ABSTRACT
It is almost 7:30 p.m., Sunday evening, October 13, 1985, at La Mama Annex in New York City where Polish writer and director Tadeusz Kantor’s Let the Artists Die is about to be performed. Tadeusz Kantor is onstage, alternately peering out at the audience and looking at his wristwatch. He exits, enters again, exits. When the play begins, he is onstage, wearing a black suit with an open-collared white shirt, seated prominently on a wooden chair, on a diagonal to the main stage action, his back toward the audience. Throughout the performance the director’s hands are in almost continual rhythmic motion, seemingly in response to both sound and action. In addition, his fingers often gesture to indicate sound cues and, occasionally, cues for actors’ positions or movements. Once he turns to glance over his shoulder and either speaks or mimes speech to the sound booth. Throughout the one and a half-hour performance the director’s concentration on the actors is intense, penetrating. Sometimes he touches or is touched by an actor, or makes eye contact. Sometimes he moves or holds stationary a particular stage prop (a chair, a skeleton-like horse). At one point he is handed an actor’s socks, shoes, and trousers; the director neatly folds the socks into the shoes and then folds the trousers, keeping them in his lap until they are later plucked out by the actor who, along with other actors, whirls by him in a circular motion around the stage. Twice the director leaves the stage: once when the exit he sits by requires wider access and again when the full cast is moving in intricate patterns in the small space. The energy level of the actors remains the same, neither decreasing nor increasing visibly, while the director is offstage.
