where itwas first performed, the Zarzuela Palace, which was one of the residences ofSpain’s royal family in El Pardo, near Madrid. See Manuel Gómez García,Diccionario Akal de Teatro (The Akal Dictionary of Theatre) (Madrid: Akal,2007), p. 904.

4. ^ See Antonio Sánchez Trigueros, Teatro y escena. La poética del silencio yotros ensayos (The Theatre and the Stage: The Poetics of Silence and OtherEssays) (Granada: Alhulia, 2008), p. 41. As Trigueros comments, ‘Spanishsociety of the late 1940s – or at least a crucial part of it, its critical conscience– despite the strictures of censorship and the threat of surveillance by the

https://culturehub.co/works/Tadeusz_Kantor_in_Spain#backmce_90






– despite the strictures of censorship and the threat of surveillance by theauthorities, also became animated by a powerful need to search for truth’ (p.42).

5. ^ José Monleón has been a central figure in the writing of Spanish theatrehistory, in theory and in practice, throughout the past half-century.

6. ^ Under the general title ‘Los seis grupos destacados de Nancy. 2: Cricot 2,Polonia’ (The Six Outstanding Groups at Nancy. Part 2: Cricot 2, Poland) thefollowing texts by Kantor were published in Primer Acto, 132 (1971): ‘Lacondición del actor’ (The Situation of an Artist), ‘Método del arte de seractor’ (The Acting Method), ‘Pre-existencia escénica’ (Scenic Preexistence),‘Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2’ (The Cricot 2 Ensemble), and ‘La recuperacióndel Arte’ (The Recovery of Art). ‘The Situation of the Artist’ is published inEnglish in Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos,1944-1990, ed. and trans. by Kobialka (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1993), pp. 129-31; this and the other texts have also been published inFrench and Italian.

7. ^ Ángel Facio, ‘Demasiadas contradicciones’ (Too Many Contradictions),Primer Acto, 132 (1971), 10-16 (p. 14).

8. ^ José Monleón, ‘Introducción a una cronología. Kantor’ (Introduction to aChronology: Kantor), Primer Acto, 189 (1981), 6-7 (p. 6).

9. ^ José Antonio Sánchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénicacontemporánea en España’, in Artes de la escena y de la acción en España: 1978-2002 (Theatre and Activist Arts in Spain: 1978-2002) (Cuenca: Ediciones dela Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006), p. 17.

10. ^ Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España. Notas para unbalance del teatro del siglo XX’ (A Century of Theatre in Spain: NotesTowards a Report on Twentieth Century Theatre), Monteagudo 3.6 (2001),19-44 (p. 39).

11. ^ ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2?’ is published in English as ‘Cricot 2 Theatre’,trans. by Michal Kobialka, in Kobialka, Further On, Nothing... TadeuszKantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp.110-15. Kantor’s ‘The Theatre of Death’ was also translated and published inthis volume, pp. 230-39.

12. ^ The Independent Theatre is among the most original and influentialcultural phenomena through which to understand Spain’s transition fromdictatorship to democracy. The movement, which developed primarilybetween the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained











between the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained

wholly detached from the economic, political, and artistic establishment inSpain. Its principal achievement was to have established the foundations ofcontemporary alternative theatre aesthetics, including for many innovativepractices still discernible in Spain today. Characterised by a bohemian andcollectivist spirit of adventure, the movement experimented extensivelywith performance, space, and dramaturgy, including: modes of rehearsal,approaches to acting, and engagement with European and North Americanperformance theory; the use of ritual and play; farce as a legitimate mode ofpolitical commentary; and the adoption of certain popular performative andfestive practices. On the subject of the Independent Theatre, see José LuisAlonso de Santos, ‘Principio y fin del teatro independiente’ (Beginning andEnd of the Independent Theatre), Campus, 31 (1989) [available online athttp://www.um.es/campusdigital/TalComoEra/alonsoSantos.htm, accessed23 March 2014]), and Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España’, p. 35.

13. ^ The impression that this performance made on Alonso de Santos isrecounted by Margarita Piñero in her book La creación teatral en José LuisAlonso de Santos (Theatrical Creation in the Work of José Luis Alonso deSantos) (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2005).

14. ^ From the author’s personal archive.15. ^ In a documentary produced by Polish Television (TVP), Kantor referred to

his own experience in 1971 when he was living in a little coastal town ‘withlittle houses and a poor abandoned old school which had just one class. Icould look through the dirty windows. I stuck my face to the window andlooked inside my mind. In my mind, I was a little boy again sitting down in apoor little town class. His desk was marked by knives and he was wetting histiny dirty fingers to pass the pages of his notebook […] the class has whitewalls and the lime was falling off. There was a black cross on the wall. Now Iknow that I made an important discovery by that window: I realized theexistence of memory’. See Kantor, dir. by Andrzej Sapija (Kraków: TelewizjaPolska, 1985), published on DVD by Cricoteka (Kraków, 2006).

16. ^ Kobialka, Further On, Nothing, p. 38.17. ^ See Pewnej nocy wesz!a do mego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza/Pewnego

wieczoru wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázquez’a (One Night/EveningVelázquez’s Infanta Came to My Room, 1988) and Pewnej nocy po raz drugiwesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta

http://www.um.es/campusdigital/TalComoEra/alonsoSantos.htm








wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta

Came to My Room for a Second Time, 1990).18. ^ La División Azul (1941-44) refers to the regular units of Spanish war

‘volunteers’, 5000 of whom (out of a total of 50,000) lost their lives at theRussian Front fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht.

19. ^ Rodrigo García, Sara Molina, and Francisco Valcarce (director of LaTartana) make up another group of directors evidently fascinated byKantor’s performances, though less directly influenced by him. For reasonsof space, it is not possible to trace comprehensively Kantor’s presence intheir performances or plays; however, it is important to mention them herein the wider context of Spanish practitioners who have engaged withKantor’s aesthetics.

20. ^ See Sanchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénica contemporánea enEspaña’, p. 276. See also Krzysztof Ple!niarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine:Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, trans. by William Brandt (Aberystwyth:Black Mountain Press, 2004).

21. ^ Agua ardiente (‘firewater’) is a generic term for strong alcoholic, oftenhome-brewed drinks, usually made from grains (such as barley, millet, orrice), which are widely considered the preferred morning libation of Spanishconstruction workers.





Tadeusz Kantor in Spain

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