Bogdan Renczyński, Mickey Mahar, Çiğdem TekeThe Return of Odysseus – Performance with Bogdan Renczyński

In June 1944, in Nazi-occupied Kraków, Kantor (1915–1990) and fellow artists secretly staged Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Return of Odysseus. At a time when gathering itself was dangerous, war was not a backdrop: it entered the work’s form. Wyspiański’s play draws on Homer’s Odyssey but dismantles its victorious hero. Odysseus returns not to Ithaca but to a devastated Europe. Home has become unrecognisable; the returning hero is a stranger in his own land. 

For Kantor, this destroyed room was not theatrical scenery. Real objects marked by the wartime city entered the performance in all their poverty and damage; actors and audience shared the same precarious space. Here he formulated a defining principle: theatre should not illustrate reality, but collide with it. Odysseus carries catastrophe into a home that can no longer receive him.

In 1955, Kantor founded Cricot 2 in Kraków. Never a conventional theatre institution, Cricot 2 was an independent laboratory in which visual artists, actors, objects and found materials met across disciplines. Particularly characteristic was Kantor’s treatment of the actors’ bodies. They became living sculptures whose movements often appeared mechanical or ritualised. The boundary between human and object blurred; each became an equal participant.

Developed in collaboration with Cricoteka in Kraków, The Return Of Odysseus approaches Kantor’s archive as living material. Bogdan Renczyński, who worked with Cricot 2 as both actor and set designer, works with Mickey Mahar and Çiğdem Teke from the Gorki ensemble in transforming texts, memories and gestures into new performative responses.