Michal Kobialka about Tadeusz Kantor at RNTF 20

An indefatigable researcher of Tadeusz Kantor’s work, Michal Kobialka has delivered many lectures about the great Polish stage director’s theater and writings. His presence in the Debates, Conferences, Meetings series, which invited Richard Foreman, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Aleks Sierz as guest lecturers in past years, is meant to add a new touch to the theatrical landscape of the last fifty years, which the RNTF has attempted to outline in its last three editions.
Kobialka is known as the first translator into English of Kantor’s writings, about whom he wrote a series of studies. The lecture to be delivered in Bucharest is an occasion to scrutinize the career path of the Polish artist in the company of a specialist, and view representative episodes from his shows, thanks to the screenings made possible by Dorota Krakowska and the Kantor Estate, with support from the Polish Institute in Bucharest.
To complete the portrait of this great personality of European theater, the RNTF in collaboration with the Theater Department of Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, is launching the book Kantor by Michal Kobialka (translated by Cipriana Petre and published by Editura Casa Cartii de Stiinta in the RNTF collection).
A professor at the Department of Theater Arts & Dance of the University of Minnesota, frequent guest of prestigious theater departments all over the world, such as the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, member of the American Society for Theater Research and contributor to many specialized magazines, Michal Kobialka has published over twenty books about theater. He is a specialist of medieval theater, as well as of contemporary European theater and postmodern theater and drama.
A Journey through Other Spaces. Essays and Manifestos 1944-1990 (University of California Press, 1993), Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (University of Minnesota, 1999) and Medieval Practices of Space (University of Minnesota, 2000), edited with Barbara Hanawalt, are among his best known works. For This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages, published at the University of Michigan in 1999, he received the ATHE Research Award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy. His most recent book, Further on, Nothing (2009), a new analytical volume, was recently awarded the Honorary Mention for Best Theatre Book (2010).
As usual, theater fans, specialists and students are invited throughout the duration of the festival to a series of meetings with theater theorists and creators who are for the first time in Romania. The events will take place at the UNATC (NUTCA) HQ in Bucharest.