Pure Form in (of?) the Theatre

One of the great things about graduate school is that it is very possible to be discussing the same question from two different angles in two different (but related) classes simultaneously. One of these fortunate collisions took place for me this when I read both Joseph Chaikin’s The Presence of the Actor and Ignacy Witkiewicz’s “On a New Type of Play,” the former articulating the principles of the performance group The Open Theatre, the latter articulating the basic principles of the Witkiewicz’s imagined Theatre of Pure Form. The question both try to answer is—what is the “pure form” of the theater?

For Witkiewicz, the question is a frustrating one, doomed from the start, because theater is inherently a bastard art, lacking basic materials for formalism. He describes the problem as follows: “pure performance in time is possible only in the world of sounds, a theater without characters who act, no matter how outrageously and improbably, is inconceivable; simply because theater is a composite art, and does not have its own intrinsic, homogenous elements, like the pure arts: Painting and Music.” All we can do, he seems to argue, is to approach pure formalism as best we can, like a Zen “impossible task” that makes us stronger and better for the trying.

But hindsight reveals that Witkiewicz’s problem was staring him in the face. “A theater without characters who act” is indeed impossible, and that is why Joe Chaikin, in his search for the essence of theater, landed on the actor’s presence, the space between the actor and the audience, and the sounds and gestures that the actor makes as the essential building blocks of all theater. In other words, the space between the actor and the audience is the pure form that Witkiewicz, in his effort to unite the theatre with the formalism and Cubisms of music and visual art, could not find.

It is telling that Witkiewicz called his art a “Theatre of Pure Form.” The name suggests that there may yet be a theatre “of” something other than “pure form.” Chaikin, on the other hand, may be said to seek the Pure Form of the Theatre, or a form of which the theatre can be no other.

It just so happens that I am also reading Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre concurrent with both these performance theorists. Lehmann, in his neo-Hegelian glory, suggests a development in theatremaking from a text-based dramatic theatre to a formalist postdramatic theatre. Witkiewicz and Chaikin place themselves nicely on a continuum that leads ultimately to Kantor and Wilson. Indeed, Witkiewicz’s theatre of pure form begins as text, as a written play that is staged by actors and a director. Chaikin’s theatre, on the other hand, begins with the actor, out of whom sound, movement, and text are all generated as co-equal parts in the artistic whole. Purity, therefore, is within his reach as it is not, and never could be, within Witkiewicz’s.