Tadeusz Kantor in Spain Spain
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Scene from Marta
Carrasco’s J’arrive...! (2005).
Photograph courtesy of the artist’s
archive.
ARTICLE
42
Tadeusz Kantor in Spain
by María J. Sánchez Montes
CIT A T ION INFOR MA T ION
María J. Sánchez Montes, ‘Tadeusz Kantor in Spain’, in Tadeusz Kantor’s
Memory: Other pasts, other futures, ed. by Michal Kobialka & Natalia
Zarzecka (London: PTP, 2015).
K E Y W OR D S
Tadeusz Kantor
Cricot 2
Spanish theatre
CONT R IBUT OR S
María J. Sánchez Montes (author), Michal Kobialka (editor), Natalia
Zarzecka (editor), Duncan Jamieson (general editor), Adela Karsznia
(general editor), Richard Gough (consortium editor)
Spanish playwriting
Wielopole, Wielopole
Today is My Birthday
COP Y R IGHT
Jerónimo López Mozo
Copyright © 2014 PTP and the individual contributors. All rights
reserved. Images in this publication are protected with Digimarc®
Guardian watermarks containing copyright and usage information.
La infanta de
Velázquez
L ICE NCE
José Luis Alonso de
Santos
All Rights Reserved
El album familiar
L A NGUA GE S
La Zaranda
English
P UBL ISHING SE R IE S
https://culturehub.co/works/Tadeusz_Kantor_in_Spain
Mariameneo,
Mariameneo
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Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP)
Vinagre de Jerez
P UBL ISHE R
Perdonen la tristeza
Polish Theatre Perspectives is an imprint of TAPAC: Theatre and
Performance Across Cultures; this title is co-published with the
Grotowski Institute and the Centre for Performance Research (CPR).
Marta Carrasco
Aiguardent
Blanc d’ombra
D OI
10.15229/ptpcol.2015.kantor.14
FOR MA T S & ID E NT IFIE R S
Mira’m
José Monleón
Online ISBN 978-1-910203-04-0
Primer Acto
P A R T NE R S A ND SP ONSOR S
Spanish Civil War
TAPAC (publisher), Grotowski Institute (publisher), CPR (publisher)
posguerra
P UBL ICA T ION D A T E
2015-01-01
Spanish Independent
Theatre
FIR ST P UBL ISHE D ONL INE
Diego Velázquez
2014-10-20
Las Meninas
Sara Molina
María José Sánchez Montes is a tenured professor at the
University of Granada, Spain, where she teaches Literary
Theory and Theatre Studies. She obtained her PhD in 2001
with a dissertation later published as El cuerpo como signo.
La transformación de la textualidad en el teatro contemporánea
(The Body as Sign: The transformation of the text in
contemporary theatre, 2004). Her current research
interests include Federico García Lorca’s Yerma in
performance, the theatre director Sara Molina, and the
presence and influence of Tadeusz Kantor in Spain. Since
2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural
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2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural
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programme, founding an international university theatre
festival and overseeing more than 200 cultural events each
year.
“Kantor: [...] ¿Sabe Infanta? Hoy es mi
cumpleaños.
El último…”
“Kantor: [...] You know, Infanta? Today is
my birthday.
My last…”
Jeronimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (1999)[1]
These are the final words of La infanta de Velázquez
(Velázquez’s Infanta), a play by Jerónimo López Mozo –
1998 National Playwright Award laureate and one of Spain’s
foremost living dramatists – in which Tadeusz Kantor
appears as a principal character. Given Kantor’s ambiguous
presence on the ‘threshold’ of his own haunting
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performances up until his death in 1990 (during rehearsals
for the playfully titled Today Is My Birthday), it is perhaps
surprising that he would have to wait almost a decade to be
revived onstage – albeit as a figure in a fictionalised setting,
‘celebrating’ posthumously and acutely conscious of his own
mortality. And this in a play written, though never
performed, in Spanish. From today’s perspective, it could be
considered a clear, if little remarked, example of the
powerful influence that Kantor has exerted on many
Spanish theatre practitioners during the past three decades,
through his performances as well as his writings.
This essay explores for the first time the broader impact of
Kantor’s thought and practice on Spanish playwrights,
directors, and ensembles. After introducing the Spanish
theatrical context that emerged in the post-Civil War
period, I will offer an overview of Kantor’s performances
there from 1981 to 1991, as well as an assessment of how
his ideas – as published in Spanish-language periodicals and
other publications – took root in Spain.[2] It is hoped that
this effort will contribute to the twin tasks of recovering
certain neglected aspects of Spanish stage history and, more
specifically, of improving our overall understanding of the
international impact made by Kantor’s oeuvre in a country
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rarely associated with his name and sphere of influence.
During the 1940s and ’50s, when the Festival d’Avignon,
Piccolo Teatro, Berliner Ensemble, and Royal Shakespeare
Company (then the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre) had
come to be viewed as emblematic examples of theatre arts in
their respective European countries, Madrid’s Lope de Vega
Company began to set the tone for national theatre in Spain.
Although the company’s work under the leadership of José
Tamayo had many merits, its achievements were connected
more with the enhancement of the zarzuela genre and
innovations in scenic and lighting design than with
modernising tendencies in acting and directing practice,
much less with theoretical approaches to
performance.[3] These differing points of focus serve to
highlight a major contrast between developments on the
Spanish stage and much of the experimental theatre
practised elsewhere in Europe at the time. Franco’s near
forty-year dictatorship isolated the country culturally from
the larger European context and relegated much Spanish
theatre to pre-war standards of commercialism and
provincial populism. While the earlier attempts of Ramón
María del Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca to renew
the Spanish drama and theatre scene at the turn of the
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century cannot be overlooked, it is important to note that
their successes were limited in scope and did not account
for the reality of most theatre performed in Spain during
the ensuing decades.
In order to begin tracing Kantor’s significance for Spanish
practitioners, it is necessary to describe briefly the situation
of Spanish theatre in the long aftermath of the Spanish Civil
War (1936-39), and especially during the transitional period
that followed Franco’s death in 1975, which saw many
emerging directors and authors becoming absorbed with
Kantor’s theoretical and aesthetic proposals. The post-war
years and period of dictatorship (1940-75) saw the majority
of Spanish theatre focused on forms of popular and comedic
performance that foregrounded the officially sanctioned,
predominantly bourgeois values. However, it should be
noted that this mostly conservative theatre coexisted with
various attempts to undermine it. In particular, I refer to
movements towards realist drama and experimental
theatre, both of which emerged in Spain in the 1950s.
Within the first group, we should emphasize Antonio Buero
Vallejo and his play Historia de una escalera (Story of a
Staircase, 1949), which occupies a similar role in the
Spanish context to those of the late nineteenth-century
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naturalist theatre manifestos elsewhere in Western
Europe.[4] Lauro Olmo, José Martín Recuerda, and Alfonso
Sastre are other key figures who, continuing along the path
forged by Vallejo, formed the core of the social-realist
movement of the 1960s, which tasked itself with
maintaining resistance to the official culture.
The Franco regime had made it tremendously difficult to
place Spanish theatre in direct dialogue with the European
avant-garde, by imposing official constraints on various
cultural practices. Still, the dictatorship could never succeed
fully in isolating Spaniards from productions that, despite
or indeed because of the challenge they posed to the
dominant tradition, would later come to be seen as integral
to their stage heritage. Indeed, starting in the 1960s, and
developing alongside theatre productions of an obviously
traditional hue, Spanish audiences slowly began to gain
access to new kinds of performances marked by engagement
with ritual practices rather than by a focus on textual
interpretation. Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter
Brook, and Eugenio Barba were the names most commonly
referenced by directors and ensembles interested in pushing
the stage arts towards new frontiers of experimentalism.
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practitioners from abroad were particularly evident
throughout their productions included Adolfo Marsillach,
Víctor García, Salvador Távora, Francisco Nieva, Fabiá
Pigserver, Lluís Pasqual, Miguel Romero Esteo, Luis Riaza,
and the groups Tábano, Els Comediants, Esperpento, and
Els Joglars. Any historical understanding of post-war
innovations in Spanish theatre would be incomplete without
considering, for example, Marsillach’s Marat/Sade (1968),
García’s Las criadas (1969) or Yerma (1971), Távora’s Quejío
(1971), Esperpento’s Farsa y licencia de la reina castiza
(1969), Tábano’s Castañuela 70 (1970), or Comediants’ Non
plus plis (1972). However, these productions all debuted
prior to the inception of a democratic government in Spain,
in conditions that severely limited the possibilities for
international dialogue.
