Inspiration from Edward Gordon Craig in Tadeusz Kantor and Józef Szajna’s artistic theories

Abstract

"Have you ever noticed that in theatrical life there come long, torturing periods of inactivity during which there appear no new and talented writers on the horizon, no actors, and no stage directors? And then suddenly, unexpectedly, nature spews forth a whole theatrical troupe and adds to it out of its bounty a writer and a stage director, who, all together, create that wonder, an epoch in the theatre. [...] And there appear the inheritors of the great men who created the epoch. They accept the tradition and bear it to the next generation. But tradition is capricious, it takes on strange forms, just like the blue birds of Maeterlinck, and becomes a trade, and one seed of it, the most important one, retains life till the new rejuvenation of the theatre, which takes the inherited seed of the great eternal and creates its own and new eternal.” This fragment from My life In Art by Constantin Stanislavski, although it is written in a lofy style (which is usually very common for such memoirs, when flashes of memory are frequently idealised), pinpoints two interesting aspects connected with the process of constructing theatre tradition.