ABSTRACT
Theatrical experience is like remembering something absent, something past, which at the same time depends entirely on a sensory, bodily perception in the here-and-now. Theatre, in contrast, retains an unshakably 'conformist' and 'worldly' trait, so to speak, which should, however, be considered its most life-affirming element. The theatre represents a community, sometimes even a collective; simultaneously, it offers concrete experience, even of what is highly individuated, in a communal framework that exists only in passing. The aesthetic dimension of the theatre occupies the borderland between the human and the 'thingly'. Material objects' fantastic potential is renewed as people come to resemble things. The theatre of Tadeusz Kantor presents the grotesquely jagged and mechanical movements of human beings as the corollary of operations performed by mad, machinic assemblages. In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg explores how the classic nautical metaphor of existence overlaps with metaphors of theatre.
