Art Is a Kind of Exhibitionism

Abstract

Although now in his seventy-fifth year, the Polish director and artist Tadeusz Kantor is still regarded in the west as a startlingly experimental director, in the bleak, highly personal mould that has marked his work since the creation of the Cricot 2 Theatre in 1955. Such productions as The Water Hen, The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Let the Artists Die have earned him a strong cult following, but he has rarely chosen to explain his views and approach to theatre in the discursive form of an interview. We are therefore particularly pleased to be able to print here a translation of an interview which first appeared in the journal Polityka, No. 39 (November 1988), which took place during the visit of Kantor's most recent work, I Shall Never Return, to New York earlier in the same year. The translation is by Piotr Kutriwczak.