It was recently suggested that I research the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor and his ‘Theatre of Death’ he established post WW2. I managed to locate his Wielopole/Wielople An Exercies in Theatre from the 50s with a very interesting introduction on his methods by GM Hyde. Kantor apparently, had an obsession with the subject of realism. There is a description of his paradoxical rootedness in Polish theatrical tradition - an intrinsic scepticism, sense of absurdity, ritual and fantasy, but also the rootlessness that came with his Dada influence, or ‘rooted in the void’. His ‘rootedness’ is not a sort of nostalgia, instead, “reminding us of the pastness of the past as much as of its presence.” Wielopole/Wielopole employs many disconcerting techniques – the doubling of actors, actors as mannequins, crossing representational space with real space. This is not an attempt to merge the past and the present but create a disjunction or void between them, a sense of loss. The Dada influence filters its way in through what Hyde calls, “the afterlife of junk, wreckage is another manifestation of death: things become themselves somewhere between the scrapheap and infinity.” Kantor started out officially as a painter although his methods always crossed the performative boundary. He placed his painting within the ‘art informal’ genre – expanding outwards with no divisions between creativity and work. Within Kantor’s sets props and costumes are not left to their own devices, not merely decoration but borderline functionalism and self-sufficiency. The actor must act as a mediator between reality and the unknown, unconscious.