Woyzeck

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Dance

I felt it was important to enlist the help of the body to tell the story of Woyzeck. There is much that goes unexpressed in words in the piece as language consistently fails the characters. Using dance also helped the job of translation from German into English. Where nuanced meanings may have been sacrificed in the language of the script, I hope that using the poetry of lyrics, music, and in particular movement, has communicated the story well. Celebrated German Tanztheater creator Pina Bausch said of the role of dance: "Basically one wants to say something which cannot be said, so what one has done is to make a poem where one can feel what is meant" (62-63). Bausch's wise assessment of the impulse to make dance is similar to Suzan-Lori Parks' words about writing a play, not a message. The play is many things, such as all the elements that create a full world, story, and character. If a story, such as Woyzeck, cannot be expressed in words alone, it then requires bodies, voices, and forms of expression beyond the printed word.

The movement and choreography was developed in collaboration with modern dance choreographer Kyle Shepard of New York City. Shepard and I have a history of working together and have developed a vocabulary of movement together combining Shepard's choreography and my physical theater work. Shepard and I share many influences, such as the work of contemporary choreographers Trisha Brown and Robert Wilson, German Tanztheater, and Japanese Buto. Movement for Woyzeck includes very little contact, emphasizing the impersonal and alienating nature of Woyzeck's world while creating dramatic tension through close proximity. Narrative tension is created and driven through movement without resorting to pantomime or linear development. Other influences for the movement in Woyzeck come from early German physical education movement and the exploration of the relationship between choreography and digital editing techniques. Post-production effects have allowed for choreographic experimentation specifically relating to scale, repetition, doublings, and tempo.

Just as the music in Woyzeck allows the characters a form of self-expression and level of eloquence denied them in their diagetic world while giving audience members an accessible point of entry into the story, using modern dance fits similarly well with the play's themes. Susan Leigh Foster points out in "Choreographing History": To approach the body as capable of generating ideas, as a bodily writing, is to approach it as a choreographer might. Dance, perhaps more than any other body-centered endeavor, cultivates a body that initiates as well as responds. [..] Here, bodies are cast into a discursive framework where they can respond in kind to the moved queries initiated in the process of formulating a dance. [...] The possibility of a body that is written upon but also writes moves critical studies of the body in new directions. It asks scholars to approach the body's involvement in any activity with an assumption of potential agency to participate in or resist whatever forms of cultural production are underway. [...] Dancemaking, for example, becomes a form of theorizing [...] The theoretical, rather than a contemplative stance achieved afterwards and at a distance, becomes embedded (embodied) within the practical decisions that build up, through the active engagement of bodies, any specific endeavor. (205-206)