Without attempting to cover in these few paragraphs every
aspect of the recent history of Spanish theatre – nor even of
the period immediately following the dictatorship – we
should note that these practitioners nonetheless represent
a set of extraordinary efforts made to ‘catch up’ with the
rest of the Europe, by diversifying the tastes of the Spanish
theatregoing public. Their productions were evidently
informed by practical investigations emergent elsewhere on
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the continent. Each departed from bourgeois models of
representation, each engaged in dialogue with the aesthetics
developed by peers around Europe, and each ultimately
helped prepare the ground so that later, other international
artists such as Kantor could be not only seen but also
understood in Spain.
Although some had become familiar with Kantor’s work well
before his productions arrived in Spain, it was not until the
1980s that Kantor was to make a significant, ‘direct’ impact
in Spanish theatre circles. The reception of his
performances and theories during Spain’s celebrated
transición to democracy must be understood in the context
of a wider theatrical ‘explosion’ that ushered in freedoms of
expression for which Spaniards had long thirsted. A new
openness regarding theatre management, censorship
policies, project selection, and design practices took hold
quickly and inexorably, and was shown most clearly in public
theatre programming. Festivals were organized throughout
the country during the 1980s, and many Spanish
playwrights had their work performed for the first time
after years of dictatorship, thus leading to an improved
quality and range of repertoire and many visually stunning
performances that continue to be studied and remarked by
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critics (Kantor’s notable among them).
A selection of Kantor’s writings was first published in
Spanish in 1971 in Primer Acto, a theatre periodical driven
by the indefatigable José Monleón, who has remained at the
journal’s helm since 1957.[5] Monleón dedicated a special
issue section to the work of Kantor and the Cricot 2
ensemble following their participation in that year’s World
Theatre Festivalin Nancy.[6] On the group’s production of
Witkacy’s The Water Hen, the issue included a glowingly
positive review by Ángel Facio, theatre director and special
correspondent to the Festival.[7] However, after this initial
incursion of Kantor materials onto the Spanish theatre
scene, another decade would pass before local audiences
had the chance to witness the performances themselves. On
the initiative of the Centro Dramático Nacional, 1981 saw
the first staging of Kantor’s work in Spain, with Wielopole,
Wielopole. The production was interpreted by Monleón as a
cultural-political act par excellence. Indeed, the committed
response of this seasoned critic on viewing the performance
provides a key gauge of its impact, as evidenced in his bold
claims that Wielopole, Wielopole constituted a ‘new kind of
event’, and that all previous occasions or self-styled
attempts to revolutionalize the Spanish theatre had been
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merely ‘incidental’ by comparison. According to Monleón,
prior to Kantor’s arrival, a few groups of the calibre of Cricot
2 had made sporadic forays that held the potential to spark
more widespread reforms in Spain, but never with the
continuity or scope needed to prompt a genuine avant-garde
movement. Or else not with the impact that Monleón
considered might awaken in Spanish audiences a more
expansive sensitivity to body, image, and composition
onstage. Instead, the dramatic text and the spectacle had
historically reasserted themselves as primary concerns
across the spectrum of theatre arts and genres. As Monleón
commented in the context of Kantor’s arrival: ‘[Spain is] a
country where literature, the moral or political message, the
“carpentry” of the dramatic action, the profile of the actors
or the elaborateness of the production still tend to count for
everything…’[8]
To this broad yet apt assessment of the Spanish theatre of
the period, we may add some further observations
concerning the particular legacy of Kantor, whose work
would become seminal for many artists in the region over
the ensuing decade. Firstly, the growing presence of Kantor
and certain other experimental artists could not counter the
widespread perception that theatre programming continued
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to have an incidental rather than essential relationship to
local innovation. In this regard, the scholar José Antonio
Sánchez, in his essay ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación
escénica contemporánea en España’ (The Origins and
Context of Theatrical Creativity in Spain), expresses his
surprise that Kantor’s presence in Spain, while resonating
widely in a relatively short period of time, did not prompt an
enduring institutional shift. Situating Kantor’s work in the
context of a general regress toward a more traditionalist
state of affairs, Sánchez writes:
The ferment of those years, full of anxiety and hope on
both the political and cultural levels, can be seen in the
plurality of theatre programming [...] and, most
strikingly from our current perspective, in the
presentation of performances rooted in specific visual
or corporeal dramas, such as Wielopole, Wielopole, by
Tadeusz Kantor; Lindsay Kemp’s adaptation of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; Laetius by Els Joglars; and
Marcel Marceau. Evolución de las ‘Pantomimas de estilo’
(Marcel Marceau: Evolution of the Pantomimes de style),
or Juan sin miedo y antología (Juan, Without Fear and
Anthology) by La Claca.[9]
Considering the debilitated state of recent Spanish theatre –
which Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla has aptly characterized for the
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most part (across both publicly and privately funded
institutions) as politically, socially, and intellectually
innocuous and ‘anodyne’ – I would add that Kantor’s arrival
on the Spanish stage constituted an especially striking event
that unfortunately has no parallel on the contemporary
scene.[10] Nonetheless, as I attempt to demonstrate below,
even that somewhat incidental and discontinuous presence
allowed a handful of Spanish authors and directors to
incorporate Kantor-inspired dramaturgies into their work.
Followers of Kantor know well that 1976 was the year that
brought international renown to Cricot 2 thanks to the
touring performances of The Dead Class (1975). Yet it was
not until 1981 that one of the company’s productions would
be performed in Spain. Wielopole, Wielopole, for reasons we
are now in a better position to examine, is still remembered
as a watershed moment in Spanish theatre history. In
connection with the touring performances of this
production, Primer Acto would dedicate a whole issue to
Kantor, naming issue 189 Kantor entre nosotros (Kantor
Among Us) and publishing a full-page photograph of the
director, followed by forty pages of coverage of the events
programme associated with his visit. Aside from a Cricot 2
chronology prepared by Monleón, the special issue included
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an interview with Kantor by José Luis Alonso de Santos and
Monleón, the already translated ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot
2?’ (What is the Cricot 2 Ensemble?) by Kantor, along with
his ‘El teatro de la muerte’ (The Theatre of Death), and a
review of Wielopole, Wielopole.[11] Most of the articles had
been re-compiled from Kantor-related materials linked to
his performances that summer during the fifth Festival
Internacional de Teatro de Caracas, where Kantor had
staged the production now being received by Spanish
audiences. Several prominent figures from Spanish theatre
circles had duly made the trip to Venezuela, among them
Monleón and the influential writer and theatre director
Alonso de Santos.
Following the ‘event’ of Kantor’s theatre debut in Spain, his
contact with the region progressed during several
appearances by him and/or Cricot 2 during the course of the
next decade. Aside from its inaugural performances at
Madrid’s Teatro María Guerrero and at the Festival
Internacional de Vitoria-Gasteiz (October 1981), Wielopole,
Wielopole was presented later in Valencia and Mallorca
(March 1983), and in Barcelona and Santander (March and
July 1987). Audiences had the chance to see The Dead Class
in Barcelona (March 1983), then in Murcia, Las Palmas,
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Seville, and Madrid (March to April 1984), and finally in
Pamplona and Zaragoza (April 1991). The Spanish premiere
of Let the Artists Die took place in Madrid’s Sala Olimpia
(March 1986), with subsequent performances in Barcelona
(March 1987) and Bilbao (May 1987). I Shall Never Return
was performed in Mallorca (October 1988) and in Barcelona
and Madrid (March to April 1989). Finally, Today Is My
Birthday came to Spain during the Eighth Festival de Otoño
in 1991, a year after Kantor’s death. Indeed, this final
production by Kantor closed the cycle of Cricot 2’s
productions in Spain.
In assessing this series’ impact among local theatre
practitioners, it is important to consider the many
differences in their respective profiles and in the ways in
which Kantor’s influence manifested itself in their work.
Prominent among those who took direct inspiration from
Kantor and Cricot 2 were authors and directors who, though
early in their careers, were already well-established artists.
Here I refer to two such figures already mentioned above:
Alonso de Santos, whose El album familiar (The Family
Album, 1981) appeared shortly after he met Kantor and saw
Wielopole, Wielopole; and López Mozo, who also met Kantor
in the early 1980s but experienced a longer gestation period
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with his ideas, displaying his influence almost two decades
later with La infanta de Velázquez.
