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Ventriloquism: Kantor, Templeton, and the Voices of the Dead
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
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.
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References
Notes and References
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