A unique record of Tadeusz Kantor's play "Wielopole, Wielopole" made by Stanislaw Zajaczkowski for Polish TV at the "Sokol" Hall in Cracow, December 1983.
TADEUSZ KANTOR
Wielopole, Wielopole
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: 68 minutes
Format: 4:3
Audio: DD 2.0
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English
A unique record of Tadeusz Kantor's play "Wielopole, Wielopole" made by Stanislaw Zajaczkowski for Polish TV at the "Sokol" Hall in Cracow, December 1983.
Review:
Tadeusz Kantor is a theater conceptualist - director, playwright, painter, scenic designer and theoretician. This creative interrelationship of artistic disciplines within a single individual may help explain the spellbinding impact of ''Wielopole Wielopole.'' In its American premiere at La Mama Annex, this new theater piece represents the second New York visit of Mr. Kantor's internationally celebrated Cricot 2 company. In 1979, the troupe appeared at La Mama with the equally haunting ''The Dead Class.''
Wielopole is the name of the director's hometown in Poland, and at its heart, his play is made up of scenes from his life and from the life of his country over decades of dislocation and disenchantment. Though the play is intended to be personal and apolitical, we cannot watch it without thinking about the state of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
The director operates in a theater of images, ritual and repetition, and what is not actually repeated is often re-evoked in a motif or as a visual metaphor, or is seen again in transformation. A portrait camera, pointed at a subject, suddenly becomes a Tommy gun spewing bullets. A sad wanderer holds a hurdy-gurdy that resembles a small funeral casket.
The evening is nonlinear, apparently nonscripted, and it is performed in Polish, but it communicates with visual and aural imagery. Mr. Kantor uses his actors not only as instruments but also as raw material, and as a mark of identity, he is on stage with them during the entire performance. In the creation of his art, he acts as his own choreographer, conductor and stagehand. The scenes are his midnight visions, and he is articulating the actors into action.
At first, he is motionless, with a mournful mien, but soon he moves scenery and people, shifting a chair and correcting the stance of a human form. He is like a sculptor installing an environment in a gallery. Nodding his head or snapping his fingers, he gives the beat to his actors and to his sound technicians. He is a sorcerer entreating us to enter his subconscious.
Memories of childhood begin with a room, populated by a father and mother, twin uncles with deadpan Ben Turpin expressions and a woman with a passion for cleaning up after incidents of violence. The actors walk woodenly like figures in a silent movie run at the wrong speed.
Death is omnipresent. On one side of the stage is a corpse, on the other a newly mounded grave. Doors open and a regiment of soldiers appear, marching stiffly in close-order drill. The militia is putty colored - from their faces to their uniforms. They are expressionless, ambulatory mummies, or, in Mr. Kantor's words, ''painful figures immobilized in the face of death.'' The cast is expanded with the addition of life-size dummies, a mirror image of the robotlike people. A country priest - whey-faced and somber - is shadowed by his puppet double.
The parents are married by the priest, the father is conscripted and the mother is brutally attacked by the soldiers - there are episodes of narrative but no story line. The evening is meant to be received, not analyzed. One should watch ''Wielopole'' as one might study a surrealistic landscape - and surrealism is clearly an indelible influence on the author-director. As the figures emerge from behind doors and walls, one is also reminded of the C.S. Lewis children's book ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.'' On the other side of Mr. Kantor's wardrobe, there is a world of phantasm.
Music, also cued by the director, underscores the alternating currents of the evening - a military march, lightly fingered Chopin, a psalm sung by Polish villagers that begins to sound like an African chorus and a hurdy-gurdy lament.
The play is filled with religious symbolism. A cross as tall as a telephone pole repeatedly appears as man's burden on earth. People and dummies crowd around a table for an interrupted Last Supper. In one of the most frightening images, a Jewish woman is arrested by soldiers. Mr. Kantor gives the firing order, and she is shot. She falls, then rises. Again he gives the order - and again - until the repeated discharge becomes an endless echo of faceless inhumanity. ''Wielopole Wielopole,'' at La Mama through May 23, is an inspired and atavistic work of performance art.
(Review courtesy of Mel Gussow and The New York Times. All rights reserved. Published May 16, 1982, Sunday.)
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..."
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