Abstraction in Theater

While an “abstractionist theater” akin to abstract painting may not exist, the act of abstraction and stylization weaves itself inevitably into the fabric of theatrical creation—both in the crafting of a play and its journey to the stage. Every artistic endeavor, and each performance in particular, pulls away from the raw chaos of the surrounding world. It’s less a mirror of theater’s knack for capturing fragments and more a nod to poetry’s gift for weaving universals, as Aristotle mused in his "Poetics." A production thrives on sifting, sorting, and stripping reality down—systematizing it into something distilled and distinct.

Many a thinker has tried to pin down this process. Oskar Schlemmer, channeling the spirit of the Bauhaus school, saw abstraction as “a simplification and shaping of essence, a return to the elemental and primary, a tension between a thing’s singularity and its multifaceted nature” (O. Schlemmer, 1978: 71). What emerges is a geometry of forms, a paring back of individuals and movements, and an unveiling of codes, conventions, and the bones of the universal.