The name Alonso de Santos is intimately linked to the
Independent Theatre movement during the period of the
Francoist dictatorship and to the directorship of Madrid’s
Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (National Classical
Theatre Company) from 2000 to 2004.[12] Among the more
than twenty dramas written by Alonso de Santos, many of
which he also personally directed, we can make special
mention of La estanquera de Vallecas (The Tobacconist of
Vallecas) and Bajarse al moro (officially translated as Going
Down in Morocco). Following his initial exposure to Kantor’s
writings and debut within the Spanish-language theatre
context, Alonso de Santos wrote and directed El album
familiar, which premiered on 26 October 1982 at the Centro
Dramático Nacional, Teatro María Guerrero, in
Madrid.[13] The play had been written in the summer of
1981 during the Caracas festival, where Alonso de Santos
had the opportunity to see Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole
ahead of its tour to Spain. The original manuscript is located
in the author’s personal archive and begins with the
following words:
In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,
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In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,
or Tadeusz Kantor, to enter or better to leave, opening
the door of the nursery, latent images of my past, not
as they were (which is impossible!), but as they are
stored in different places in my mind. It is not a
confession, it is a search for a true foundation (not
what I have fabricated with my artificial
remembrances).[14]
It is notable that although Wielopole, Wielopole triggered the
writing of El album familiar, this particular family album
awakens in its young protagonist memories of a past left
behind in a manner that also echoes Kantor’s inspiration for
another of his productions, The Dead Class.[15]
El album familiar could be considered an exercise in cultural
remembering emerging from the Francoist posguerra (postwar period). A family photo album given to the protagonist
before he begins a journey away from his family and his past
becomes the starting point for a journey through time,
through diachronic modalities of memory. Alonso de Santos
uses the stage not only as a site for personal remembrance
but as a cultural witnessing to the impact of war and
destruction. Several features common to Kantor’s work are
also interwoven in Alonso de Santos’ play: explorations of
the temporalities of remembering, staging memory as a
historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the
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historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the
stage; all set against the background of the Spanish Civil
War. In El album familiar, the dead assist in reconstructing
the past and in shifting the protagonist's selfunderstanding. But while this play shares certain
fundamental aspects of Kantor’s poetics, unlike Kantor’s
own ‘texts’ – which were prepared according to the logic of
musical partytury (scores) – Alonso de Santos’ work more
closely resembles a conventional dramatic script. As Michal
Kobialka indicates, for Kantor – perhaps due to his visual
arts background – ‘the process of staging a drama did not
signify [...] the process of interpreting the text or finding its
stage equivalent’.[16] Despite the influence of Kantor’s
thematic and aesthetic concerns during the writing
process, Alonso de Santos remains largely within his familiar
genre. It is interesting to speculate whether this text would
maintain the same Kantorian connections if staged by
another director. Nonetheless, most critics, with the
exception of Monleón, did not explore the Kantorian
connections when the play premiered, and this feature was
downplayed in the majority of reviews.
López Mozo’s link to Kantor first materialized directly in La
infanta de Velázquez: a play written in 1999, recognised with
an award in 2000, and published in 2001, though not yet
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staged. The text is clearly a self-styled homage to Kantor,
especially to the trajectory of his central theatrical ideas and
performances, all of which have a prominent place in López
Mozo’s narratives. The action is drawn from Kantor’s visit to
the Prado Museum on his first visit to Spain, and specifically
from the profound impact that Diego Velázquez’s paintings
had on him. Indeed, the title of López Mozo’s play directly
echoes a set of paintings by Kantor on the theme of
Velázquez’s Infanta, housed at Kraków’s National
Museum.[17] Throughout his text, López Mozo ranges
across some 300 years of European history, with Kantor and
other Cricot 2 members as characters/facilitators who serve
to actualize the simultaneity of various pasts. The play
opens with Kantor visiting the Prado and inviting the
Infanta Margarita, a prominent figure in the foreground of
Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, to visit him in
Kraków. The seventeenth-century Infanta promptly takes
up Kantor’s invitation and journeys with him to late
twentieth-century Kraków. The story integrates a diverse
series of historical moments: the act of painting Las
Meninas and the later evacuation of Velázquez’s work from
the Prado during the Spanish Civil War (both of which are
represented onstage before the Infanta’s trip to Kraków);
the Spanish War of Independence; the Second World War
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the Spanish War of Independence; the Second World War
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and the deployment of the División Azul (Blue Division) at
the Russian Front; and Margarita’s relationship with
Emperor Leopold I (her mother’s brother, whom she
[18] TheY text
W OR K married).
BL OGS
COMMUNIT
CONV
E R SA
T IONSthe characters
E NG
eventually
also
leads
T IONS
RE
DATA
Sign in
Si
A BOUT
and audience across the Iron Curtain; within the Francoist
dictatorship (to Franco himself); to the events of May 1968;
and to other episodes of recent history. As in the cases of
Kantor and Alonso de Santos, López Mozo refers
extensively to the experience of war, here approaching
European conflicts involving Spain as a starting point for
dealing with time, memory, and cultural traumas.
La Zaranda, Futuros difuntos (2008). Photograph courtesy of La Zaranda.
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Kantor’s influence has extended beyond playwriting to
companies and directors whose performance aesthetics
have evidently developed
in ways close to his own. La
Privacy settings
Zaranda and Marta Carrasco, respectively, provide two such
examples.[19] La Zaranda (Lower Andalusian Unstable
Company) a theatre group formed during the 1970s whose
origins are in the Spanish Independent Theatre, are widely
considered the outstanding ‘respondents’ in Spain to
Kantor’s aesthetics. Kantorian motifs ‘haunt’ their
repertoire. One of their early performances, Mariameneo,
Mariameneo (1985), tells the story of an old Andalusian
woman alone with her memories, who keeps her dead alive
by recounting episodes from the pasts they shared. Vinagre
de Jerez (Jerez Vinegar, 1989) takes us from the garden
patio to an Andalusian tavern, where scattered barrels and
carafes bear witness to three lives spent in failure and
inaction. The three protagonists – a guitar player, a
flamenco singer, and a flamenco dancer – watch their lives
pass them by, both figuratively and literally, as they witness
their own corpses walk past at the end. A similar realization
strikes the characters of Obra Postuma (Posthumous Work,
1995), who discover they are dead during the course of the
performance, as they encounter their unfulfilled and
irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A
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irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A
Shadow of our Former Selves, 2002), a merry-go-round
signals the circular repetition and inertia from which its
characters cannot escape.
Like Kantor’s productions, La Zaranda’s work is notable for
building layered, self-reflexive, ‘poor’ performance spaces.
Perdonen la tristeza (Pardon the Sadness, 1992), set within a
theatre building, uses the motif of a street carnival to reflect
on the perceived crisis of contemporary theatre while posing
questions about the status of its own performance. Cuando
la vida eterna se acabe (When Eternal Life Comes to an End,
1997) presents an old mattress as the main object of a space
that seems to exist only in the memory of the four
protagonists, while Homenaje a los malditos (Tribute to the
Damned, 2004) gathers a few old chairs and tables around
which a groups pays homage to their maestro, who is
transformed into an inanimate puppet before the audience.
La puerta estrecha (The Narrow Door, 2000) frames a debate
on questions of access and immigration using a series of
closed doorways. In Los que rien los últimos (Those Who
Laugh Last, 2006), a wandering troupe of ragamuffin street
artists use the ‘vehicle’ of an antique tricycle-cart to
transport actors about the stage as they raise existential
questions about who and where they are. Finally, in Futuros
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difuntos (Defunct/Deceased Futures, 2008), a group of
asylum inmates are abandoned and struggle for control
until, overcome by anxiety at the absence of any higher
authority, they give themselves up to chance and to death.
La Zaranda, Los Que Ríen los Últimos(2006). Photograph courtesy of the company.
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La Zaranda, Nadie lo quiere creer (2010). Photograph courtesy of the company.
La Zaranda’s productions combine living and dead
characters and the remnants of their pasts, with old objects
often prompting the flow of memories that drive the action.
Although profoundly rooted in the baroque traditions of
Andalusia, where Semana Santa (Holy Week) processionals
remain integrally tied to popular culture, the company’s
visually intense performances – full of penumbra, evocative
objects, and revenant figures – clearly call to mind many
diverse elements of Kantor’s theatre.
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Marta Carrasco’s Blanc d’ombra(1997). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s archive.
Marta Carrasco is a dancer whose work combines theatre,
dance, and artes plásticas (visual arts). Kantor’s influence is
noteworthy in her performances Aiguardent (Firewater,
1995), Blanc d’ombra (Recordant Camille Claudel) (White of
Shadow (Remembering Camille Claudel), 1997), and Mira’m
(Look at Me, 2000). In Jose Antonio Sánchez’s terms, these
three works are similar insofar as they are ‘situated in a
space “between”: of memory or of death’, where the stage
functions as a kind of Kantorian ‘memory
machine’.[20] Aiguardent deals with alcoholism and its
attendant anguish and solitude, foregrounding its
protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs
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protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs
of confusion on a stage littered with pitchers of ‘firewater’
alongside a trunk full of memories, a wedding dress, a chair,
and a table with wheels.[21] Blanc d’ombra concerns the
sculptor-lover of Rodin; in the performance, Carrasco
unveils what lies behind various canvasses onstage: a series
of objects through which the audience is able to trace the
protagonist’s past. Rodin himself appears only as a kind of
cloth-covered mannequin, which Carrasco, as Claudel,
appears to seduce with her movements, until ultimately she
inhabits him. Mira’m – in which Carrasco does not perform –
is replete with intertextual references to The Dead Class and
Wielopole, Wielopole, with ‘characters’ crossing the stage in
the form of actors and mannequins. A large closet full of
furniture and old objects fulfils the role of ‘memory
machine’.
