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Mladen Ovadija

Tadeusz Kantor’s Informel Theatre and the Futurist Recognition

of Materiality of Sound/Color/Sign.

Tadeusz Kantor, one of the major figures of the painting

(installation, happenings, conceptual art) and theatre of the

new avant-garde in Europe and Poland, lived the permanent

revolution of ever-changing visual arts and knew that “theatre

must know how to profit from the inexhaustible radicalism of

painting.”1 “Being a painter, as much as a theatre man,” he

said, “I never dissociated these two fields of activity… in the

most direct and radical way I confronted the problems created

by the plastic arts in my theatre.” As Kantor goes on to

explain:

Our idols were Mondrian, Malevich and the Bauhaus, but we

saw that abstraction was not adequate to the reality around

us… we annexed this threatening reality to the work of art.

…I am fascinated by the—mystical or utopian perhaps—idea

and supposition that in every work of art there exists,

independent of artist, an UR-MATTER that shapes itself and

1 Krzysztof Miklaszewski, Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor (London: Routledge, 2002), 9.

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in which dwell all possible scenarios of life. …I believe

in the SIMULTANEITY and EQUIVALENCE of my individual action

and that of this Prime Matter.2

It was Kantor’s commitment to the idea of Prime Matter

first explored by Informel painters that led him to turn to the

idea of Informel theatre, in which all elements of performance—

actors, objects, space, text, and sounds—act as flexible,

malleable material showing the interference of emotions and

memories with states and properties of matter.

Italian Futurist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, one of the main

promoters of the historical avant-garde, shared Kantor’s

fascination when he introduced the “lyrical intoxication with

matter” as the source of all art. In his poetry of parole in libertà

(words in freedom) Marinetti shifted focus from verbal meaning

to vocal expression, from the syntactic structure of language

to its sound substance as the onomatopoeic reflection of the

artist’s Dionysian immersion in the same Prime Matter Kantor

speaks about. As an outcome of intoxicating yourself with life

that allows us, or rather forces us, to deform and reshape

words “parole in libertà are an absolutely free expression of the

universe beyond prosody and syntax, a new way of seeing the 2 Jarosław Suchan and Marek Świca, eds., Tadeusz Kantor, Interior of Imagination

(Cracow: Cricoteka, 2005), 62.

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universe as the sum of forces in action. They mix the materials

and orchestrate colors, noises, sounds; with all the expressive

means at our disposal.”3 Consequently, in the ensuing search

for a new idiom of expression in Futurist painting, sculpture

and theatre artists focused on the materiality, palpability,

and physicality of the immediate artistic material instead of

its representational value. Thus the recognition of the

materiality of sound in poetry together with color and

painterly or sculptural mass in plastic arts prompted the

hybridization of art disciplines based on the concrete material

features of the artistic or theatrical sign.

This blending of media and the concomitant introduction of

the new strategies in dramaturgy and performance are discussed

by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenblat, leading researchers of

intermediality in theatre conducted by the IFTR. They underline

that “intermediality is about changes in theatre practice and

thus about changing perceptions of performance, which become

visible through the process of staging.”4 With the visual aid

of a triangle, they schematize intermediality in theatre as the

result of the three vectors representing sign systems of (a)

3 Richard J. Pioli, ed., Stung by Salt and War: Creative Texts of F. T. Marinetti (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 52.

4 Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 12.

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image, (b) word, and (c) sound to which, along the triangle’s

three sides, body, space, and time are added as their media.

Subsequent models of theatrical structure becomes increasingly

complex with the inclusion of many more intersecting elements

like mediatized and live performance, analogue and digital

media, and so forth. I find that the notion of the materiality

of image/word/sound is located at the pivotal point of theatre’s

intermedial exchange triangle, particularly when examining the

futurist and avant-garde artistic legacy. Therefore, my paper

focuses on the basics: that is, the intermediality of visual,

aural, and kinetic aspects of stage and performance inherited

from the avant-garde hybridization of art disciplines and,

first of all, from the futurist recognition of the materiality

of sound, color, mass, and objects and their scenic presence as

such. Initiated by the theory and practice of futurist poetry,

plastic arts, and performance, this trend resonates in the new

avant-garde’s painting of Informel and transgresses into the

theatre field in Tadeusz Kantor’s concepts of Autonomous,

Informel, Zero, and Impossible theatre.

