TADEUSZ KANTOR: Kenotic Theatrology and the "Reality of the Lowest Rank"

2. This inattentiveness is especially regrettable with regard to the analysis of theatrical creativity, where the expression of religious attitudes and preoccupations is not unusual. The relevancy of religious issues within the 20^th century theatre is abundantly clear when one considers developments that link Antonin Artaud, probably one of the most profound aesthetic thinkers of late modernity, and Peter Brook, the well-known founder of the "Centre of Theatrical Research" in Paris. While Artaud set the paradigms of a religious critique aiming at "en finir avec le jugement de dieu"[3] in order to prepare the irruption of a non-theistic revelation, Brook took a Gurdjieffien view of religion and stressed that "it is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep children good."[4] Between these two positions, there is a vast and mostly unexplored area of research, where earnest religious quests take place in intimate connection with the avant-gardes and their experimental work.

3. Significantly, in a country like Poland, so deeply marked by the conflicting world-views of Catholicism and Communism, Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski made major contributions to the theatrical avant-garde that proved to be in profound contradiction not only to each other, but to both of these world-views. Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1997), Kantor's younger colleague, created a so-called "poor theatre" characterized by its search of a "secularized sacrum"[5] and demanding from its actors the sort of total commitment usually expected from saintly men in traditional religions. Instead of the mercantile attitude of actors trying to "sell" themselves to a public, Grotowski propounded an ascetic via negativa[6] of acting by elimination. The "publico-tropism"[7] he aimed at purported that the actors take off the mask of everyday life and perform an act of total self-revelation. Offering himself as an "absolute gift"[8], the Grotowskian actor constitutes the antithesis of the prostitute, with whom nonetheless he has been identified for centuries. For Grotowski, who was well acquainted with India's philosophical traditions, the actor's mission is to embody a complete abandonment to something impossible to name, but describable as including both "the erotic and the charitable".[9]

4. In contrast to Grotowski's polycultural openness, Tadeusz Kantor (Wielopole 1915 – Kraków 1990) anchored his work almost exclusively in Western traditions. In his work as painter, author, stage designer, theatre director and producer Kantor was deeply influenced both by Dada iconoclasm and the aesthetic ideals of "Bauhaus" and constructivism. After initiating an underground theatre during World War II, Kantor founded in Kraków the experimental company Cricot 2 (1955), as well as the "Cricoteka" (1979), an institution charged with maintaining the archives of Kantor's work. With his piece "The Dead Class" Kantor began in 1975 a new and important phase of his work known as the "Theater of Death" that was to make him famous the world over. Kantor, who had dealt with the issue of death in several earlier plays,[10] passed away just before the first performance of his own last production, whose title - by a grim and perplexing coincidence - was: "Today Is My Birthday" (1991).[11]

5. Besides being a creative artist and theatre director, Kantor was a gifted writer. Throughout his life he developed his innovative ideas in manifestos and theoretical exposés that were to exercise a decisive influence on the theatre aesthetics of the late 20^th century. His conception of an autonomous stage was clearly inspired by Antonin Artaud's critique of the predominance of literary texts in theatre productions and by his inclusion of ritual and musical elements in the scenic work. Given Kantor's predilection for the surrealist pieces by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), it is not surprising that some of his later productions incorporated the techniques eventually used in connection with happenings. Key concepts of Kantor's aesthetics (such as "mental and reversed space", " 'zero' theatre", "room of memory" or "theory of negatives")[12] have become indispensable analytical instruments of contemporary theatrological discourse. The lectures he delivered in Italy in 1986, published under the title Milano Lessons[13], are generally regarded as Kantor's aesthetic summa. In correspondence with the main contentions of these Lessons, the following elaborations proceed on the assumption that the concept of "reality of the lowest rank"[14] - with its Neoplatonic and Christological connotations - plays a central role in Kantor's life-long meditations on the essence of theatre.

