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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Famously, the work of the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor drew much on his own past – and specifically on memories of the dead. No less famously, he himself took a ‘part apart’ in his work on stage, manipulating and orchestrating the plays in progress, simultaneously as actor and auteur. In the following article, Eleanor Margolies relates Kantor's dramatic memorializing of the dead and his creative ambivalence towards theatrical illusion to the ‘intersection of mysticism and rationalism’ in his Polish-Jewish background – notably, to the image of the dybbuk, through whom the spirits of the dead speak, as in Anski's play of that name. She relates this ventriloquial habitation by a strange voice with the work of the performance artist Fiona Templeton, whose Recognition interweaves past and present, the living and the dead, in analogous fashion. She suggests that, through very different philosophies and technologies, both Kantor and Templeton ‘transmit a sensual understanding of the past’ to their audiences – through whose own responses the past is ultimately made to speak.
1. See Hoffman, Eva, Shtetl: the Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998)Google Scholar, and Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof, Kantor (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1997), p. 27Google Scholar. Pleśniarowicz has noted that the Habima production of The Dybbuk, directed by Vakhtangov, was enormously popular, and was mounted three times in Krakow during the period of Kantor's studies. He points out the striking likeness between photographs of that production and photographs of Kantor's Wielopole/Wielopole.
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9. The importance of this gap was suggested to me by a production of The Dybbuk by Wierszalin Theatre Company in which the dybbuk was played by a male actor, and the possessed woman stood silently to one side during the exorcism, as if incapable of embodying the male voice. The production worked against the complex, ‘non-realist’ conception of the actor-character relationship implied by Anski's drama.
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