The hybridization of arts went along the lines of the

historical avant-garde tendency to merge art and life, which

produced works of immediate sensual contact with reality in

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different artistic disciplines. The “lyrical intoxication with

matter” thus gave birth to both onomatopoeia in sound poetry

and to fisicoffolia (physical madness) in Marinetti’s Variety Theatre.

In the same way as the word was freed from its syntactic and

signifying yoke by the onomatopoetic vocal gesture in poetry,

performance was absolved from representation by physical

madness. A concept conceived in lyrical poetry gained crucial

significance in futurist theatre where “the dirty thing and the

dirty word psychology, has been eliminated by the authority of

instinct and intuition.”5

A similar trend is found in plastic arts. Futurist painters

and sculptors who developed the concepts of “plastic dynamism,”

“simultaneity,” and “painting of noises, sounds, and smells”

declared: “The intoxicating aim of our art [that] prompted us

to use force-lines in order to emphasize speed and energy of

objects penetrating the atmosphere.”6

Musicality of force-lines, of masses-nightmares, of reflected

corners… Plastic representation of states of mind… is no

longer an art-theme, art-decoration,

5 F. T. Marinetti, “Variety Theatre Manifesto,” in Futurist Performance, by Michael Kirby (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 183.6 Umberto Boccioni et al., “The Exhibitors to the Public,” in Futurist

Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 47.

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art-portrait, art-photography; but pure search for the

line-color-form that stems from the visible-audible-

smelled-palpable-tactile; no longer an illustrative motif

but cerebral tension; sculpture-painting and sculpture-

music.7

Eschewing the discernible representation of a stable

object, painters moved toward the multi-sensory dynamics and

tension of sculpture-painting and sculpture-music. This

provided the grounds for the shift from an art object to an

event bearing sensual immersion in the world and initiated a

dramaturgy that deals with sound, lights, movements, and such

other fluid, nonstructured materials as sculptural mass in

temporal flux, a method common to the futurist and Kantor’s

theatre. Its similarity to the ideas and practices of Informel art

is apparent.

The term Informel art was coined by French writer Michel Tapié

in Un art autre (1952), a book that describes the work of several

famous painters, including Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Jean Fautrier,

and Alberto Burri, whose common denomination was

rebelliousness, spontaneity, irrationality, and freedom of

form. They were more concerned with the act of painting and

7 Quoted in Depero: Dal Futurismo alla Casa d’Arte (Milan: Edizione Charta e MART, 1994), 13.

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touch with material than with the final shape of the work of

art. An American parallel to Informel, also called “Action

Painting” or gestural abstraction, was epitomized by the works

of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who spontaneously

dribbled, splashed, or smeared paint onto the canvas. “At a

certain moment,” notes Harold Rosenberg, “the canvas began to

appear… as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in

which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object,

actual or imagined.”8 What mattered were the qualities of the

paint itself and the act of painting itself—the canvas was not

a picture, but an event.

Some critics describe Informel as lyrical abstraction, but as

Roberto Passini argues, abstraction is notable for its rigorous

mental and formal choices while “Informel involves getting into

the thick of worldly events, plunging into material, profoundly

sensing the empirical dimension and colliding with the drama of

existence. This almost institutes dichotomy of the Western

thought . . . found in the pairing of Apollo with Dionysus.”9

This “plunging into material” and gestural expressionism of

8 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), originally in Art News 51/8, (Dec. 1952): 22.

9 Roberto Pasini, “Tropic of the Informel,” in The Informal Artists from Pollock to Schumacher, ed. Susanne Anna (Bonn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999), 113.

