Teatr Ariel emerged as a combination of Teatr Akne and The Ariel Quartet founded by students of a music school in Cracow. The group of five actors and four musicians performed under the new name at the FRINGE Festival’98 in Edinburgh where it was awarded Fringe Firs for “Little Requiem for Kantor”.
Zofia Kalińska, the author of the text and the director of the play had worked for many years in Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre Cricot 2 and as first of his actors founded her own Akne Theatre in the *)s. She prepared the following plays: The Maids by J. Genet, Nominatae Filiae, Plasirs d’Amour, a mono drama Medea and The Sale of the Demonic Woman. All plays were written and directed by Zofia Kalińska who was awarded the Fringe First twice (in 1991 for Plesirs d’Amour). The Theatre does not have permanent quarters nor permanent staff but – due to the personality of its founder – it exists and achieves international acclaim. Its overall idea is looking for new forms of expression by reaching out to the primeval cultural and psychological patterns.
I was lucky enough – says Zofia Kalińska – to work with Kantor for twenty years. Now I feel obligated towards him, I feel I owe him a kind of homage. Eight years after Kantor died, Bartek Chajdecki, a seventeen year old composer form Cracow, wrote a wonderful piece of music on my request – “Little Requiem for Kantor”. I was so inspired by this music that I added a few memorabilia form Kantor’s Theatre. Bartek proved that Kantor is still alive and may be a source of inspiration for a young artist.