6. The distinctive blending of avant-garde engagements and religious preoccupations in Kantor's work could hardly be properly assessed without taking into consideration the biographical and idiosyncratic complexities that marked his ethnic and religious self-understanding. Characteristically, a standard German theatre lexicon assumes that "[h]is father was Jewish, his mother Catholic."[15] Although the fact of having a Jewish father - according to Halacha[16] - would not make Kantor a Jew, he was oftentimes regarded as such in intellectual and artistic circles both in Poland and in Germany. In consideration of such an unwarranted assumption, it is all the more relevant to underline that not even the Jewishness of his father can be taken for granted. Although the family name "Kantor" is shared in Poland by Jews and Gentiles alike, recent research by members of the "Crikoteka" in Kraków has established that the Kantors in Wielopole were exclusively Christian.[17] In addition, it is a well-known fact that Kantor's father belonged to a right-wing nationalistic party with such pronounced anti-Semitic policies that it demanded from its members a baptism certificate. If one excludes the possibility of Jewish family connections, Kantor's acknowledged acquaintance with Judaism can be at least partially explained by other biographical elements going back to his early childhood. Kantor, who saw his father only twice after World War I, lived his formative years with his mother in the household of his uncle, a Catholic priest with very "ecumenical" views for a Pole of his days. The fact that he regularly received the visits of the local rabbi undoubtedly had important repercussions throughout Kantor's life, since he declared in a conversation quoted by Joromir Jedlinski: "I grew up under the shadow of the Catholic Church and of the Synagoge."[18] Regardless of the question concerning the alleged Jewish ancestry or the demonstrable Jewish influences, there is no doubt about Kantor's final denominational allegiances. Despite his critical attitude to Christianity and although he remarried after divorcing his first wife, Kantor was buried as a son of the Roman Catholic church in a funeral ceremony in Kraków with an immense attendance.

7. Like Artaud, Grotowski or Brook, Kantor travelled extensively and came into contact with a wide range of religions and cultures. Unlike these creative artists, however, Kantor never showed any far-reaching interest in intellectual confrontation with non-occidental worldviews. He concentrated rather on the Jewish and Christian intellectual heritages as well as on the textual sources of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Especially noteworthy in this connection is his frequent recourse to the Aristotelian tradition of thought when dealing with the issue of trespassing the threshold from the visibility of forms toward the unknown side of reality, which he termed "matter". From this perspective, Kantor's main intellectual pursuit can be described as an aesthetic exploration of the relationship between ousia as morphe or "form" and ousia as ypokeimenon or "concrete substrate". Opposing conceptions of knowledge and understanding that concentrate exclusively on formal aspects and disregard real concreteness, Kantor undertakes the allegedly "impossible"[19] task of attaining the very principle that determines such concreteness. The principle in question, which Aristotle might have called prōte hyle, is "matter" in its primal state, i.e. devoid of all form and intelligibility. Since for Kantor, the progressive decrease of form in matter reveals the increasing richness of the potentialities that are inherent in matter, primal matter must be conceived of as the "non-being" that underlies, unmediated, the "reality of the lowest rank" and has, eventually, the potentiality to become anything whatsoever, including a work of art. In the context of Kantor's aesthetics, this "reality of the lowest rank" is embodied by the "discarded object" in its "poorest state"[20], for it most radically conveys the material "objectiveness" of an object as opposed to the refinement of forms and the art these forms have rendered possible throughout history. It is not by chance, that Kantor describes his own scenic method literally as "turned toward 'nothingness' ", and therefore as actually "impossible."[21] Although the "nothingness" of primal matter is not graspable in itself, it nonetheless marks the direction of Kantor's search for an "exponent and criterion of individuality"[22] beyond the normativity of inherited "forms". Against this background, it is not surprising that Kantor's insistence on the "In-formel" is essentially linked with his reflections on the "end of art" as represented by Kasimir Malewitsch or Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz [23]. Since according to these artists it is not the final product of art that counts, but the creative process and activity whose tokens are left behind as the so-called objets d´art, the creator in art is primarily concerned with the pure potentiality of matter as the actual source of his own creativity. Since any true artist manifests the "unformed" reality of Becoming through his own "forming" art, the tragic view of universal changeability proves to be the sine qua non of authentic art creation.[24]