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Scene from Marta Carrasco’s Mira’m (2000). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s
archive.
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Scene from Mira’m. Photograph courtesy of Carrasco’s archive.
Throughout this article, I have sought to sketch out the
history of Kantor’s presence in Spain, highlighting the
ongoing impact of both his theoretical and artistic practice.
Following Wielopole, Wielopole, the Spanish theatregoing
public enjoyed relatively broad access to Kantor’s
performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –
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performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –
significantly – in smaller and less internationally renowned
locations. Through Kantor’s ensuing influence on, for
example, the central practitioners mentioned above, I
suggest that he has contributed to significant openings in
Spain’s often-insular theatre tradition – even if I would also
argue that further work is required to explore the potential
of his ideas to invigorate the contemporary Spanish theatre
scene. The homogeneity and tameness to which PérezRasilla alludes above is a reminder that – despite a political
climate in which Spain can claim to be a mature democracy
engaged in the project of a borderless Europe – inspirational
leadership is still required in order to push the arts beyond
unreflective traditionalism. I would even venture that if
Kantor’s theatre were to make its Spanish debut in 2014
rather than 1981, it would be considered just as radical and
innovative today. His influence thus constitutes a strange
and somewhat problematic heritage, though Kantor himself
would no doubt have savoured the irony that his work has
been able to remain fresh and challenging over time, unlike
certain other cases of modernist innovation in the arts.
Nonetheless, the four principal examples I focus on in this
article – spanning playwrights, directors, and performers –
establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor
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establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor
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legacy in Spain. Indeed, I would argue that the work of
several of Spain’s leading theatre practitioners could not be
fully understood or appreciated without reference to
Kantor. Given this unmistakeable imprint, perhaps one way
of understanding Kantor’s promise that he ‘shall never
return’ is simply to acknowledge that – when it comes to the
Spanish theatre scene – he never left.
Notes:
1. ^ Jerónimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (Madrid: Primer Acto, 2006,
p. 162). Unless otherwise noted, all citations appear in my own translation.
2. ^ Today is My Birthday was staged in Spain following Kantor’s death, in
October 1991 at Teatro María Guerrero.
3. ^ Zarzuela refers to a genre of popular musical stage performance in which
actors alternate between speaking and singing, whose predominance on the
Spanish stage has been intermittent since it first emerged during the
seventeenth century. The name of the genre derives from the place where it
was first performed, the Zarzuela Palace, which was one of the residences of
Spain’s royal family in El Pardo, near Madrid. See Manuel Gómez García,
Diccionario Akal de Teatro (The Akal Dictionary of Theatre) (Madrid: Akal,
2007), p. 904.
4. ^ See Antonio Sánchez Trigueros, Teatro y escena. La poética del silencio y
otros ensayos (The Theatre and the Stage: The Poetics of Silence and Other
Essays) (Granada: Alhulia, 2008), p. 41. As Trigueros comments, ‘Spanish
society of the late 1940s – or at least a crucial part of it, its critical conscience
– despite the strictures of censorship and the threat of surveillance by the
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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authorities, also became animated by a powerful need to search for truth’ (p.
42).
^ José Monleón has been a central figure in the writing of Spanish theatre
history, in theory and in practice, throughout the past half-century.
^ Under the general title ‘Los seis grupos destacados de Nancy. 2: Cricot 2,
Polonia’ (The Six Outstanding Groups at Nancy. Part 2: Cricot 2, Poland) the
following texts by Kantor were published in Primer Acto, 132 (1971): ‘La
condición del actor’ (The Situation of an Artist), ‘Método del arte de ser
actor’ (The Acting Method), ‘Pre-existencia escénica’ (Scenic Preexistence),
‘Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2’ (The Cricot 2 Ensemble), and ‘La recuperación
del Arte’ (The Recovery of Art). ‘The Situation of the Artist’ is published in
English in Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos,
1944-1990, ed. and trans. by Kobialka (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), pp. 129-31; this and the other texts have also been published in
French and Italian.
^ Ángel Facio, ‘Demasiadas contradicciones’ (Too Many Contradictions),
Primer Acto, 132 (1971), 10-16 (p. 14).
^ José Monleón, ‘Introducción a una cronología. Kantor’ (Introduction to a
Chronology: Kantor), Primer Acto, 189 (1981), 6-7 (p. 6).
^ José Antonio Sánchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénica
contemporánea en España’, in Artes de la escena y de la acción en España: 19782002 (Theatre and Activist Arts in Spain: 1978-2002) (Cuenca: Ediciones de
la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006), p. 17.
^ Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España. Notas para un
balance del teatro del siglo XX’ (A Century of Theatre in Spain: Notes
Towards a Report on Twentieth Century Theatre), Monteagudo 3.6 (2001),
19-44 (p. 39).
^ ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2?’ is published in English as ‘Cricot 2 Theatre’,
trans. by Michal Kobialka, in Kobialka, Further On, Nothing... Tadeusz
Kantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp.
110-15. Kantor’s ‘The Theatre of Death’ was also translated and published in
this volume, pp. 230-39.
^ The Independent Theatre is among the most original and influential
cultural phenomena through which to understand Spain’s transition from
dictatorship to democracy. The movement, which developed primarily
between the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained
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between the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
wholly detached from the economic, political, and artistic establishment in
Spain. Its principal achievement was to have established the foundations of
contemporary alternative theatre aesthetics, including for many innovative
practices still discernible in Spain today. Characterised by a bohemian and
collectivist spirit of adventure, the movement experimented extensively
with performance, space, and dramaturgy, including: modes of rehearsal,
approaches to acting, and engagement with European and North American
performance theory; the use of ritual and play; farce as a legitimate mode of
political commentary; and the adoption of certain popular performative and
festive practices. On the subject of the Independent Theatre, see José Luis
Alonso de Santos, ‘Principio y fin del teatro independiente’ (Beginning and
End of the Independent Theatre), Campus, 31 (1989) [available online at
http://www.um.es/campusdigital/TalComoEra/alonsoSantos.htm, accessed
23 March 2014]), and Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España’, p. 35.
^ The impression that this performance made on Alonso de Santos is
recounted by Margarita Piñero in her book La creación teatral en José Luis
Alonso de Santos (Theatrical Creation in the Work of José Luis Alonso de
Santos) (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2005).
^ From the author’s personal archive.
^ In a documentary produced by Polish Television (TVP), Kantor referred to
his own experience in 1971 when he was living in a little coastal town ‘with
little houses and a poor abandoned old school which had just one class. I
could look through the dirty windows. I stuck my face to the window and
looked inside my mind. In my mind, I was a little boy again sitting down in a
poor little town class. His desk was marked by knives and he was wetting his
tiny dirty fingers to pass the pages of his notebook […] the class has white
walls and the lime was falling off. There was a black cross on the wall. Now I
know that I made an important discovery by that window: I realized the
existence of memory’. See Kantor, dir. by Andrzej Sapija (Kraków: Telewizja
Polska, 1985), published on DVD by Cricoteka (Kraków, 2006).
^ Kobialka, Further On, Nothing, p. 38.
^ See Pewnej nocy wesz!a do mego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza/Pewnego
wieczoru wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázquez’a (One Night/Evening
Velázquez’s Infanta Came to My Room, 1988) and Pewnej nocy po raz drugi
wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta
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wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta
18.
19.
20.
21.
Came to My Room for a Second Time, 1990).
^ La División Azul (1941-44) refers to the regular units of Spanish war
‘volunteers’, 5000 of whom (out of a total of 50,000) lost their lives at the
Russian Front fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht.
^ Rodrigo García, Sara Molina, and Francisco Valcarce (director of La
Tartana) make up another group of directors evidently fascinated by
Kantor’s performances, though less directly influenced by him. For reasons
of space, it is not possible to trace comprehensively Kantor’s presence in
their performances or plays; however, it is important to mention them here
in the wider context of Spanish practitioners who have engaged with
Kantor’s aesthetics.
^ See Sanchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénica contemporánea en
España’, p. 276. See also Krzysztof Ple!niarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine:
Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, trans. by William Brandt (Aberystwyth:
Black Mountain Press, 2004).
^ Agua ardiente (‘firewater’) is a generic term for strong alcoholic, often
home-brewed drinks, usually made from grains (such as barley, millet, or
rice), which are widely considered the preferred morning libation of Spanish
construction workers.
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Scene from Marta
Carrasco’s J’arrive...! (2005).
Photograph courtesy of the artist’s
archive.
