• Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association
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• no.49
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• pp.75-100
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• 2013

An on-going creative process was the major principle of Kantor's artistic endeavors. Kantor's emphasis on process grew out of his frustration with the experience of creation being isolated from the audience in the present time, during the moments of encounter. At the same time, however, Kantor was always aware of the fact that the first night of each and every performance that he made was the last point of his creative intervention. Despite being performed live in the present time, Kantor saw theatre essentially as an end product. This does not mean that Kantor abandoned the concept of on-going process, for process was for the artist a means to reject the idea of a finished work of art and to denounce the feeling of satisfaction derived from the traditional denouement in representational theatre. For him, theatre that dominated his time isolated the audience from the art work and the artist, and from this perspective his continual emphasis on process should be understood as an aesthetic principle in order to open up and expand the dimension of art into the realm of the spectator so that the experiences of both the artist and spectator may coexist. The heaviest barrier that separated the artist and his work from its audience was the creative structure that governed Western art. In theatre it was the dramatic structure that was the main object of his series of severe challenges. Not only did it fail to represent reality but it distorted reality, creating nothing but artificial illusion. Under this condition, all that was permitted to the audience was mirages. However, Kantor never completely discarded illusion from his theatre. The point for him was always to created a circumstance where the illusory reality of drama comes to exist within the dimensions of our reality. It was Kantor's belief that instead of a total denial of illusion, his theatre should strategically accommodate illusion which comes from reality. And, the aim of Kantor's theatrical experiments was to invite the audience into this ambience and transform the experience of his audience into a much more participatory one. This paper traces the ways in which Kantor transgressed the dominating conventions of representational, literary theatre, and how such attempts induced an alternative mode of spectatorship. The study will begin from an investigation into Kantor's attitude towards illusion and reality, and then move onto a closer inspection of how he spatially and dramaturgically materialized his concepts on stage, giving special focus on Wielopole, Wielopole.