Tadeusz Kantor - Theatre Cricot 2 - 1975

Rare publication on the famous Polish avant-garde theatre group. Theatre Cricot 2. No date (1975). Saddle-stitch, 36 unnumbered pages. Black-and-white illustrations. French text. In excellent condition - slight signs of time. Auction without reserve!!!! Poland Polonia Polska

Cricot 2 was a Polish experimental theatre company based in Kraków. It was founded in 1955 by the renowned theatre director, professional painter, assemblage artist, avant-garde scenographer, and art theorist Tadeusz Kantor, whose works are in the National Museum collections in Kraków and Warsaw.

The productions initially drew on Witkacy’s dramas, but later works were original creations by Tadeusz Kantor himself.

Background
Cricot 2 was performed in Poland and abroad. Its peak popularity and recognition came with its original production of The Dead Class (Umarła klasa) in 1975; [2] a new theatrical form invented by Kantor. It was nicknamed the “Theatre of Death,” a kind of séance that evokes sensory images, words, and sounds distorted by the passage of time. Drawing on his personal memories and the experiences of the Holocaust, Kantor sought to capture the collective memory of the Polish‑Jewish tragedy of the mid‑twentieth century.

Kantor created a unique visual canon and theatrical atmosphere that were impossible to replicate or sustain after his death in 1990. Soon after, his last production, entitled Dziś są moje urodziny (Today is My Birthday), was completed and performed by the actors without his presence, and the company ceased activity, despite debates about continuing without him being divided.

Tadeusz Kantor (Wielopole Skrzyńskie, 6 April 1915 – Kraków, 8 December 1990) was a Polish painter, scenographer, and theatre director, one of the leading theorists of Twentieth-Century theatre.

Biography
Born in 1915 in Wielopole, a small town in Poland, son of the officer, publicist, and Polish patriot Marian Leon Kantor - “Mirski,” and Helena Berger, he directed his first production in 1937 (The Death of Titangiles by Maurice Maeterlinck) while still attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

In 1942 he clandestinely founded in Kraków the “Independent Theatre” where he gathered young painters and artists. In 1955 he founded the group “Cricot 2”: a meeting place for artists and theater people just like the group “Cricot” - born from the anagram of the transliteration of the words To cyrk, meaning “this is a circus” - which Kantor wanted to honor.

During World War II and the following years Kantor developed his theatre poetics, one of the salient aspects of which is the precariousness of existence, tangibly experienced during the wartime period. Through his constant and passionate theatre research he expressed himself in various poetic manifestos, culminating in 1975 with the development of the core manifesto of his work, the “Theatre of Death,” as well as the creation of the performance that would bring him worldwide fame and is still considered a fundamental milestone in Twentieth-Century theatre research: “The Dead Class.”

The last Cricot 2 show directed by Kantor was staged on 10 January 1991 in Toulouse, a month before his death (which occurred suddenly on 8 December 1990). It is titled Today is My Birthday and traces various significant moments and figures of the author’s life, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Russian avant-garde artist betrayed by the revolution, the Polish stage designer Maria Jarema, and the painter Jonasz Stern, miraculously escaped from Jewish annihilation. The work explores and retraces Kantor’s emotional and artistic life, bringing to the stage, with an irremediably empty chair, his irreplaceable absence.

Kantor in Florence
In 2002 Florence dedicated a cycle of exhibitions to Kantor, twenty years after his death. The weekly Specchio della Stampa covered the planned events with a feature on the international master presented as: “Disruptive, nihilist, subversive. In theatre as in painting, the Polish artist is the first to blow up the oppressive frames of finished works. To exalt, instead, the performance of the creative act.”[1] In Florence Kantor opened Cricot 2 there in 1972, thanks to which he “wanted to double the space that his theater in Kraków already had a rather tight grip on.” Florence, as a location for the artist’s theatrical experiments, stood in opposition to the city defined as a “tourist fetish” in Specchio della Stampa’s review, quoting Carlo Sisi, then Director of the Gallery of Modern Art at Pitti that hosted Kantor’s exhibitions: “a community devoted to consumption and anchored to Renaissance rents.”[1]