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Informel proved to be akin to Marinetti’s Dionysian “lyrical

intoxication with matter.”

Tadeusz Kantor welcomed the idea of Informel art as the end

of all calculations and intellectual inhibitions when, as a

result of immediate experience, painting had moved beyond all

forms and aesthetics and became a manifestation of life, a

continuation not of art, but of life.

Until now, I have drawn and painted figures and objects.

Now I “draw” space. New space! …Space / which is neither a

starting point nor a limit, / which ascends and sinks deep…

which does not hesitate to invade a closed shape, / shake

in violent turns. / Figures, objects become a function of

space and its vicissitudes.10

Kantor’s “drawing space” and its fluidity necessarily led

to the expansion of his painterly ideas and methods to his

theatre endeavors. In “The Informel Theatre” manifesto of 1961,

he pleaded for “REALITY in its elementary state: MATTER that is

freed from abiding the laws of construction.”11 This state of

raw matter was to be sensed in all elements of his later

performances; in the indistinct relation between objects and

humans; in the actors’ bodies ready to be molded by their

10 Suchan and Świca, Tadeusz Kantor, 36. 11 Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990, ed. Michal Kobialka, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 51.

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physical action, speech and vocal articulation. All these

elements were employed in an energetic pulsative performance

(in the sense of Lyotard’s idea of theatre) epitomized by The

Dead Class in which Kantor, standing on the stage, directs,

sculpts, and conducts the piece – “draws space” acting like a

Jackson Pollock who splashes paint on canvas.

Kantor’s theatre productions incessantly confronted

challenges of the plastic arts: Witkiewicz’s In the Little Manor

House (1961), for instance, provided experimental ground for

Informel art. Here:

A poor, molding wardrobe brought down from the attic had to

replace the nostalgic country manor house demanded by the

playwright. …Actors degraded, without dignity, were hanging

motionless like cloths as heavy mass of sacks in a

wardrobe. …Remnants of objects, relics, what remained of

them, earned a chance to become the form.12

The production coincides with the Cricot 2 Theatre’s move

to the basement of the Galeria Krzystofory in Cracow and owes

very much to the author’s painting and installation works

exhibited there. The cavernous performance/exhibition space, a

space proved to be right for the “reality of the lowest rank” -

a wardrobe, a cloakroom, a laundry room, a hospital, and so on.

12 Ibid., 53.

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In 1963 Kantor filled the gallery with all sorts of objects and

material remnants of his creative process forming an active

environment that looked like Futurist, Dada, Merz-stage, or

Malevich’s “chaotic” exhibitions. Kantor stated that Popular

Exhibition or Anti-exhibition represents “my own creation and my own

past estranged and objectified by the mix with the matter of

life” and shows “the distinctive feature of creativity is a

state of flux, change, transience, ephemerality and perpetuity—

the qualities of life itself.”13 Exhibiting corrupted arts,

contaminations, and interdisciplinary and hybrid forms, Kantor

tried to redirect the spectator from an analytical and

contemplative reception of the work of art to an active

witnessing of the creative process and fluidity of an event.

From dyes and canvas, through ready-made objects, poor

objects and situations to “memory clichés,” archetypal

images and individual memories, what remains unchanged is

the complicated relation bonding the artist and the matter

of his art into a single fluid system.14

Kantor’s live presence on the stage or installation space

was a major factor integrating the stage performance and the

13 Suchan and Świca, Tadeusz Kantor, 62.14 Ibid., 62.

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work of visual art in “a single fluid system.” Thus, in The Dead

Class (1975), a piece that admittedly encapsulates and

exemplifies ideas of Informel, Kantor stood, sat, walked, and

danced around and within the pictorial/sculptural/stage space,

conducted actors and sculpted an energetic intermedial

performance/installation. Instead of the theatrical

representation of a play, we see an act of performance art in

which the author wrestles with his material. Kantor even marked

the border of the performance space in the corner of the

Galeria Krzysztofory with a ribbon stretched between poles

giving us a sign that we watch not only a theatre event but

also a kinetic sculpture made of degraded human matter. He

insisted on this sign wherever The Dead Class was subsequently

staged during the Cricot 2 Theatre’s glorious tour around the

world that lasted over a decade.

