This performance project hopes to bring to the attention of Western audiences a truly great but often neglected artist of the 20^th Century.  

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was a pioneer of the avant-garde and is a hero of the cultural conscience of Poland. His writings, paintings and photography broke new ground with bold originality. His work predates that of Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, and Brecht in the surrealist movement of the European theatre.

Visits to Paris and St Petersburg had introduced him to the surrealist paintings of Picasso and Braque, and to the cinema. Travels with anthropologist and friend Bronislaw Malinowski to Australia and Ceylon introduced him to tribal culture. Witkiewicz declared that motion pictures would spell the death of the theatre unless totally new forms of theatre could be created. Why not do with theatre what the surrealists were doing with painting? He set about realising his new vision: Pure Form. His father was a successful painter of the same name – so the young Witkiewicz changed his professional name to Witkacy, by which he is still popularly known.

An intellect with myriad talents and interests, he was not immediately appreciated. Some thought him interesting and innovative, but most considered him a dilettante or even a fraud. Perhaps as a reaction he developed himself into a flamboyant, fragmented and enigmatic personality, almost like one of the abstract characters in his plays. His eccentricities, and his arrogance, became legendary. However, Witkacy’s contribution to world culture, Polish culture, and the 20^th Century surrealist avant-garde remains.

Witkacy Idiota will examine this unique and bizarre life, extracting images from his works, particularly The Madman and the Nun, in which a troubled poet is subjected to cruel therapy in a mental asylum. The word 'idiota' is Russian and a reference to Dostoyevsky’s Idiot – the appropriateness of this comment to be demonstrated in a black humour.