8. Receding from the domain of "forms" and directing oneself toward primeval matter implies for Kantor a critical de-realisation of the sanctioned paradigms that define the objet d´art, the "'holy' illusion" or the "'holy' performance", with the aim to replace "the sublime aesthetic values" they represent by "the poor object" and "real space" [25]. Since the immobility of the art object in its final form is a "SACRUM"[26] alien to the human mind and thence a source of alienation, the reaction of the critical artist can take the form of "absurdity, protest, blasphemy [or] transgression"[27]. His intended "emancipation of reality" is based on the withdrawal of persons, actions and situations "from daily rituals" in order to incorporate them into the artistic sphere of "total freedom"[28]. Although such a freedom is considered an "impossibility" in everyday life, it can be attained, according to Kantor, in art as "process", on the condition that its material elements become "perfectly useless and disinterested"[29] and thus bereft of any pragmatic teleology. These insights underlie not only Kantor's far-reaching theatrological thesis that "the virtual UR-MATTER of theatre, its PURE ELEMENTS [are] INDEPENDENT! AUTONOMOUS!"[30] They are also at the basis of his conception of happenings and of what he termed "emballages"[31]. Not surprisingly, Kantor depicted the happening he presented in 1966 under the title "Emballage Humain" as being already "a pure ritual, bereft of all symbolism, an ostentative act."[32] The act of wrapping and concealing a "form" aims, in Kantor's view, at heightening perception of the material substrate which - devoid of its familiar visible traits - proves to be useless, aimless, and therewith autonomous. Seen in this light, the late modern rituals of Kantor do not intend to add or discover meaning through symbolic activity, but on the contrary, they seek to subtract meaning in order to confront the pure "objectiveness" of the given objects. Inasmuch as happenings renounce the traditional patterns of "illusion and imitation" in favour of "depicting reality via reality" [33], they are for Kantor basically "an attempt of catching [the object] in flagranti."[34] Since in this conception there is nothing to be "re-presented", the actions of a happening concentrate on the creation of "compartmental structures that entirely destroy[] all logical networks of reciprocal references."[35] By disconnecting the different layers of reality in a "happening", Kantorian happenings aim at bringing to a closer scrutiny the factuality of what is there to be seen. [36]

9. According to Kantor, contemporary theatre should be a place of fundamental transgression against its own history. Well aware that the alienating dichotomy of the sacred and the profane has found its way into the midst of theatrical activity, Kantor pleads for a critical "profanation"[37] that would abolish "the impenetrable limits between art and life."[38] Instead of functioning as "a sanctuary [...] separated from life and [...] dedicated to aesthetic experiences"[39], the theatre (and art in general) should turn against the "sacrosanct conventions of the work of art"[40] which do not admit reality as a fact within art, but only as fiction, reflection or "presentation" of something else. Far from creating illusions by "re-presenting" a text, the theatre is meant to be a place of disillusion and disenchantment brought about through non-mediated confrontations with reality. However, the intended immediacy of reality can only be attained by a process of de-realisation or subtraction of the frameworks and structures that distract from reality's essential poverty. In correspondence to his description of this process as "going beyond the threshold of the visible"[41], Kantor insists that, by principle, works of art should not be representational, but serve as "the base of a process of thought, of a spiritual procedure"[42]. Since, following Kantor's Aristotelian point of departure, the prōte hyle is a pure potentiality bereft of all "form" and thus not "visible", there is finally no contradiction between, on the one hand, Kantor's "great battle against the visible and the material"[43], and, on the other, the fact that his foremost quest as artist is to cope with the "ur-matter"[44]. In connection with the fundamental issue of invisibility, Kantor's postulates the highly significant thesis that the unity of "ur-matter", space and artistic act constitutes "an inexplicable mystery of the creative process"[45]. For Kantor, space is not a passive container, but energy which, having no form, creates all forms. In close analogy to the Cabbalistic Zimzum[46], this creative space is conceived of as a process of contraction and expansion by which the tensional relation of the forms called into being are regulated.[47] Ultimately, Kantorian space proves to be identical with the "ur-matter" of universal potentiality, and both "invisibilities" reveal themselves to the artist's introspection as the very essence of what is creative in him and through him. Against this background, Kantor envisions a theatre liberated from the constraints of mimēsis and thus capable of bearing witness to the autonomous "pre-existence" of the "ur-matter" of the scene.[48] On such a scene, the "actor" re-presents only himself. Strictly speaking, he is just a "player" ("joueur")[49] playing "within the space of NOTHINGNESS"[50].

