Death Imitates Art: Kantor's Funeral

I sometimes think of the theatre performances that I could have seen, had I known about them. Most of these were from when I was a teenager. I lived about 40 minutes from Manhattan by car and could have seen a lot. But my idea of theatre was limited to what was happening on Broadway. My dad was a violinist in the pit of several Broadway shows, so that was our theatre world.

But now, I am speaking specifically of Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class, which premiered in Poland in 1975, which played in New York in 1976, and which I did not see. I was 18 at the time. And my infatuation with non-mainstream theatre had yet to be ignited.

Tadeusz Kantor, born in 1915, poet, painter, designer, theatre maker, theoretician, was the great Renaissance man of 20th Century Poland. 

Tadeusz Kantor

Kantor was one of the most esteemed and influential artists Poland has ever produced. He has been compared to Andy Warhol, not in style or philosophy, but in the impact that he had on the culture, personally as well as artistically. His life was a work of art.

And he has been written about and dissected as deeply as Picasso, Stravinsky or Martha Graham.

He went through many theatrical phases, the last and most celebrated was his Theatre of Death, which is marked by themes of death and memory. Kantor has stated that, “Life can be expressed in art only by means of the absence of life, by way of references to DEATH.” The most famous piece from this period was The Dead Class, presented at his theatre, Cricot2. Adults visit the classroom of their youth, with life-sized dolls on their backs, representing the children that they once were. They are incapable of returning to the past. As theatrologist Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz put it: “The mechanisms of memory try in vain to furnish this dead space.”

The Dead Class poster, which hangs on the wall of our dining room.

For those of you who don’t know, Kantor appeared in his productions, on stage, playing himself, much like a musical conductor for an orchestra. He would cue the actors on, conduct the next beat, and would be the magician, who conjured up what you were watching. He referred to The Dead Class as a séance. His presence on stage in the majority of his plays was iconic. After he passed away, his company performed their last piece without him on stage. But they said that it wasn’t the same.

The Dead Class (Kantor on the right in white)

And stories of his extreme behavior off stage are as famous as the work he produced.

There are many infamous Kantor stories. A Polish dramaturg told me that she took a university class taught by Kantor and he would regularly bail on his students. The students would show up for class and Kantor would not be in the room. They then had to hunt all around Krakow for him until they found him. “How did you know where to find him?” I asked. Her response: “We know his tricks.”

Another story goes that Kantor went to Paris to accept an award from the French, and he insulted France in his acceptance speech. And the award was from the French. He said in his speech that there were no artists in France, only “craftsman-bureaucrats.” To the French. Wow.

In fact, there are so many, that there’s actually a webpage devoted to them. As reported in Culture.pl:

“Kantor's legendary rages – caused by members of his troupe, hotel staff, festival organizers, representatives of cities that hosted Cricot2, or anyone who just happened to be nearby – can now be regarded as artistic happenings in their own right.

Actress Lila Krasicka started choking and became unresponsive before a performance in Brussels in 1977 and ambulance was called for. A company member relates:

“Pale, barely breathing, she is choking on air and her hands are falling. She seems to go stiff, and her eyes are rolling. The three of us burst into the hall. And there, we hear Kantor: 'She’s an idiot! She’s had the idea of dying, now!' A moment of silence, and then, 'One isn’t allowed to die before the premiere!'“

The actress recovered, by the way.

In November of 1990, I was doing theatre research in Poland and I was based in Krakow, home to Kantor’s theatre. The big thing in Poland at the time was to create a theatre museum where a visitor could see costumes, photos, videos and dramaturgy from past productions. Every theatre had one. And so every day I went to the archive at Cricot2, which was called Cricoteka, to read scholarly articles and watch videos of all of his shows. His company was performing nothing at that time, but Kantor was preparing and rehearsing a new piece entitled Today Is My Birthday. 

Whenever I went to Cricoteka, which was just about every day, Kantor himself was always there, working in the next room, and I could watch him through the open doorway. He was 75, and moved slowly in the black suit he always wore.

I saw all of his Theatre of Death work at the archive: The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and I Shall Never Return.

The works were not subtitled, and I was struck by a couple of things. One was that he worked with the same group of actors for years, including the identical twin brothers Leslaw and Wacław Janicki. I was also struck by the use of procession in almost all his works. The procession is a ritual act. And these were all, in some ways, rituals of death.

After a month of visits to Cricoteka, at the beginning of December, I learned that Kantor had died. Black placards were put up all over Krakow, to announce the news. This was a new sight for me, but a custom in Poland.

Death notice / Photo by Witold Górka

It was a gray, chilly day as I was one of hundreds, standing in Krakow cemetery for the funeral of Tadeusz Kantor.

In the murky distance, two white horses approached the cemetery pulling a black, 19th-century hearse across the cobblestones. As the carriage entered the  graveyard, I could see Kantor’s acting company walking behind the carriage. The same actors that I had seen day in and day out on film at the Cricoteka. The were dressed in the customary black, but so had they been in the performances of his plays. This was his family. 

Kantor’s hearse on the streets of Krakow. Photo by Witold Górka

The top-hatted driver halted the horses which stomped and exhaled in the mist, before settling into a reverent silence. An attendant walked around though the dense, hazy air and opened the back of the hearse. The actors then removed the casket containing the great artist and hoisted it shoulder high. Actors and casket slowly trudged to the burial spot, led by the Janicki twins, in the final ritual of death in which the great director would himself take part.

The surrealism of the event – in which the man who created the Theatre of Death was buried in procession by his acting company – transformed the ceremony into something greater, more profound and enigmatic. It was just as if I was watching one of his plays. I could not fully take it all in. It was like mirrors reflecting each other into infinity. Or a painting of a painting within a painting, and on and on and on.

Actors Leslaw and Wacław Janicki bear Kantor’s casket
Photo by Witold Górka

It was life.

It was death.

And, there was no mistaking that it was theatre.