As an audience member visiting the Woyzeck project, you enter a dim room hung on all four walls with black curtains. The starched fabric of your white lab coat glows in the semi-darkness. You feel the unfamiliar weight of AR headset rest on the bridge of your nose. The room you are in appears empty except for a handful of objects suspended in space; six dolls with their heads separated a few inches above their bodies and hanging in midair; a dollhouse, a shirt, a book, a document, and a life-sized mannequin. Music plays. Piano notes linger high and haunting. You step further into the mysterious room, the strange music drawing you onward. A figure emerges as the music changes. The sounds of a trilling harp beguiles you to move closer. The figure is a beautiful young girl, but there is ambiguity in her movements. At times she moves with the awkwardness of an old woman or a mechanical doll and at times she moves with the fluidity of a dancer. She looks up, points to you, and sings:
Your dream begins Dream or story Pale light of morning Just before waking A man runs, and runs, and runs
You have entered the storyworld. You have entered Woyzeck. As you continue to explore the storyworld, you have entered the life of Franz Josef Woyzeck through music, dance, and AR objects. It is the life of a poor soldier driven to insanity and violence. As you encounter the characters and objects in the storyworld, you may feel you are an observer, watching from a critical distance as evidence of a crime is assembled before you. Or, you may feel like a digital-savvy flâneur enjoying your stroll through a game, a form of embodied hypertext. Perhaps you feel yourself inexplicably drawn into the story, pulled by the music, images, and the strange wizardry of your AR glasses.
Interpretation
Woyzeck is a deceptively simple story of brutal violence. The characters within this play are not understood through psychology. They are not written as realistic people beyond the depth of emotion they experience. Similarly, the characters are not personifications of ideas. For example, they do not function as embodied representations of a social issue. Questions about how the tragic violence in Woyzeck could have been prevented, or exactly why the characters behave the way they do, are not easily answered. This ambiguity contributes to the chilling and fatalistic tone of the piece. Woyzeck is primarily a story about bodies and the many kinds of violence we do to them--be it officially sanctioned military violence or more intimate forms of abuse. Büchner presents us with this image of humankind more as a lament or requiem than as a problem-play meant to drive audiences toward a logical or proactive solution or even a moralistic judgment. Robert Scanlon accurately captures the emotional strength of the play: We see, through the accumulating mosaic of these scenes, a world frighteningly like our own, where human dignity is fighting a desperate battle with innumerable forms of abuse, most of them official and authoritarian in some way, some of them openly malicious, many of them--and these are the most unsettling--awesomely impersonal and deeply imbedded in primordial layers of human nature. ("Coiled" 4) It is a matter of course in Woyzeck that bodies are under siege. As Scanlon notes above, the violence seems to stem from something deep, inexplicable and unavoidable in human nature. The characters in the play defy psychological analysis.
It may be tempting to reduce Woyzeck to a paranoid schizophrenic, for example, when so little character development is offered, but such labeling misses the strength of Büchner's writing, which lies in the portrayal of pure emotions, such as betrayal, love, lust, humiliation, and despair. These emotions strike a universal human dilemma beyond individual or particular situations in life. Medicalizing the characters in Woyzeck neutralizes the brutality of the piece with theoretical explanation. In the following sections I will focus on the ways in which emotion is rendered in this production through language and gesture, enticing the audience, automatons, and interactivity.
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