The Dead Class brings a group of old people, dressed in

rustic mourning clothes, with their mannequin doubles,

corpselike infants attached to their bodies, on a pilgrimage to

their childhood classroom; the four rows of school benches are

thrown into a corner of the gallery as a “reality of the lowest

rank.” The actors stubbornly mutter broken, incomplete,

sometimes nonsensical lines - remnants of a life once lived,

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trying to recall happier days. In an obsessive-compulsive

manner, they grind thr text like mills so that their grammar

drills and mnemonic chants soon change into “phonetic blots” of

the raw vocal material. “Matière brute is also attained in parole,”

writes Kantor in “The Informel Theatre” manifesto, the actors’

speech consists of “inarticulate sounds, murmur, stutter,

drawl, whisper, croak, whining, sobbing, spitting, phonemes,

obscene language, syntax-free language.”15 The aural aspect of

the performance is built on the rhythm and melody of children’s

numbering, the declamation of the Hebrew alphabet, remembered

phrases, and fragments of the Apocalypse that form a nonverbal

language, a sort of glossolalia that affects emotions. Tadeusz

Różewicz said: “The Dead Class is the liberation of words…watching

this performance, I breathe words.” Here Marinetti’s parole in

libertà and the immediate sensuality of their sound come to mind.

Różewicz explained:

The sound has a decisive significance: a musical motif

selected with so much care—a waltz, a tango, a liturgical

or military chant—creates the tension and dramaturgy. The

melody rises and descends, augments and diminishes, returns

in an obsessive manner like a mechanism of memory. To this,

the other sounds are added: drum beats of Purim festivity,

15 Ibid., 54.

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rumble of the wooden balls in a cradle, grave shots of a

firing squad.16

Thus a hybrid of Informel gestural painting/sculpture,

installation/performance art, and theatre production gets

generated by the rhythm of its sound. It develops from stasis

as the actors and mannequins sit silently and motionlessly on

their benches, so that the spectator can hardly distinguish one

from the other. One can just see a crushing apathy on their

faces. “An empty stare into the space. A sudden recollection of

something. And then again, a desperate attempt to recapture a

lost time. Resignation. And so on indefinitely until boredom

and insanity strikes.”17 However, the dynamic change occurs

with the tune of a valse française that revives the old

pupils/mannequins, giving them the illusion of a jubilant

parade as they march around the benches. Animated by the music,

they succeed momentarily in their enormous fight against the

gravity of nostalgia: their faces brighten, and their bodies

straighten up under the conductor Kantor’s baton. They climb on

the school benches and with a swell of music reach for the sky

on their tiptoes: a sculpture of hope is built in front of our

16 Quoted in Tadeusz Kantor: Dipinti, disegni, teatro, exhibition catalogue, ed. JózefChrobak and Carlo Sisi (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002), 53.

17 Kantor, A Journey, 66.

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eyes. And then, with the ebb of music, disillusion returns, and

the form crumbles in the state of formless suffering matter.

But Kantor still struggles to give this matter a form, aware

that it will last but for a moment. The program of The Dead Class

reads: “Theatre of automatons continued. . . . All repeat their

held-back gestures they will never complete, forever imprisoned

in them. . . . And they shall continue collapsing and rising

endlessly, again and again.”18

In this performative act, Tadeusz Kantor acquires the

visual arts’ technique of throwing paint at the canvas or the

sculpting/drawing the space, a method he started to use in his

Informel painting period. With the help of music, he is sculpting

a human pyramid that constantly crumbles. He does not aim to

accomplish a work of art but to give life to the ever fluid

matter. In The Dead Class there is no representation of a play

but just the convulsive pulsation of matter

(actors/sounds/objects/space) struggling to acquire some

meaningful shape.

