Tadeusz KantorThe Return of Odysseus

Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) was a revolutionary theater-maker and transdisciplinary artist who dissolved the boundaries between theater, visual art, and life. He called himself a Verpackungskünstler: an artist using wrapping to withdraw objects from ordinary use and expose repressed histories.

In June 1944, in Nazi-occupied Kraków, Kantor and fellow artists secretly staged Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Return of Odysseus. At a time when gathering itself was dangerous, war was not just a backdrop: it entered the work’s form. Wyspiański’s play draws on Homer’s Odyssey but dismantles its victorious hero. Odysseus returns not to Ithaca but to a devastated Europe, to a room destroyed by the violence of 1944. Home has become unrecognizable; the returning hero is a stranger in his own land, suspended between arrival and impossibility.

For Kantor, this destroyed room was not theatrical scenery. Real objects marked by the wartime city entered the performance in all their poverty and damage; actors and audience shared the same precarious space. Here he formulated a defining principle: theater should not illustrate reality, but collide with it. Odysseus brings catastrophe into a home that can no longer receive him.

In 1955, Kantor founded Cricot 2 in Kraków. Never a conventional theater institution, Cricot 2 was an independent laboratory in which visual artists, actors, objects, and found materials met across disciplines. Particularly characteristic was Kantor’s treatment of the actors’ bodies. They became living sculptures whose movements often appeared mechanical or ritualized. The boundary between human and object blurred; each became an equal participant.

Kantor died in December 1990 during rehearsals for Today Is My Birthday. Cricot 2 presented the production for the final time after his death, with his empty chair marking an irreplaceable absence. The question remains: how can Kantor’s theater return without being reconstructed or imitated?

Developed in collaboration with Cricoteka in Kraków, The Return of Odysseus approaches Kantor’s archive as living material. Bogdan Renczyński, who worked with Cricot 2 as both actor and set designer, joins the Gorki ensemble in transforming texts, memories, and gestures into new performative responses. Sebastian Baumgarten and Till Wonka revisit the 1944 production with a staged reading.

Sarkis invites Kantor into FUGE at the Gorki, where artworks and memories return as protagonists in an ongoing theater. A moving platform and thirty-one crosses, drawn from Kantor’s visual vocabulary, enter the Gorki stage.

The invitation continues outside. On the digital wall at Platz der Märzrevolution, Eustachy Kossakowski’s photograph of Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening from 1967 shows Edward Krasiński conducting the waves from a platform in the Baltic Sea. An emblem of our new season, the image shows theater leaving the building and turning wind, water, audience, and passersby into a shared situation.

At 21 pm on September 11, as part of Berlin Art Week, Dietrich Mahlow’s film Kantor ist da (Kantor Is Here) brings Kantor’s 1968 Nuremberg happenings back into the present not as passive documentation, but as actions staged through and for the camera, making the film’s title the proposition of the entire project: Kantor is here.