TADEUSZ KANTOR - Próby, tylko próby (Rehearsals, rehearsals only)

Number of disks: 1
Format: DVD
Region: 0 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.
Studio: Cricoteka (Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor)
Total time: 74 minutes
Format: 4:3
Audio: DD 2.0
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English

Film "Próby tylko próby" was created from almost 50-hours long video footage of rehearsals to Tadeusz Kantor and Cricot 2 Theater spectacle  "Dzis sa moje urodziny" (Today is my birthday). The rehearsals were registered between October 13, 1989 and December 7, 1990.

DVD Extras:

- Tadeusz Kantor's drawing to play  "Dzis sa moje urodziny"
- Tadeusz Kantor's text   to play  "Dzis sa moje urodziny"
- Tour itinerary and  bibliography to play  "Dzis sa moje urodziny"
- Selection of photographs by Romano Martinis from play  "Dzis sa moje urodziny"
- Chronology and bibliography of Tadeusz Kantor's life and art

About Tadeusz Kantor:

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) was once called "the best artist of the world from amongst Polish artists and the most Polish one from amongst artists of the world". Already during his life, some considered him a genius, and others a master of mystification or a clever imitator only. Today, no one should doubt that this artist, who passed away in 1990, was one of the greatest creators of the art of the twentieth century. Even though it is difficult to explain what the phenomenon of his imagination was based upon. He was a versatile artist; a "total" one as he used to say, thus it is very risky to divide his output into individual "disciplines". Being a painter, stage designer, poet, actor, and happener, he made a name for himself as a man of theatre, but even in the domain of it he remained first of all a painter who thought with images and used actors and props instead of paints.

Kantor's greatest achievement was The Cricot 2 Theatre. Its performances, beginning with The Dead Class (1975), attained the level of masterpiece. The unusual formula of his Theatre of Death consisted in creating artistic illustration for mechanisms of memory. Sequences of unreal pictures, snatches of memories, obtrusively returning scenes, and absurd situations: everybody knows this from his own experience. And all of us are confused in a similar way: series of painful resentments, daring longings, remembered fragments of sentences, comical scraps of the past. We are physical, and it appears that our memory and imagination are also physical. We do not exist without form; we think and even feel with images. And Kantor could show it on the stage. He created an unusually suggestive space in which the living and the dead have been mixed, where the shyest desires and most cruel experiences, i.e. war, love and crime, fear, passion and hatred have been revealed. On faded photographs of his family album, the personal biography intertwined with history, where national myths and private obsessions returned with tiresome echoes, like in the distorting mirror.

(bio courtesy of Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska and Cricoteka)

***

Tadeusz Kantor's Little Manifesto:

I wish to read to you, Ladies and Gentlemen, my Little Manifesto (I am still writing manifestos), which was written especially for this occasion.

Before I read it, however, to make it clearer will take the liberty to remind you that the fundamental (if I could use this pathetic word) idea behind my creative work has been and is the idea of reality, which I labeled the Reality of the Lowest Rank.

It can be used to explain my paintings, emballages, poor objects, and equally poor characters, who, like the Prodigal Son, return home after a long journey.
Today I would like to use the same metaphor to describe myself:

"It is not true that MODERN man has conquered fear. This is a lie! Fear exists. There is fear of the external world, of what the future will bring, of death, of the unknown, of nothingness, and of emptiness.

It is not true that artists are heroes and fearless victors, as we are led to believe by old legends and myths.

Believe me, they are poor and defenseless beings who chose to take their place opposite fear. It was a conscious act. It is in consciousness that fear is born. I am standing in front of you. I, the accused who is standing in front of harsh but just judges. And this is the difference between the dadaists, whose heir I am, and me.

"Please, get up!" cried the Grand Scoffer, Francis Picabia. "You are indicted."

And today I will correct this once impressive invocation: I am standing in front of you. I am the one who is accused and indicted.

I am supposed to justify myself and find evidence of, I do not know which, my innocence or my guilt.

I am standing in front of you, as I used to stand at the class desk... in the past..., and I am saying: I forgot I knew, I assure you, Ladies and Gentlemen..."