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The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor from Part II - Our Memory: Kantor's Dead Class
Two of the strategies that foreign critics used to grapple with Dead Class deserve special attention. One was to rely on the work's visual aspects as a primary access point (the “what you see is what you get” approach). The second was to reductively interpret Dead Class as – to quote Anne Barry – “a satire on the educational process.” If the first strategy attempted to frame Dead Class in the broader European canon of art, the second one completely missed the point, failing to see the deeper historical roots of Kantor's masterpiece. Evoking a number of dramatic comparisons, Harold Clurman attempted to locate Dead Class somewhere along the spectrum of theatrical landscape based on its mise-en-scene:
It is reminiscent of German expressionist drama, without expressionism's literary emphasis. The fascination of the Dead Class is largely visual (its director, Kantor, was first a painter), and it succeeds by the mordancy of its physical metaphors: its weird suggestiveness and, above all, by the mastery of its performances.
This mise-en-scene approach, however, seemed an inadequate framework for understanding Kantor's works, as another critic noted:
Mr. Kantor's work is anti-theatre. He is attempting to create a new kind of drama, a form that has the abstract qualities of music or sculpture as well as something of the unnerving aspects of a happening. I'm not sure I want him to succeed, valuing theater for just those qualities of humanism that he would banish. But The Dead Class is undeniably fascinating as well as disquieting.
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