abstract
In 1909, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky published his play The Yellow Sound, a "stage composition" consisting mostly of stage directions describing color and atmosphere, music, and a character list of "yellow giants" and "indistinct beings," in effect creating a kind of abstract drama. Eleven years later the Polish painter/playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz published under the name Witkacy his "Introduction to Pure Form in the Theater," in which he asserted that theater should strive for a process similar to that of abstract painting. Artists should arrange elements not according to resemblance to life but rather according to internal rules of composition. Witkacy believed that only when audiences were unable to recognize resemblances to their own lives could they begin to experience a play "metaphysically" and not cognitively.
Though Witkacy appears to have not been exposed to Kandinsky's play, the similarity in the theories of these two avant-garde dramatists is clear. Their dramaturgical practice, on the other hand, is quite different. Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound draws heavily on music, dance, and painting; Witkacy's play The Water Hen (1921) seems at first glance to be a somewhat conventional work for the theatrical stage: actors play characters in human form who act and interact in a fictional setting. In fact, Witkacy's contention that "characters who act" are the central elements of theater is the primary difference between The Water Hen and The Yellow Sound. Unlike Kandinsky, Witkacy uses recognizable human bodies for his characters, but then must find ways to keep his audience from identifying with them as fellow human beings and developing predictive expectations about their actions in order to achieve the metaphysical experience at the root of Pure Form. An analysis of The Water Hen illustrates the ways in which Witkacy presents the bodies on stage as "human" bodies purely in form.