ARTICLE
42
Tadeusz Kantor in Spain
by María J. Sánchez Montes
CIT A T ION INFOR MA T ION
María J. Sánchez Montes, ‘Tadeusz Kantor in Spain’, in Tadeusz Kantor’s
Memory: Other pasts, other futures, ed. by Michal Kobialka & Natalia
Zarzecka (London: PTP, 2015).
K E Y W OR D S
Tadeusz Kantor
Cricot 2
Spanish theatre
CONT R IBUT OR S
María J. Sánchez Montes (author), Michal Kobialka (editor), Natalia
Zarzecka (editor), Duncan Jamieson (general editor), Adela Karsznia
(general editor), Richard Gough (consortium editor)
Spanish playwriting
Wielopole, Wielopole
Today is My Birthday
COP Y R IGHT
Jerónimo López Mozo
Copyright © 2014 PTP and the individual contributors. All rights
reserved. Images in this publication are protected with Digimarc®
Guardian watermarks containing copyright and usage information.
La infanta de
Velázquez
L ICE NCE
José Luis Alonso de
Santos
All Rights Reserved
El album familiar
L A NGUA GE S
La Zaranda
English
P UBL ISHING SE R IE S
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Mariameneo,
Mariameneo
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Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP)
Vinagre de Jerez
P UBL ISHE R
Perdonen la tristeza
Polish Theatre Perspectives is an imprint of TAPAC: Theatre and
Performance Across Cultures; this title is co-published with the
Grotowski Institute and the Centre for Performance Research (CPR).
Marta Carrasco
Aiguardent
Blanc d’ombra
D OI
10.15229/ptpcol.2015.kantor.14
FOR MA T S & ID E NT IFIE R S
Mira’m
José Monleón
Online ISBN 978-1-910203-04-0
Primer Acto
P A R T NE R S A ND SP ONSOR S
Spanish Civil War
TAPAC (publisher), Grotowski Institute (publisher), CPR (publisher)
posguerra
P UBL ICA T ION D A T E
2015-01-01
Spanish Independent
Theatre
FIR ST P UBL ISHE D ONL INE
Diego Velázquez
2014-10-20
Las Meninas
Sara Molina
María José Sánchez Montes is a tenured professor at the
University of Granada, Spain, where she teaches Literary
Theory and Theatre Studies. She obtained her PhD in 2001
with a dissertation later published as El cuerpo como signo.
La transformación de la textualidad en el teatro contemporánea
(The Body as Sign: The transformation of the text in
contemporary theatre, 2004). Her current research
interests include Federico García Lorca’s Yerma in
performance, the theatre director Sara Molina, and the
presence and influence of Tadeusz Kantor in Spain. Since
2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural
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2008 she has overseen the University of Granada’s cultural
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programme, founding an international university theatre
festival and overseeing more than 200 cultural events each
year.
“Kantor: [...] ¿Sabe Infanta? Hoy es mi
cumpleaños.
El último…”
“Kantor: [...] You know, Infanta? Today is
my birthday.
My last…”
Jeronimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (1999)[1]
These are the final words of La infanta de Velázquez
(Velázquez’s Infanta), a play by Jerónimo López Mozo –
1998 National Playwright Award laureate and one of Spain’s
foremost living dramatists – in which Tadeusz Kantor
appears as a principal character. Given Kantor’s ambiguous
presence on the ‘threshold’ of his own haunting
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performances up until his death in 1990 (during rehearsals
for the playfully titled Today Is My Birthday), it is perhaps
surprising that he would have to wait almost a decade to be
revived onstage – albeit as a figure in a fictionalised setting,
‘celebrating’ posthumously and acutely conscious of his own
mortality. And this in a play written, though never
performed, in Spanish. From today’s perspective, it could be
considered a clear, if little remarked, example of the
powerful influence that Kantor has exerted on many
Spanish theatre practitioners during the past three decades,
through his performances as well as his writings.
This essay explores for the first time the broader impact of
Kantor’s thought and practice on Spanish playwrights,
directors, and ensembles. After introducing the Spanish
theatrical context that emerged in the post-Civil War
period, I will offer an overview of Kantor’s performances
there from 1981 to 1991, as well as an assessment of how
his ideas – as published in Spanish-language periodicals and
other publications – took root in Spain.[2] It is hoped that
this effort will contribute to the twin tasks of recovering
certain neglected aspects of Spanish stage history and, more
specifically, of improving our overall understanding of the
international impact made by Kantor’s oeuvre in a country
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rarely associated with his name and sphere of influence.
During the 1940s and ’50s, when the Festival d’Avignon,
Piccolo Teatro, Berliner Ensemble, and Royal Shakespeare
Company (then the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre) had
come to be viewed as emblematic examples of theatre arts in
their respective European countries, Madrid’s Lope de Vega
Company began to set the tone for national theatre in Spain.
Although the company’s work under the leadership of José
Tamayo had many merits, its achievements were connected
more with the enhancement of the zarzuela genre and
innovations in scenic and lighting design than with
modernising tendencies in acting and directing practice,
much less with theoretical approaches to
performance.[3] These differing points of focus serve to
highlight a major contrast between developments on the
Spanish stage and much of the experimental theatre
practised elsewhere in Europe at the time. Franco’s near
forty-year dictatorship isolated the country culturally from
the larger European context and relegated much Spanish
theatre to pre-war standards of commercialism and
provincial populism. While the earlier attempts of Ramón
María del Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca to renew
the Spanish drama and theatre scene at the turn of the
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century cannot be overlooked, it is important to note that
their successes were limited in scope and did not account
for the reality of most theatre performed in Spain during
the ensuing decades.
In order to begin tracing Kantor’s significance for Spanish
practitioners, it is necessary to describe briefly the situation
of Spanish theatre in the long aftermath of the Spanish Civil
War (1936-39), and especially during the transitional period
that followed Franco’s death in 1975, which saw many
emerging directors and authors becoming absorbed with
Kantor’s theoretical and aesthetic proposals. The post-war
years and period of dictatorship (1940-75) saw the majority
of Spanish theatre focused on forms of popular and comedic
performance that foregrounded the officially sanctioned,
predominantly bourgeois values. However, it should be
noted that this mostly conservative theatre coexisted with
various attempts to undermine it. In particular, I refer to
movements towards realist drama and experimental
theatre, both of which emerged in Spain in the 1950s.
Within the first group, we should emphasize Antonio Buero
Vallejo and his play Historia de una escalera (Story of a
Staircase, 1949), which occupies a similar role in the
Spanish context to those of the late nineteenth-century
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naturalist theatre manifestos elsewhere in Western
Europe.[4] Lauro Olmo, José Martín Recuerda, and Alfonso
Sastre are other key figures who, continuing along the path
forged by Vallejo, formed the core of the social-realist
movement of the 1960s, which tasked itself with
maintaining resistance to the official culture.
The Franco regime had made it tremendously difficult to
place Spanish theatre in direct dialogue with the European
avant-garde, by imposing official constraints on various
cultural practices. Still, the dictatorship could never succeed
fully in isolating Spaniards from productions that, despite
or indeed because of the challenge they posed to the
dominant tradition, would later come to be seen as integral
to their stage heritage. Indeed, starting in the 1960s, and
developing alongside theatre productions of an obviously
traditional hue, Spanish audiences slowly began to gain
access to new kinds of performances marked by engagement
with ritual practices rather than by a focus on textual
interpretation. Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter
Brook, and Eugenio Barba were the names most commonly
referenced by directors and ensembles interested in pushing
the stage arts towards new frontiers of experimentalism.
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practitioners from abroad were particularly evident
throughout their productions included Adolfo Marsillach,
Víctor García, Salvador Távora, Francisco Nieva, Fabiá
Pigserver, Lluís Pasqual, Miguel Romero Esteo, Luis Riaza,
and the groups Tábano, Els Comediants, Esperpento, and
Els Joglars. Any historical understanding of post-war
innovations in Spanish theatre would be incomplete without
considering, for example, Marsillach’s Marat/Sade (1968),
García’s Las criadas (1969) or Yerma (1971), Távora’s Quejío
(1971), Esperpento’s Farsa y licencia de la reina castiza
(1969), Tábano’s Castañuela 70 (1970), or Comediants’ Non
plus plis (1972). However, these productions all debuted
prior to the inception of a democratic government in Spain,
in conditions that severely limited the possibilities for
international dialogue.
Without attempting to cover in these few paragraphs every
aspect of the recent history of Spanish theatre – nor even of
the period immediately following the dictatorship – we
should note that these practitioners nonetheless represent
a set of extraordinary efforts made to ‘catch up’ with the
rest of the Europe, by diversifying the tastes of the Spanish
theatregoing public. Their productions were evidently
informed by practical investigations emergent elsewhere on
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the continent. Each departed from bourgeois models of
representation, each engaged in dialogue with the aesthetics
developed by peers around Europe, and each ultimately
helped prepare the ground so that later, other international
artists such as Kantor could be not only seen but also
understood in Spain.