10. While in real life travel occurs within the limits of geographical space, Kantor's travels are meant as wanderings through different spaces or levels of reality. His travel metaphors are generally used to describe the way introspection, conducing from the external world into the depths of memory and past experience, functions as the actual means of artistic creativity. Significantly, even life and art are regarded as an uninterrupted trip without end[51] in correspondence with the processual search after the "the void and the 'Zero' spheres"[52] of "poor reality". Hence, the wandering artist Kantor often depicts proves to be "the eternal wanderer", "being nowhere at home, having no place of his own and looking in vain for a harbour."[53] Since the wanderer's own exiled existence is the direct consequence of his paradigmatic rupture from his native community, his philosophy of life can be resumed in the ancient sapiential sentence: "omnia mea mecum porto"[54]. In a noteworthy elaboration on the relationship between the wanderer's original act of rebellion and the situation of the present-day artist, Kantor writes: "From the common realm of customary and religious rituals, common ceremonies, and common people's activities advanced SOMEONE who made the risky decision to BREAK with the ritualistic Community. He was not driven by conceit [...] to become an object of universal attention. This would have been too simplistic. Rather it must have been a rebellious mind, sceptical, heretical, free, and tragic, daring to remain alone with Fate and Destiny.[...] This ACT was undoubtedly seen as a disloyalty to the old ritualistic traditions and practices, as secular arrogance, as atheism, as dangerous subversive tendencies, as scandal, as amorality, as indecency [...]"[55] As a consequence of this daring move, "there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier."[56] In due course, this man, confronting his viewers from the stage, will become the eternal stranger and wanderer ever bereft of possessions. Even though he owns nothing, he appears as the great manipulator, for he is the performer of his own life's content. In a sense, this "eternal wanderer" becomes the very personification of the work of art inasmuch as it is capable of "transposing by its sole existence the whole surrounding reality into an unreal situation"[57]. Since such a wandering artist or artistic wanderer is not constrained by the superfluous "repetition" of reality in a "re-presentation", he is free to "use" and "take possession" of reality in a selfless and unpractical manner.[58] Lastly and most importantly, as an advocate of immediacy, he is the only "player" having the freedom to manipulate reality beyond the limits of its factitious and ensnaring mediations.[59]