On the empty stage the atmosphere becomes / condensed to

the highest possible degree / so that the objects lose

their function and the features that / make them objects;

18 “The Dead Class,” in Tadeusz Kantor, Umrła klasa, a catalogue, (Sopot and Lodz: Państwowa Galley and Gallery 86, 2004), 42.

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they become MATTER. …The human figure is shaped on the

border area of a live, suffering organism and / a mechanism

/ functioning automatically and absurdly. …I follow the

credo / of the informel art. I put into practice my idea of

the REALITY.19

In this reality, objects function as actors and vice versa,

making symbiotic bio-objects. The human body merges and

interpenetrates with physical matter and objects like a human

figure clashes with a couch or a street with a house balcony on

a Futurist painting. In The Dead Class, the notion of

interpenetration literally takes place when the old

pupils/actors’ bodies, fused with the dummies of dead children

appear. One cannot decide which element dominates—a living

being or its mechanical extension. “As if pasted or stitched

together from ill-matched parts: remnants of their childhood,

they fall apart and become transformed with every minute.”20

Kantor’s use of mannequins, dummies, wax figures, or

puppets together with live actors was inspired by Bruno

Schulz’s story “A Treatise on Mannequins” from the collection

Cinnamon Shops. The protagonist of the story, Bruno’s father,

Joseph, aroused by the beauty of two young seamstresses, muses 19 Suchan and Świca, Tadeusz Kantor, 38.20 Miklaszewski, Krzysztof. Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor, (London: Routledge,

2002), 36.

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on mannequins cast away in storage as if they do not feel

anything. “There is no dead matter,” says he,

death is only an appearance behind which the forms of

unknown life hide. Demiurge created countless live species

able to reproduce themselves. But Demiurge has no privilege

of creation. We lived too long terrorized by perfection of

his work that paralyzed our creativity. We want to be

creators in our own degraded reality, to be Demiurges.

Matter doesn't know of jokes, she is always full of tragic

dignity. 21

Although stiff and mute objects, mannequins still possess

the dignity of suffering matter with the inherent potential of

life, thought Schulz. Directing/conducting his

actors/mannequins Kantor assumes the desired role of the

Demiurge able to find life hidden behind the appearance of

death. That is why in Kantor’s “Theatre of Death” the mannequin

is understood, contrary to Kleist and Craig, not as a possible

replacement for a live actor but as his model, as the live

matter under the mask of objecthood, death, and emptiness.

Besides human dummies, Kantor invented a number of contraptions

coupled to the actor’s body producing a strange but telling

anatomy. Such symbiotic creatures/objects include a man with a

21 Bruno Schulz, Cinnamon Shops, trans. Celina Wieniewska (London: MacGibbonand Kee, 1963), 48.

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board in his back and wheels attached to his legs (Lovelies and

Dowdies), a woman with legs spread on the two planks of the

birthing machine and a mechanical cradle that rocks dead wooden

balls instead of children (The Dead Class), or the grandfather-

priest’s corpse and actor’s body tied to both sides of the

rotating death-bed (Wielopole, Wielopole), and so forth. The live

performer thus becomes a part of the kinetic sculpture that has

its own hybrid idiom and significance.

Similarly, Kantor’s scenery is not just a location on

which objects become discernible but rather a field of energies

that expands outward via the performance. Kantor held that

“theatre cannot become an area of applying painting effects”

and that scenery was useless and unnecessary in the new theatre

since the sculptural stage space ought to be “integrated with

the theatrical whole so strongly as to melt into the entire

stage matter.”22 He pleads for a different (nonillustrative)

kind of application of plastic arts in theatre, an application

of the principles of Informel art where “space is not a passive

container in which objects and forms are placed. / Space is in

itself the subject of creation. / The main, subject! / Space

loaded with energy… which expands… shapes forms and objects…

22 Suchan and Świca, Tadeusz Kantor, 25.

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gives birth to forms!”23 In such space objects do not adhere to

the rules of construction but remain forever changeable matter.

