Woyzeck

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Language and Gesture

The language in Woyzeck is terse and confined, with characters speaking past one another, often unable to reach out of their own existential isolation to grasp mutual understanding. This does not mean the characters are unintelligent or inarticulate. When they speak in gesture or movement they communicate with clarity. In other words, whereas many plays are language-based, Woyzeck is gesture-based. It is not what the characters in Woyzeck say so much as what they do.

Richard Schechner has highlighted the significance of gesture in Woyzeck, which is an important foundation for my AR approach to the piece. Schechner writes, "It is wrong to think that Woyzeck is inarticulate. [...]when he speaks with gestures, he speaks with authority" ("Notes" 17). The action is the mode of communication itself. There is no rationalization. Perhaps Woyzeck's lack of words may be interpreted as inarticulate; however his actions speak louder than any words could. Büchner put such strong actions at Woyzeck's disposal to allow him to speak louder than any words could capture. Based on the strength of the actions Büchner wrote for Woyzeck I have chosen to use AR, dance, and music to tell this story. I chose AR because it is a technology that allows the audience member's body particular intimacy with the story, and dance and music because they are forms that give expression to that which cannot be understood through words alone.

The killing gesture is an obvious instance of gesture in Woyzeck, but there are also many significant gestures in the piece that relate to humiliation. For example, the ritual humiliations of eating peas and urinating for the doctor's Nazi-like experiments, the pain of connecting love to a transaction in the gesture of handing over his money to Marie as she cuckolds him, as well as the submission to unquestionable authority by running to roll call and the gestures associated with military drills and exercises. Even shaving the captain becomes a humiliation. When this intimate gesture of the personal toilet is accompanied by the captain's attitude of bourgeois derision toward Woyzeck, it implies the sort of thoughtless intimacy allowed a dog, moments later to be just as carelessly kicked away by its master's boot.