A theatrical experiment is before us, an attempt to look at Kantor’s last work from two perspectives: scientific and artistic. For six months, a group of people involved in theatre, dance or performance will be searching for meanings, possible scenarios and unrealized shifts in Tadeusz Kantor’s performance Today Is My Birthday. After participating in seminars and workshops, during the ‘work in progress’, the group of participants, together with the Cricot 2 Theatre actor Bogdan Renczyński, will create a new performance based on this process. The premiere is planned for April 2025.
Cricoteka’s project will begin with the recruitment of people willing to participate in work on the performance. Recruitment will take place from 15 August to 15 September. The starting point for the stage work will be a series of 10 seminars with invited researchers, explorers and people connected with the Cricot 2 Theatre.
Today Is My Birthday – Explorations is a project that has been planned entirely with Tadeusz Kantor’s last theatrical work, Today Is My Birthday, in mind. The performance has diverse, often contradictory senses; it is inscribed with tension, fate, limitlessness, beauty, and defeat. Work on the performance was stopped abruptly as a consequence of Kantor’s sudden death after one of the final rehearsals. Because of this, the show is often seen in terms of an unfinished work. The show premiered in Toulouse in 1991 and was performed dozens of times until 1992. In comparison, The Dead Class was shown around five hundred times. Today Is My Birthday has not received the publicity comparable to previous Theatre of the Dead productions. The project is also a pretext to reach for the resources of the Living Archive in search of interpretative clues, which became the heart of Cricoteka, founded in 1980.
Kantor was not able to plan how the Cricot 2 Theatre company, orphaned by him, would cope with his absence in the process of closing the work and with the absence of the director on stage. For some critics, Today Is My Birthday is an incomplete work, one that is fractured precisely by Kantor’s absence. Guy Scarpetta, in his opinion on La deuxième mort de Tadeusz Kantor (The Second Death of Tadeusz Kantor), saw the performance in this way: “I hesitated for a long time before speaking on this subject. Because I understand very well what motives (all too human) drove Kantor’s actors to fight so that his theatre would not die with him. If I finally do so, it is with a view to all those young viewers who never saw Kantor’s performances during his lifetime, who may fall victim to this forgery and no longer be able to distinguish between an awkward imitation and the original.”
The aim of Cricoteka’s project is not to recreate Tadeusz Kantor’s performance, but an attempt to build a fully autonomous theatrical work created from a clash between a new generation of artists and the work of the founder of the Cricot 2 Theatre. An analysis of the performance’s criticism, its reception and post-premiere fate will be one of the elements of the work.
The topics of the meetings will be focused around the themes relevant to the work – from a presentation of the state of research on the performance to critical perspectives on the memory and post-memory of the performance, Tadeusz Kantor’s working method or the multi-faceted dramaturgy. The materials gathered in the resources of the Tadeusz Kantor Archive at Cricoteka will form the basis of the research process and creative activities. The project is intended to engage art and science, which together are able not only to tell the story of an already closed creative process, but also to trigger another one.
The series of seminars introducing the project will take the form of meetings open to the public. Those involved in the study of theory and the history of art, theatre and performance are encouraged to attend. The artistic part of the project is open to all who wish to explore the meanders of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical legacy in a collaborative, laboratory-like way, and above all to artistic people who are actively involved in theatre, performance or dramaturgy. Participation in the seminar part of the project will, at the same time, be a pass to participate in the artistic part of the project.
Framework of the project:
Recruitment for the programme: 15 August – 15 September 2024.
Number of project participants: 6 – 8 people
Seminars: 8 October – 17 December 2024.
Production part (workshops, rehearsals): January – April 2025.
An honorarium is provided for participation in the production part.
Premiere performances: 4 and 5 April 2025