The same idea of space can be found in the texts and works

of Italian Futurist painter and set designer Enrico Prampolini,

who sought for a “plastic-dynamic construction” of stage

governed by “lyrical sensitivity.” In a 1915 essay, he explains

the stage as an intuitively perceived rhythmic space where the

atmosphere and matter blend.

We, the hypersensitive ones . . . must shape with greater

vehemence the impulses and sensations of the infinitesimal

world and the universe which surrounds us. This is the

foundation of the absolute construction of sound and motion which

not only unites in itself the material values of all the

arts, but also the sensations which until now have been

determined by each individual art form.24

Needless to say, this hypersensitivity for the

infinitesimal world is another manifestation of Marinetti’s

Dionysian “lyrical intoxication with matter,” which can be

regarded as an overture to the plunging into material of

Informel art. Heeding its call, wrestling with material, and

sensing its gravity and opacity in poetry and painting, as well

23 Kantor, A Journey, 216.24 Quoted in Günter Berghaus, “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On

Synaesthesia and the Idea of Total Work of Art,” Maske und Kothurn 32.2 (1986): 24.

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as acknowledging its sensorial value in performance, Futurists

brought to the fore the concreteness and materiality of

theatrical signs. The antecedents of Informel art and Kantor’s

work that is related to it are evident in the historical avant-

garde’s larger project of the hybridization of art forms and,

more specifically, in futurist recognition of the materiality

of artistic means and the intuitive merger of sound and color

with other sensory attractions, movements, and objects.

Tadeusz Kantor, particularly in the “Informel Theatre”

manifesto and The Dead Class, followed the impulses, principles,

and methods of plastic arts and developed a genuine stage

performance based on the materiality of its elements that

provided the conduit for the intermediality of his theatrical

idiom, which transgressed the boundaries between installation,

sculpture, and theatre. Although in these performance pieces he

often traveled deep into his memory and personality, Kantor was

aware that theatre is not about “an exploration of the

subconscious or one’s own obsessions,” but rather about

a new, unknown aspect of reality, its primary condition:

MATTER. - Matter, element and impetus, continuity and

infinity, density and slowness, liquidity and

capriciousness, lightness and ephemerality. Matter

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incandescent, exploding, luminous, dead and calm.

Congealment in which we discover all traces of life.25

Thus Kantor appears as artist and as material of his own

painting and theatre.

WORKS CITED

Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla,

and Gino Severini. “The Exhibitors to the Public.” In

Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio, 45–50. London:

Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Berghaus, Günter. “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On

Synaesthesia and the Idea of Total Work of Art.” Maske und

Kothurn 32.2 (1986): 7–28.

Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre

and Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

25 Suchan and Świca, Tadeusz Kantor, 58.

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Chrobak, Józef, and Carlo Sisi, eds. Tadeusz Kantor: Dipinti, disegni,

teatro. Exhibition catalogue. Rome: Edizioni di storia e

letteratura, 2002.

Depero: Dal Futurismo alla Casa d’Arte. Milan: Edizione Charta e MART,

1994.

Kantor, Tadeusz. A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos,

1944–1990. Edited by Michal Kobialka. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1993.

Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ Publications,

1986.

Miklaszewski, Krzysztof. Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor. London:

Routledge, 2002.

Pasini, Roberto. “Tropic of the Informel.” In The Informel Artists

from Pollock to Schumacher, edited by Susanne Anna, 113-119.

Bonn: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999.

Pioli, Richard J., ed. Stung by Salt and War: Creative Texts of the Italian

Avant-gardist F. T. Marinetti. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

Suchan, Jarosław, and Marek Świca, eds. Tadeusz Kantor, Interior of

Imagination. Cracow: Centre for the Documentation of the Art

of Tadeusz Kantor Cricoteka, 2005.

22

Schulz, Bruno. “A Treatise on Mannequins.” In Cinnamon Shops and

Other Stories. Translated by Celina Wieniewska, 48-62. London:

MacGibbon and Kee, 1963.