Tadeusz Kantorʼs theater sniper. A poetics of lowest rank or the aura of the rejected.

Abstract

This essay addresses the unorthodox dramatic proposal by theater director Tadeusz Kantor. Influenced by romantics, symbolists and intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School, he developed a poetic theater of “lowest rank”, anti-naturalist and anti-representational, outside all power, absolute or entirety, and from which he was reduced to zero each of the stage elements to make them “auratic remnants”. To the same extent, compared to the pragmatism of the secularized society of capital, he proposed a "metaphysical theater" designed as a free game to put a man in contact with the child he had been.