Ashes – Luca Drama workshop

01.09.2014 – 11.09.2014 Leuven, Belgium

Conducted by Teresa i Andrzej Wełmińscy

In the first 2 weeks of September, Andrzej and Teresa Welminski, famous actors of Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre Cricot 2 in Cracow (Poland), held a workshop at Luca, the theatre school of the Lemmens Institute in Leuven, Belgium.
This workshop ended with a performance, entitled ‘Ashes’.  From October 1st till November 26th the actor/director Johan Knuts will direct a spectacle, based on the results of this performance.

Both the performance and the spectacle fit into a large project, entitled Melancholy, in which is also involved Johan de Boose, a Belgian/Dutch author who knew Tadeusz Kantor personally, wrote a book with translations of Kantor’s manifestos and made his phd (doctorate) on the Theatre of Death at the University of Ghent. The workshop started from texts, images, obsessions, dreams, films, works of art and ideas, brought by the students on the first day. Andrzej and Teresa asked them explicit to bring only ideas, that are stucked in the memory. The students were already introduced in Kantor’s concept of art and they had seen several dvd-recordings of his spectacles. Very soon the idea of war became crucial, inspired by the commemoration programs on Belgian television about World War I, which had a long and cruel history in the socalled Flander’s Fields. During this war the library of Leuven was destroyed by the German army. It became clear that images of marching and dying soldiers and of burning cities would play an important role in the performance. Also in Kantor’s art war was omnipresent.

Read the full report of the theatre workshop by Andrzej and Teresa Welminski in School of Arts/Luca Leuven, Belgium, September 1st – till September 11th 2014.

CIRCUM MORTIS teaser from PARCHFILMS on Vimeo.

CIRCUM MORTIS teaser from PARCHFILMS on Vimeo.