Born in 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, a small Polish-Jewish town in Southern Poland, Tadeusz Kantor grew up in a world dominated by both Christian and Jewish mysticism. Today, in the house where Kantor was born, there is a small museum, with souvenirs from his childhood and props and drawings from his spectacles. During his childhood, every aspect of daily village existence, from birth to death, had religious ramifications that were imminently embedded within the entire sociocultural context of each congregation. The two worlds, Kantor remembers, “lived in an agreeable symbiosis,” each cultivating its own traditions. The synagogue and the church stood on opposite sides of the city; Jewish and Christian ceremonies were performed parallel to each other. Ruled by the cycles of their religious rituals, each community was oriented more towards sacred than earthly values. As Kantor reminisces, “beyond its everyday life, the little town was turned towards eternity.” The coexistence and intermingling of the two cultures, and the spiritually charged atmosphere of timelessness and mysticism they evoked, were resurrected time after time in all of Kantor's spectacles. The town – constructed like a theatrical space in which the predictable intertwined with the accidental, the grotesque with the profound, the sacred with the profane – became the framework for the juxtapositions Kantor investigated over years of theatrical experiments. Built around the everlasting oppositions between life and death, form and matter, illusion and reality, consciousness and object, Kantor's “religious dramas” attempt to simultaneously reconcile these poles and show the impossibility of doing so.