Although some had become familiar with Kantor’s work well
before his productions arrived in Spain, it was not until the
1980s that Kantor was to make a significant, ‘direct’ impact
in Spanish theatre circles. The reception of his
performances and theories during Spain’s celebrated
transición to democracy must be understood in the context
of a wider theatrical ‘explosion’ that ushered in freedoms of
expression for which Spaniards had long thirsted. A new
openness regarding theatre management, censorship
policies, project selection, and design practices took hold
quickly and inexorably, and was shown most clearly in public
theatre programming. Festivals were organized throughout
the country during the 1980s, and many Spanish
playwrights had their work performed for the first time
after years of dictatorship, thus leading to an improved
quality and range of repertoire and many visually stunning
performances that continue to be studied and remarked by
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critics (Kantor’s notable among them).
A selection of Kantor’s writings was first published in
Spanish in 1971 in Primer Acto, a theatre periodical driven
by the indefatigable José Monleón, who has remained at the
journal’s helm since 1957.[5] Monleón dedicated a special
issue section to the work of Kantor and the Cricot 2
ensemble following their participation in that year’s World
Theatre Festivalin Nancy.[6] On the group’s production of
Witkacy’s The Water Hen, the issue included a glowingly
positive review by Ángel Facio, theatre director and special
correspondent to the Festival.[7] However, after this initial
incursion of Kantor materials onto the Spanish theatre
scene, another decade would pass before local audiences
had the chance to witness the performances themselves. On
the initiative of the Centro Dramático Nacional, 1981 saw
the first staging of Kantor’s work in Spain, with Wielopole,
Wielopole. The production was interpreted by Monleón as a
cultural-political act par excellence. Indeed, the committed
response of this seasoned critic on viewing the performance
provides a key gauge of its impact, as evidenced in his bold
claims that Wielopole, Wielopole constituted a ‘new kind of
event’, and that all previous occasions or self-styled
attempts to revolutionalize the Spanish theatre had been
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merely ‘incidental’ by comparison. According to Monleón,
prior to Kantor’s arrival, a few groups of the calibre of Cricot
2 had made sporadic forays that held the potential to spark
more widespread reforms in Spain, but never with the
continuity or scope needed to prompt a genuine avant-garde
movement. Or else not with the impact that Monleón
considered might awaken in Spanish audiences a more
expansive sensitivity to body, image, and composition
onstage. Instead, the dramatic text and the spectacle had
historically reasserted themselves as primary concerns
across the spectrum of theatre arts and genres. As Monleón
commented in the context of Kantor’s arrival: ‘[Spain is] a
country where literature, the moral or political message, the
“carpentry” of the dramatic action, the profile of the actors
or the elaborateness of the production still tend to count for
everything…’[8]
To this broad yet apt assessment of the Spanish theatre of
the period, we may add some further observations
concerning the particular legacy of Kantor, whose work
would become seminal for many artists in the region over
the ensuing decade. Firstly, the growing presence of Kantor
and certain other experimental artists could not counter the
widespread perception that theatre programming continued
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to have an incidental rather than essential relationship to
local innovation. In this regard, the scholar José Antonio
Sánchez, in his essay ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación
escénica contemporánea en España’ (The Origins and
Context of Theatrical Creativity in Spain), expresses his
surprise that Kantor’s presence in Spain, while resonating
widely in a relatively short period of time, did not prompt an
enduring institutional shift. Situating Kantor’s work in the
context of a general regress toward a more traditionalist
state of affairs, Sánchez writes:
The ferment of those years, full of anxiety and hope on
both the political and cultural levels, can be seen in the
plurality of theatre programming [...] and, most
strikingly from our current perspective, in the
presentation of performances rooted in specific visual
or corporeal dramas, such as Wielopole, Wielopole, by
Tadeusz Kantor; Lindsay Kemp’s adaptation of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; Laetius by Els Joglars; and
Marcel Marceau. Evolución de las ‘Pantomimas de estilo’
(Marcel Marceau: Evolution of the Pantomimes de style),
or Juan sin miedo y antología (Juan, Without Fear and
Anthology) by La Claca.[9]
Considering the debilitated state of recent Spanish theatre –
which Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla has aptly characterized for the
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most part (across both publicly and privately funded
institutions) as politically, socially, and intellectually
innocuous and ‘anodyne’ – I would add that Kantor’s arrival
on the Spanish stage constituted an especially striking event
that unfortunately has no parallel on the contemporary
scene.[10] Nonetheless, as I attempt to demonstrate below,
even that somewhat incidental and discontinuous presence
allowed a handful of Spanish authors and directors to
incorporate Kantor-inspired dramaturgies into their work.
Followers of Kantor know well that 1976 was the year that
brought international renown to Cricot 2 thanks to the
touring performances of The Dead Class (1975). Yet it was
not until 1981 that one of the company’s productions would
be performed in Spain. Wielopole, Wielopole, for reasons we
are now in a better position to examine, is still remembered
as a watershed moment in Spanish theatre history. In
connection with the touring performances of this
production, Primer Acto would dedicate a whole issue to
Kantor, naming issue 189 Kantor entre nosotros (Kantor
Among Us) and publishing a full-page photograph of the
director, followed by forty pages of coverage of the events
programme associated with his visit. Aside from a Cricot 2
chronology prepared by Monleón, the special issue included
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an interview with Kantor by José Luis Alonso de Santos and
Monleón, the already translated ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot
2?’ (What is the Cricot 2 Ensemble?) by Kantor, along with
his ‘El teatro de la muerte’ (The Theatre of Death), and a
review of Wielopole, Wielopole.[11] Most of the articles had
been re-compiled from Kantor-related materials linked to
his performances that summer during the fifth Festival
Internacional de Teatro de Caracas, where Kantor had
staged the production now being received by Spanish
audiences. Several prominent figures from Spanish theatre
circles had duly made the trip to Venezuela, among them
Monleón and the influential writer and theatre director
Alonso de Santos.
Following the ‘event’ of Kantor’s theatre debut in Spain, his
contact with the region progressed during several
appearances by him and/or Cricot 2 during the course of the
next decade. Aside from its inaugural performances at
Madrid’s Teatro María Guerrero and at the Festival
Internacional de Vitoria-Gasteiz (October 1981), Wielopole,
Wielopole was presented later in Valencia and Mallorca
(March 1983), and in Barcelona and Santander (March and
July 1987). Audiences had the chance to see The Dead Class
in Barcelona (March 1983), then in Murcia, Las Palmas,
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Seville, and Madrid (March to April 1984), and finally in
Pamplona and Zaragoza (April 1991). The Spanish premiere
of Let the Artists Die took place in Madrid’s Sala Olimpia
(March 1986), with subsequent performances in Barcelona
(March 1987) and Bilbao (May 1987). I Shall Never Return
was performed in Mallorca (October 1988) and in Barcelona
and Madrid (March to April 1989). Finally, Today Is My
Birthday came to Spain during the Eighth Festival de Otoño
in 1991, a year after Kantor’s death. Indeed, this final
production by Kantor closed the cycle of Cricot 2’s
productions in Spain.
In assessing this series’ impact among local theatre
practitioners, it is important to consider the many
differences in their respective profiles and in the ways in
which Kantor’s influence manifested itself in their work.
Prominent among those who took direct inspiration from
Kantor and Cricot 2 were authors and directors who, though
early in their careers, were already well-established artists.
Here I refer to two such figures already mentioned above:
Alonso de Santos, whose El album familiar (The Family
Album, 1981) appeared shortly after he met Kantor and saw
Wielopole, Wielopole; and López Mozo, who also met Kantor
in the early 1980s but experienced a longer gestation period
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with his ideas, displaying his influence almost two decades
later with La infanta de Velázquez.