11. The never-ending path to the "impossible state" of the "void" or the "Zero sphere" is a quest toward "the quintessence of life"[60] as opposed to stylisation, glamour and pathetic. Kantor's assertion that his "method" is "turned toward 'nothingness'"[61] implies his intent of "destroying [illusion] interminably"[62]. Therfore, far from cancelling reality, this method is supposed to lead to its actual core. As afore mentioned, this core manifests itself most pregnantly at the level where reality is less "in-formed" and therefore close to its unceasing inception from nothingness. Thus, attention has to be constantly directed to the "WRETCHED OBJECT"[63], to the "DISCARDED OBJECT, WHICH IS AT THE THRESHOLD OF BEING THROWN OUT, WHICH IS USELESS, GARBAGE [...]".[64] What Kantor at first called the "POOR OBJECT", appears later on in his work in the radicalised form of the "THE REALITY OF THE LOWEST RANK"[65], about which he explicitly states that "it was and is the fundamental [...] thought of my work."[66] Since the traditional pose of the artist as hero and fearless conqueror proves to be utterly inadequate in the midst of "poor" reality arising from the void, the lucid artist acknowledges that "defencelessness is his destiny" and consequently chooses "his place in front of the dreadful [Angst]" [67], a step away from nothingness. By principle, the spiritual movement leading to the perception of "poor reality" is fostered by the critical disillusionment concerning the alleged advantages of power. Thus, an essential aspect of the Kantorian "DISINTEGRATION OF ILLUSION ITSELF"[68] is constituted by the insight into the powerlessness of power in dealing with nothingness.[69] When considering the fundamental structure of Kantor's programmatic descent towards naught, one can hardly avoid being reminded of comparable structures present in the nascent Christology of the New Testament. In one of the most terse expressions of kenotic thought, the author of the epistle to the Philippians depicts with synoptic conciseness the kernel of the incarnational drama of Jesus Christ as a process of estrangement from his godly form leading to his consequent degradation toward humanity.[70] Significantly, the term used to describe this divine "becoming other" is derived from the Greek verb kenoō, "to become void, empty or vacant". According to this pattern of thought, the "Son" departs from the fullness of the "Father" in order to bring fallen Creation back to its origin. The scheme in question is easily recognizable as a Christian (re)interpretation of the Neo-platonic triad consisting of monos, proodos, and epistrophē : The "One" falls out from itself and goes its "way" (hodos) opposite to its original fullness in order to perform at the extreme of emptiness a return to its source enriched by the experience of having become "an-other".[71] In analogy to the metaphysical and sotereological accomplishments of the proodos and its Christian parallel, the Kantorian artist chooses to move toward the "void" in order to experience the "otherness" of reality at its inception and henceforth "re-constitute" the world in accordance to the virtualities envisioned by imagination as opposed to the constraints of the given. Differing from the Christological theologumenon of the logos incarnate, however, Kantor´s kenotic artist is neither an "embodiment" of the overcoming of the kenon nor its "iconic" representation. Strictly speaking, he remains a man ever striving after what Kantor called the "agonal condition"[72]. By struggling with the threats of the void in the immediacy of "poor" reality, the quintessential artist is enriched by an experience of his finitude that empowers him to re-create through imagination a world open to its own possibilities.

12. After having earnestly proclaimed "the death of art", Kantor stresses in one of his earliest texts, that "from now on" there is nothing else to do, but "to turn to REALITY itself without a mediator."[73] Since the need to reach immediacy proves to be one of the decisive leitmotivs throughout Kantor's work, it is not surprising that the issue dominates his description of the "first actor" who broke with "the ritualistic Community" and produced a "metaphysical shock"[74] by presenting himself (and not: "re-presenting" somebody else!) in the nudity of his existence. Having taken the risk of placing himself "outside"[75] the communal group by rejecting the rites and mediations of religion, the artist is capable of a metaphysical confrontation that would eventually make his "art [...] an answer to reality"[76] devoid of illusions. In this connection, Kantor points out: "The more tragic this reality is, / the stronger is the 'inner' dictate to / provide an answer, / to create / a 'different' reality [...]."[77]
Since the agonal condition of man is the warrant of his creativity, Kantorian art entails an act of severance or rupture with regard to religion as a fiducial system of mediation. Strictly speaking, Kantorian art marks the "end of religion" if "re-ligion” is understood as a process of ontological reintegration in (or reconciliation with) a supposed source of salvation. Kantor's texts make it clear that such a revocation of religion is pari passu a rebellion against the prosaic "reality of life"[78], for it constitutes a "transgression [...] so alien and unbelievable that it / could be perceived as / THE IMPRINT OF AN ACTIVITY FROM THE "OTHER / WORLD," / from the other side."[79] Obviously Kantor is not hinting here at a Platonic world of pre-existing ideas functioning as paradigms of mimēsis, but at an unprecedented irruption of a deranging art coming from the virtualities of "matter" in order to reconstitute reality in "the time of poetry"[80]. As Kantor stresses, "th[e] process of / creating a different, /other / reality whose freedom is not / bound by the laws of any system of life, / or the act itself, which is like a demiurge's act / or a dream, / is the aim of art."[81] Correspondingly, Kantorian theatre proves to be "the place that reveals – as some fords in the river do – the traces of transition from "that other side" into our life".[82]