Michal Kobialka - Böcker

A new encounter with the work of a master of avant-garde theatreTadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative visual artists, stage directors, and theoreticians. His theatre productions and manifestos challenged the conventions of creating art in post–World War II culture and expanded the boundaries of Dada, surrealist, Constructivist, and happening theatre forms. Kantor’s most widely known productions-The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), and Today Is My Birthday (1990)-have had a profound impact on playwrights and artists who continue today to engage with his radical theatre. In Further on, Nothing, Michal Kobialka explores Kantor’s theatre practice from the critical perspective of current debates about representation, memory, and history. He pursues the intriguing proposition that Kantor gave material form to a theatre practice that defined the very mode of postmodern operation and that many of its theoretical notions are still in circulation. According to Kobialka, Kantor’s theatre still offers an answer to reality rather than a portrayal of a utopian alternative. Further on, Nothing includes new translations of Kantor’s work, presented in conversation with Kobialka’s own theoretical analyses, to show us a Kantor who continues to offer-and deliver on-the promise of the avant-garde.

This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is a collection of Michal Kobialka’s essays, written between 1986 and 2025, that provide a comprehensive understanding of Kantor’s theatre practice.The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a specific area of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre practice. Part I explores Kantor’s radical departure from, or rupture within, the known and accepted representational categories not only of the twentieth, but also of the twenty-first century. Part II focuses on Kantor’s productions, which disrupted the preestablished artistic conventions in order to infiltrate and shatter the prevailing political, ideological, and cultural systems of power. Part III sheds light on Kantor’s 1949-90 theatre experiments with objects, matter, space, reality of the lowest rank, an autonomous work of art, zero zones, the impossible condition, and complex mnemotechnics, which reflected his unwavering belief that theatre was an answer to, rather than a representation of, reality. The three parts elucidate the central argument of this book, that Kantor’s theatre is an example of refractory art in its double sense: as a negation of the status quo and as a deviation from the dominant artistic conventions in service to any official cultural system and its culture industry.Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, performance theory, theatre history, Polish theatre, and avant-garde art in the twentieth century.

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is a collection of Michal Kobialka’s essays, written between 1986 and 2025, that provide a comprehensive understanding of Kantor’s theatre practice.The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a specific area of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre practice. Part I explores Kantor’s radical departure from, or rupture within, the known and accepted representational categories not only of the twentieth, but also of the twenty-first century. Part II focuses on Kantor’s productions, which disrupted the preestablished artistic conventions in order to infiltrate and shatter the prevailing political, ideological, and cultural systems of power. Part III sheds light on Kantor’s 1949-90 theatre experiments with objects, matter, space, reality of the lowest rank, an autonomous work of art, zero zones, the impossible condition, and complex mnemotechnics, which reflected his unwavering belief that theatre was an answer to, rather than a representation of, reality. The three parts elucidate the central argument of this book, that Kantor’s theatre is an example of refractory art in its double sense: as a negation of the status quo and as a deviation from the dominant artistic conventions in service to any official cultural system and its culture industry.Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, performance theory, theatre history, Polish theatre, and avant-garde art in the twentieth century.