The name Alonso de Santos is intimately linked to the
Independent Theatre movement during the period of the
Francoist dictatorship and to the directorship of Madrid’s
Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (National Classical
Theatre Company) from 2000 to 2004.[12] Among the more
than twenty dramas written by Alonso de Santos, many of
which he also personally directed, we can make special
mention of La estanquera de Vallecas (The Tobacconist of
Vallecas) and Bajarse al moro (officially translated as Going
Down in Morocco). Following his initial exposure to Kantor’s
writings and debut within the Spanish-language theatre
context, Alonso de Santos wrote and directed El album
familiar, which premiered on 26 October 1982 at the Centro
Dramático Nacional, Teatro María Guerrero, in
Madrid.[13] The play had been written in the summer of
1981 during the Caracas festival, where Alonso de Santos
had the opportunity to see Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole
ahead of its tour to Spain. The original manuscript is located
in the author’s personal archive and begins with the
following words:
In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,
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In the manner of Proust, Bergman in Wild Strawberries,
or Tadeusz Kantor, to enter or better to leave, opening
the door of the nursery, latent images of my past, not
as they were (which is impossible!), but as they are
stored in different places in my mind. It is not a
confession, it is a search for a true foundation (not
what I have fabricated with my artificial
remembrances).[14]
It is notable that although Wielopole, Wielopole triggered the
writing of El album familiar, this particular family album
awakens in its young protagonist memories of a past left
behind in a manner that also echoes Kantor’s inspiration for
another of his productions, The Dead Class.[15]
El album familiar could be considered an exercise in cultural
remembering emerging from the Francoist posguerra (postwar period). A family photo album given to the protagonist
before he begins a journey away from his family and his past
becomes the starting point for a journey through time,
through diachronic modalities of memory. Alonso de Santos
uses the stage not only as a site for personal remembrance
but as a cultural witnessing to the impact of war and
destruction. Several features common to Kantor’s work are
also interwoven in Alonso de Santos’ play: explorations of
the temporalities of remembering, staging memory as a
historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the
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historiographical practice, and the dead inhabiting the
stage; all set against the background of the Spanish Civil
War. In El album familiar, the dead assist in reconstructing
the past and in shifting the protagonist's selfunderstanding. But while this play shares certain
fundamental aspects of Kantor’s poetics, unlike Kantor’s
own ‘texts’ – which were prepared according to the logic of
musical partytury (scores) – Alonso de Santos’ work more
closely resembles a conventional dramatic script. As Michal
Kobialka indicates, for Kantor – perhaps due to his visual
arts background – ‘the process of staging a drama did not
signify [...] the process of interpreting the text or finding its
stage equivalent’.[16] Despite the influence of Kantor’s
thematic and aesthetic concerns during the writing
process, Alonso de Santos remains largely within his familiar
genre. It is interesting to speculate whether this text would
maintain the same Kantorian connections if staged by
another director. Nonetheless, most critics, with the
exception of Monleón, did not explore the Kantorian
connections when the play premiered, and this feature was
downplayed in the majority of reviews.
López Mozo’s link to Kantor first materialized directly in La
infanta de Velázquez: a play written in 1999, recognised with
an award in 2000, and published in 2001, though not yet
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staged. The text is clearly a self-styled homage to Kantor,
especially to the trajectory of his central theatrical ideas and
performances, all of which have a prominent place in López
Mozo’s narratives. The action is drawn from Kantor’s visit to
the Prado Museum on his first visit to Spain, and specifically
from the profound impact that Diego Velázquez’s paintings
had on him. Indeed, the title of López Mozo’s play directly
echoes a set of paintings by Kantor on the theme of
Velázquez’s Infanta, housed at Kraków’s National
Museum.[17] Throughout his text, López Mozo ranges
across some 300 years of European history, with Kantor and
other Cricot 2 members as characters/facilitators who serve
to actualize the simultaneity of various pasts. The play
opens with Kantor visiting the Prado and inviting the
Infanta Margarita, a prominent figure in the foreground of
Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, to visit him in
Kraków. The seventeenth-century Infanta promptly takes
up Kantor’s invitation and journeys with him to late
twentieth-century Kraków. The story integrates a diverse
series of historical moments: the act of painting Las
Meninas and the later evacuation of Velázquez’s work from
the Prado during the Spanish Civil War (both of which are
represented onstage before the Infanta’s trip to Kraków);
the Spanish War of Independence; the Second World War
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and the deployment of the División Azul (Blue Division) at
the Russian Front; and Margarita’s relationship with
Emperor Leopold I (her mother’s brother, whom she
[18] TheY text
W OR K married).
BL OGS
COMMUNIT
CONV
E R SA
T IONSthe characters
E NG
eventually
also
leads
T IONS
RE
DATA
Sign in
Si
A BOUT
and audience across the Iron Curtain; within the Francoist
dictatorship (to Franco himself); to the events of May 1968;
and to other episodes of recent history. As in the cases of
Kantor and Alonso de Santos, López Mozo refers
extensively to the experience of war, here approaching
European conflicts involving Spain as a starting point for
dealing with time, memory, and cultural traumas.
La Zaranda, Futuros difuntos (2008). Photograph courtesy of La Zaranda.
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Kantor’s influence has extended beyond playwriting to
companies and directors whose performance aesthetics
have evidently developed
in ways close to his own. La
Privacy settings
Zaranda and Marta Carrasco, respectively, provide two such
examples.[19] La Zaranda (Lower Andalusian Unstable
Company) a theatre group formed during the 1970s whose
origins are in the Spanish Independent Theatre, are widely
considered the outstanding ‘respondents’ in Spain to
Kantor’s aesthetics. Kantorian motifs ‘haunt’ their
repertoire. One of their early performances, Mariameneo,
Mariameneo (1985), tells the story of an old Andalusian
woman alone with her memories, who keeps her dead alive
by recounting episodes from the pasts they shared. Vinagre
de Jerez (Jerez Vinegar, 1989) takes us from the garden
patio to an Andalusian tavern, where scattered barrels and
carafes bear witness to three lives spent in failure and
inaction. The three protagonists – a guitar player, a
flamenco singer, and a flamenco dancer – watch their lives
pass them by, both figuratively and literally, as they witness
their own corpses walk past at the end. A similar realization
strikes the characters of Obra Postuma (Posthumous Work,
1995), who discover they are dead during the course of the
performance, as they encounter their unfulfilled and
irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A
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irrecoverable pasts, whereas in Ni sombra de lo que fuimos (A
Shadow of our Former Selves, 2002), a merry-go-round
signals the circular repetition and inertia from which its
characters cannot escape.
Like Kantor’s productions, La Zaranda’s work is notable for
building layered, self-reflexive, ‘poor’ performance spaces.
Perdonen la tristeza (Pardon the Sadness, 1992), set within a
theatre building, uses the motif of a street carnival to reflect
on the perceived crisis of contemporary theatre while posing
questions about the status of its own performance. Cuando
la vida eterna se acabe (When Eternal Life Comes to an End,
1997) presents an old mattress as the main object of a space
that seems to exist only in the memory of the four
protagonists, while Homenaje a los malditos (Tribute to the
Damned, 2004) gathers a few old chairs and tables around
which a groups pays homage to their maestro, who is
transformed into an inanimate puppet before the audience.
La puerta estrecha (The Narrow Door, 2000) frames a debate
on questions of access and immigration using a series of
closed doorways. In Los que rien los últimos (Those Who
Laugh Last, 2006), a wandering troupe of ragamuffin street
artists use the ‘vehicle’ of an antique tricycle-cart to
transport actors about the stage as they raise existential
questions about who and where they are. Finally, in Futuros
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difuntos (Defunct/Deceased Futures, 2008), a group of
asylum inmates are abandoned and struggle for control
until, overcome by anxiety at the absence of any higher
authority, they give themselves up to chance and to death.
La Zaranda, Los Que Ríen los Últimos(2006). Photograph courtesy of the company.
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La Zaranda, Nadie lo quiere creer (2010). Photograph courtesy of the company.
La Zaranda’s productions combine living and dead
characters and the remnants of their pasts, with old objects
often prompting the flow of memories that drive the action.
Although profoundly rooted in the baroque traditions of
Andalusia, where Semana Santa (Holy Week) processionals
remain integrally tied to popular culture, the company’s
visually intense performances – full of penumbra, evocative
objects, and revenant figures – clearly call to mind many
diverse elements of Kantor’s theatre.
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Marta Carrasco’s Blanc d’ombra(1997). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s archive.
Marta Carrasco is a dancer whose work combines theatre,
dance, and artes plásticas (visual arts). Kantor’s influence is
noteworthy in her performances Aiguardent (Firewater,
1995), Blanc d’ombra (Recordant Camille Claudel) (White of
Shadow (Remembering Camille Claudel), 1997), and Mira’m
(Look at Me, 2000). In Jose Antonio Sánchez’s terms, these
three works are similar insofar as they are ‘situated in a
space “between”: of memory or of death’, where the stage
functions as a kind of Kantorian ‘memory
machine’.[20] Aiguardent deals with alcoholism and its
attendant anguish and solitude, foregrounding its
protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs
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protagonist-dancer’s moments of lucidity as well as her fogs
of confusion on a stage littered with pitchers of ‘firewater’
alongside a trunk full of memories, a wedding dress, a chair,
and a table with wheels.[21] Blanc d’ombra concerns the
sculptor-lover of Rodin; in the performance, Carrasco
unveils what lies behind various canvasses onstage: a series
of objects through which the audience is able to trace the
protagonist’s past. Rodin himself appears only as a kind of
cloth-covered mannequin, which Carrasco, as Claudel,
appears to seduce with her movements, until ultimately she
inhabits him. Mira’m – in which Carrasco does not perform –
is replete with intertextual references to The Dead Class and
Wielopole, Wielopole, with ‘characters’ crossing the stage in
the form of actors and mannequins. A large closet full of
furniture and old objects fulfils the role of ‘memory
machine’.
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Scene from Marta Carrasco’s Mira’m (2000). Photograph courtesy of the artist’s
archive.
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Scene from Mira’m. Photograph courtesy of Carrasco’s archive.
Throughout this article, I have sought to sketch out the
history of Kantor’s presence in Spain, highlighting the
ongoing impact of both his theoretical and artistic practice.
Following Wielopole, Wielopole, the Spanish theatregoing
public enjoyed relatively broad access to Kantor’s
performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –
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performances: mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, but also –
significantly – in smaller and less internationally renowned
locations. Through Kantor’s ensuing influence on, for
example, the central practitioners mentioned above, I
suggest that he has contributed to significant openings in
Spain’s often-insular theatre tradition – even if I would also
argue that further work is required to explore the potential
of his ideas to invigorate the contemporary Spanish theatre
scene. The homogeneity and tameness to which PérezRasilla alludes above is a reminder that – despite a political
climate in which Spain can claim to be a mature democracy
engaged in the project of a borderless Europe – inspirational
leadership is still required in order to push the arts beyond
unreflective traditionalism. I would even venture that if
Kantor’s theatre were to make its Spanish debut in 2014
rather than 1981, it would be considered just as radical and
innovative today. His influence thus constitutes a strange
and somewhat problematic heritage, though Kantor himself
would no doubt have savoured the irony that his work has
been able to remain fresh and challenging over time, unlike
certain other cases of modernist innovation in the arts.
Nonetheless, the four principal examples I focus on in this
article – spanning playwrights, directors, and performers –
establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor
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establish beyond doubt that there is an important Kantor
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legacy in Spain. Indeed, I would argue that the work of
several of Spain’s leading theatre practitioners could not be
fully understood or appreciated without reference to
Kantor. Given this unmistakeable imprint, perhaps one way
of understanding Kantor’s promise that he ‘shall never
return’ is simply to acknowledge that – when it comes to the
Spanish theatre scene – he never left.
Notes:
1. ^ Jerónimo López Mozo, La infanta de Velázquez (Madrid: Primer Acto, 2006,
p. 162). Unless otherwise noted, all citations appear in my own translation.
2. ^ Today is My Birthday was staged in Spain following Kantor’s death, in
October 1991 at Teatro María Guerrero.
3. ^ Zarzuela refers to a genre of popular musical stage performance in which
actors alternate between speaking and singing, whose predominance on the
Spanish stage has been intermittent since it first emerged during the
seventeenth century. The name of the genre derives from the place where it
was first performed, the Zarzuela Palace, which was one of the residences of
Spain’s royal family in El Pardo, near Madrid. See Manuel Gómez García,
Diccionario Akal de Teatro (The Akal Dictionary of Theatre) (Madrid: Akal,
2007), p. 904.
4. ^ See Antonio Sánchez Trigueros, Teatro y escena. La poética del silencio y
otros ensayos (The Theatre and the Stage: The Poetics of Silence and Other
Essays) (Granada: Alhulia, 2008), p. 41. As Trigueros comments, ‘Spanish
society of the late 1940s – or at least a crucial part of it, its critical conscience
– despite the strictures of censorship and the threat of surveillance by the
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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authorities, also became animated by a powerful need to search for truth’ (p.
42).
^ José Monleón has been a central figure in the writing of Spanish theatre
history, in theory and in practice, throughout the past half-century.
^ Under the general title ‘Los seis grupos destacados de Nancy. 2: Cricot 2,
Polonia’ (The Six Outstanding Groups at Nancy. Part 2: Cricot 2, Poland) the
following texts by Kantor were published in Primer Acto, 132 (1971): ‘La
condición del actor’ (The Situation of an Artist), ‘Método del arte de ser
actor’ (The Acting Method), ‘Pre-existencia escénica’ (Scenic Preexistence),
‘Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2’ (The Cricot 2 Ensemble), and ‘La recuperación
del Arte’ (The Recovery of Art). ‘The Situation of the Artist’ is published in
English in Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos,
1944-1990, ed. and trans. by Kobialka (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), pp. 129-31; this and the other texts have also been published in
French and Italian.
^ Ángel Facio, ‘Demasiadas contradicciones’ (Too Many Contradictions),
Primer Acto, 132 (1971), 10-16 (p. 14).
^ José Monleón, ‘Introducción a una cronología. Kantor’ (Introduction to a
Chronology: Kantor), Primer Acto, 189 (1981), 6-7 (p. 6).
^ José Antonio Sánchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénica
contemporánea en España’, in Artes de la escena y de la acción en España: 19782002 (Theatre and Activist Arts in Spain: 1978-2002) (Cuenca: Ediciones de
la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006), p. 17.
^ Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España. Notas para un
balance del teatro del siglo XX’ (A Century of Theatre in Spain: Notes
Towards a Report on Twentieth Century Theatre), Monteagudo 3.6 (2001),
19-44 (p. 39).
^ ‘¿Qué es el conjunto Cricot 2?’ is published in English as ‘Cricot 2 Theatre’,
trans. by Michal Kobialka, in Kobialka, Further On, Nothing... Tadeusz
Kantor’s Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp.
110-15. Kantor’s ‘The Theatre of Death’ was also translated and published in
this volume, pp. 230-39.
^ The Independent Theatre is among the most original and influential
cultural phenomena through which to understand Spain’s transition from
dictatorship to democracy. The movement, which developed primarily
between the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained
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between the 1960s and ’70s, was indeed ‘independent’, since it remained
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
wholly detached from the economic, political, and artistic establishment in
Spain. Its principal achievement was to have established the foundations of
contemporary alternative theatre aesthetics, including for many innovative
practices still discernible in Spain today. Characterised by a bohemian and
collectivist spirit of adventure, the movement experimented extensively
with performance, space, and dramaturgy, including: modes of rehearsal,
approaches to acting, and engagement with European and North American
performance theory; the use of ritual and play; farce as a legitimate mode of
political commentary; and the adoption of certain popular performative and
festive practices. On the subject of the Independent Theatre, see José Luis
Alonso de Santos, ‘Principio y fin del teatro independiente’ (Beginning and
End of the Independent Theatre), Campus, 31 (1989) [available online at
http://www.um.es/campusdigital/TalComoEra/alonsoSantos.htm, accessed
23 March 2014]), and Pérez-Rasilla, ‘Un siglo de teatro en España’, p. 35.
^ The impression that this performance made on Alonso de Santos is
recounted by Margarita Piñero in her book La creación teatral en José Luis
Alonso de Santos (Theatrical Creation in the Work of José Luis Alonso de
Santos) (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2005).
^ From the author’s personal archive.
^ In a documentary produced by Polish Television (TVP), Kantor referred to
his own experience in 1971 when he was living in a little coastal town ‘with
little houses and a poor abandoned old school which had just one class. I
could look through the dirty windows. I stuck my face to the window and
looked inside my mind. In my mind, I was a little boy again sitting down in a
poor little town class. His desk was marked by knives and he was wetting his
tiny dirty fingers to pass the pages of his notebook […] the class has white
walls and the lime was falling off. There was a black cross on the wall. Now I
know that I made an important discovery by that window: I realized the
existence of memory’. See Kantor, dir. by Andrzej Sapija (Kraków: Telewizja
Polska, 1985), published on DVD by Cricoteka (Kraków, 2006).
^ Kobialka, Further On, Nothing, p. 38.
^ See Pewnej nocy wesz!a do mego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza/Pewnego
wieczoru wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázquez’a (One Night/Evening
Velázquez’s Infanta Came to My Room, 1988) and Pewnej nocy po raz drugi
wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta
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wesz!a do mojego pokoju Infantka Velázqueza (One Night Velázquez’s Infanta
18.
19.
20.
21.
Came to My Room for a Second Time, 1990).
^ La División Azul (1941-44) refers to the regular units of Spanish war
‘volunteers’, 5000 of whom (out of a total of 50,000) lost their lives at the
Russian Front fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht.
^ Rodrigo García, Sara Molina, and Francisco Valcarce (director of La
Tartana) make up another group of directors evidently fascinated by
Kantor’s performances, though less directly influenced by him. For reasons
of space, it is not possible to trace comprehensively Kantor’s presence in
their performances or plays; however, it is important to mention them here
in the wider context of Spanish practitioners who have engaged with
Kantor’s aesthetics.
^ See Sanchez, ‘Génesis y contexto de la creación escénica contemporánea en
España’, p. 276. See also Krzysztof Ple!niarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine:
Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, trans. by William Brandt (Aberystwyth:
Black Mountain Press, 2004).
^ Agua ardiente (‘firewater’) is a generic term for strong alcoholic, often
home-brewed drinks, usually made from grains (such as barley, millet, or
rice), which are widely considered the preferred morning libation of Spanish
construction workers.
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