10. The Dead Class
In nineteen seventy-five, the premiere of The Dead Class, Tadeusz Kantor’s most famous work, took place at the Krzysztofory Gallery in Kraków. This marked the beginning of a new phase in the theatrical work of the artist and his Cricot Two Theater - the Theater of Death.
Kantor chose the concept of death in order to make theater bring back feelings again. Death - or even the mere thought of it - evokes stronger emotions in people than those arising from the awareness of life.
In his text The School Class, Tadeusz Kantor described the moment when the idea for the play was born:
It was nineteen seventy-one or nineteen seventy-two. At the seaside. In a small town. Almost a village. One street. Small, poor, ground-floor houses. One of them, the poorest, perhaps - the school. It was summer, vacation time. The school was empty and abandoned. It had only one classroom. You could look inside it through the dusty panes of two small, shabby windows, set low just above the sidewalk. It gave the impression that the school had sunk below street level. I pressed my face against the glass. For a very long time, I peered into the depths of my dark and murky memory. I was a little boy again, sitting in a poor village classroom, at a desk scratched by pocketknives, with my ink-stained fingers drooling on the pages of the elementary school textbook; the floorboards had deep grooves worn by constant scrubbing, and the bare feet of the village boys somehow went well with that floor. Whitewashed walls, plaster peeling off at the bottom, and a black cross on the wall.
In The Dead Class, a group of elderly people returns to their school desks to make up for missed lessons. They drag behind them lifeless effigies of children, as if they were their forgotten childhoods from which one cannot be freed. The Dead Class is a story about a desperate desire to go back in time; it tells us that the world of the dead is just as real but in a different way.
The idea for The Dead Class stems from The Pensioner by Bruno Schulz, whose protagonist - withdrawn from society and longing for a bit of human warmth - enrolls in school to become like a child again. Schulz insinuates, however, that his condition is ambiguous, that there is no definitive answer to the question of exactly who he is – an aging pensioner or a ghost, a “visitor from the other side.”
Kantor maintains the insinuated ambiguity - except that he changes the singular to the plural, creating an entire class of such not-quite-real beings. They are half-ghosts in a state of complete decline. (…) They enter, hopping and limping, onto a stage lined with rows of crooked benches, each “with his own brat,” carrying a mannequin of their former selves as children in their arms.
There were at least two versions of The Dead Class. The first, performed from the premiere until the company’s return from its first international tour of the United Kingdom (August fifteen – September twenty-two, nineteen seventy-six), was filmed by Andrzej Wajda in June nineteen seventy-six. The second, presented over the next ten years during numerous international tours had the biggest number of performances and cemented the legend of Kantor and his theatre around the world. After the artist’s death, the Cricot Two company continued to perform The Dead Class in Spain, Canada, the USA, Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
The artist created numerous works inspired by the concept of The Dead Class using a variety of techniques: drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and objects. Some of them are objects taken directly from the performance, such as The Cradle, The Family Machine, or Child Dummy on Bicycle. Other works, such as the sculpture of the Boy at his Desk or the installation The School Class. A Closed Work, were created as autonomous pieces, as were the paintings in the Dead Class series. The Cricoteka collection is also home to all other objects, props, and costumes that formed the performance space of The Dead Class.
