Directed by Andrzej Wełmiński and Teresa Wełmińska, Traumatikon is a collaboratively devised performance, fuelled by mutual inspiration. We worked from various stimuli including pictures, poor objects, characters and etudes. We drew inspiration from Kantor himself, with whom Andrzej and Teresa worked for many years as part of Cricot2, but also Meyerhold, Eadweard Muybridge, The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari, Picasso’s blue paintings, Joseph Beuys and Oscar Schlemmer to name but a few.
The piece began as two separate groups, developing in two different directions. Group A worked with characters drawn from history, who found themselves together in a timeless café/tavern. Group B formed a poor traveling circus. During the process, these two worlds began to overlap...
ART OF ENGLAND
RICHARD DEMARCO
April 2011
Joseph Beuys believed that ‘Everyone is an artist’. By that he meant that everyone has the God-given role of being a creative human-being, if provided with the opportunity. Only extra-ordinary artists have the strength of will to produce art works as a direct result of believing in the inherent capability of so-called ‘non-artists’.
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I must also make reference to another unusual and unmissable visual arts experience which has given me hope that the spirit of true avant-gardism is still alive and well. It has resulted from a master class conducted by Andrzej and Teresa Welminski involving a group of over forty students at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. They have produced an extra-ordinary example of a ‘total art work’. It is a true celebration of the life and art of Tadeusz Kantor who was the 1976 winner of the Rembrandt Prize as a visual artist. He was undoubtedly possessed of an unique genius bestriding the worlds of the visual and performing arts.
Each moment of the one and a half hour event which is entitled ‘Traumatikon’ provided the audience at Rose Bruford College with a experience in the form of what could be termed ‘sculpture in motion’ and which calls to mind aspects of Russian Constructivist theatre, the Dadaist happenings at the Café Voltaire, the performance art of Kurt Schwitters, as well as the art of those Polish artists who inspired Kantor – such as Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Wyspianski, and Witold Gombrowicz.
Andrzej and Teresa are two veterans of Kantor’s Cricot 2 Theatre company. The Edinburgh Festival is in need of them and their capacity to defend the truth embodied in Kantor’s art.
I have illustrated this essay with two of my ‘Event Photographs’: one is a portrait of Virginia Ryan standing in front of her ‘Intransitu’ installation in Edinburgh; the other is of a dramatic moment from ‘Traumatikon’ showing ‘The Angel of Death’ personifying the spirit of war wrecking havoc on 20th century Europe, smitten with two World Wars. It is an image which calls to mind Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and Goya’s ‘Disaster’s of War’ as well as the 1976 Cricot 2 Theatre production of Kantor’s masterpiece, ‘The Dead Class’.
Richard Demarco
Traumatikon is enticing, moving and witty. Counter-Active in collaboration with Andrzej Welminski and Teresa Welminska, visual artists and former members of the internationally acclaimed Cricot2, share with you a feast for the imagination. Traumatikon offers an encounter with charismatic icons of the past from Muhammad Ali to N Armstrong. Drifting between the distorted worlds of a circus and café, the performance is inspired by the works of influential artists such as F Kahlo, O Schlemmer and P Picasso. With live music, Traumatikon is ‘An extraordinary ensemble piece, full of Kantorian moments and gestures’.
Noel Witts, Kantor Memory
ED2011 Theatre Review: Traumatikon
Traumatikon’s programme name-checks eleven modernist names, with Tadeusz Kantor being the key – “Kantorian” seems to mean repetitive, grotesque, and nonlinear. We follow a restaurant’s large macabre cast through tics, non-dialogue, boozy sing-a-longs and transformations. Characters take it in turns to break through routine with some absurd great change that gives both them and us a short reprieve from passive horror: a ‘queen’ becomes Pablo Picasso; a mute emerges as Frida Kahlo; a cheery girl channels the goddess Freya in wrath; the grim restaurant itself suddenly becomes a gory circus. Traumatikon is cruel to beauty, but if you have patience, and the stomach for masses of irony and black, it’s meaty. Meat that’s going green.
- See more at: http://www.threeweeks.co.uk/article/ed2011-theatre-review-traumatikon-counter-active/#sthash.XiOFIcOT.dpuf
TRAUMATIKON at Summerhall in the Edinburgh Festival
If you've heard of Tadeusz Kantor, the great Polish theatre director, then you'll want to see TRAUMATIKON at Summerhall (the old Dick Vet building) on the Fringe in Edinburgh. Counter-Active, a generously talented group out of the Rose Bruford College in London have been collaborating with two former members of Kantor's Cricot 2 theatre company who also direct. 'An extraordinary ensemble piece, full of Kantorian moments and gestures' says Noel Witts, and it certainly is. Get along there and experience one of the hits of the Festival. For those who have never heard of Kantor then you have a wonderful surprise in store.
David
/…/ From the same era when Williams' poetic sensibilities began to stir came Polish auteur Tadeusz Kantor's Cricot 2 company, a radical collective that presented a form of total theatre which at the time the western world had seen little of. Under the directorial guidance of former Cricot 2 members Andrzei and Teresa Welminski, the young Counter-Active company and students of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance understandably look to the maestro for inspiration in Traumatikon, a messy melange of fantasy dinner party and the sort of circus cabaret that's currently undergoing something of a revival in the more decadent areas of clubland.
In a hotel cafe, disembodied hands appear through little mounds of earth. It's a familiar image to anyone weaned on zombie and vampire teen TV, but these clutching little hands have been grasping their way into life, and indeed death, since Kantor's own metaphysical constructions. Once swept away, however, the party of the year erupts into life with a guest list of twentieth century icons including Edith Piaf, Frida Kahlo, a well-oiled Picasso, a soggy Virginia Woolf taking stones from her pockets, Neil Armstrong and Muhammed Ali. Even Margaret Thatcher makes an appearance.
Not that this is always clear in a series of representational interpretations that occasionally burst into little tortured solos, all set to a live piano and double bass score. Once the circus arrives, it's as if the original Cabaret Voltaire live art club had been drafted in to add to a youthfully lusty grab-bag of sound and image that suggests Kantor's children are very much alive and kicking./
Neil Cooper