Witkacy - On the Theory of Pure Form

Pure Form is an attempt to liberate drama from realistic psychology and story telling, to put it on the same basis as modern art and music.

Pure Form is not a purification of the drama of its content of reality.

It is not the rejection of reality but rather transformation of it into the new dimensions - intellectual dimensions - opened up by modern thought in the twentieth century.

Pure Form is a way of trying to increase the possibilities for the drama and enlarge its horizons by getting rid of old-fashioned art, the old laws of mechanics, traditional psychology which have dominated the theatre and dictated its forms.

What were the most radical elements of Witkacy's theory of the theatre?

  • — introduction of nonmimetic, non-realistic artful constructions instead of faithful imitation.

    — use of ironic distancing

    — denying emotional identification

    — asserting the primacy of performance as created by director, designer and actor for whom the playwright provides what is little more than a scenario

    — promoting anti-Stanislavsky approach to acting ("actor must cease faking life experiences and instead become a true creator, using all his tools of expression - words, voice, gesture, body - with mathematical precision to produce formal values")

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    • Witkacy sought renewal of modern art through the dissolution of old structures, "re-chewing" literature and playing with literary tradition.

    Witkacy's theatrical style, consisting of humour, playfulness, parody, free borrowings and chance associations, is not explained by the theoretical formulations which are solemn and severe.

    A real Pure Form art can evoke in the audience a "metaphysical feeling of the strangeness of existence" and this is its main goal.

    "Art is an escape, the noblest of drugs, that can transport us to another world without bad effects on the health or the intelligence," asserted Witkacy in the early 1920s. Only later did he begin to have doubts about the efficacy of the drug "ART". Eventually, he became to fear that the new mass totalitarian societies, by means of mental regimentation and social tranquilisation, would do away with any need for narcotics, in either the literal or the figurative sense.

    Source: Daniel Gerould, A Study of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer ( Seattle, 1981) and The Witkiewicz Reader (Evanston, 1992).

     

    ©Dr Elwira Grossman, 1996