In 2020, American theatre-related circles received an outstanding book covering multiple aspects of the work of Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), an avant-garde Polish theatre artist who inspired theatre theory and practice not only in his own country, but in many other places in the world including the United States and Japan.
Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context starts with the introduction by Magda Romańska (one of the editors) mapping the whole project and ponders the relevance of Tadeusz Kantor's theatre and theories for the twenty-first century. She points out that as much as Jerzy Grotowski's focus on the body in his theatre practice made him the exemplary theatre figure of the second-half of the twentieth century, Kantor's disembodied, truncated, object-oriented productions make him the signpost of the twenty-first century post-dramatic theatre that challenges the unified structure of the performance, gets rid of the character and plot, leaving the space for disconnected bits...
