Nowojorskie historie Kantora

Zuzanna Berendt reviews the play Kantor: Downtown (Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, premiere: 13.11.2015), the result of a month-long search for traces of the reception of Tadeusz Kantor's work in New York, carried out by Wiktor Rubin, Jolanta Janiczak, Joanna Krakowska, and Magda Mosiewicz. The author calls attention to the construction of the play, based on a montage of interviews filmed with American avant-garde artists and a spatial model of a play based on Kantor's Dead Class. Apart from investigating the reception of Kantor's work among such artists as Penny Arcade, Ozzi Rodriguez, and Jill Godmilow, the most important theme of the play is the economic aspect of how theater functions. The artists analyze this in terms of the Cricot 2 Theater, the Downtown artists, and finally, contemporary repertory theaters, such as the Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz.