Woyzeck

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Enticing the Audience

In deference to the richness and complexity of Woyzeck and the intelligence of audiences, my design has been aimed toward enhancing ambiguities found in the play. I agree with Suzan Lori Parks that there is a troubling trend that must be resisted in current theater that encourages simplistic or didactic writing and emphasizes a message or the evocation of feeling without thought in the audience. Parks notes: [...] in no other form of writing these days is the writing so awful--so intended to produce some reaction of sorts, to discuss some issue: the play-as-wrapping-paper-version-of-hot-newspaper-headline, trying so hard to be hip [...] Theater seems mired in the interest of stating some point, or tugging some heartstring, or landing a laugh, or making a splash, or wagging a finger. In no other artform are the intentions so slim! (6) Unlike contemporary adaptations such as Jeff Cohen's 1999 Woah-Jack!, which reduces the story of Woyzeck to a social issue, my aim is has been to write an adaptation that preserves the richness of Büchner's original script. I have worked to create a story space within which the audience has a great degree of freedom of choice regarding actions and meanings. This gives the audience member an experience that is rich and layered and requires complex thought to interpret. Although it is an interactive experience and therefore incomplete without the audience member's input, that does not mean the experience is a blank slate--it is within the constraints of Woyzeck's story and confined to the world of Woyzeck.

As I have explained, Woyzeck is very much about the body and the control of Woyzeck's body in particular, and therefore is a ripe storyworld in which to involve the spectator's body. Involving the audience member's body through interaction is also advantageous as it can allow for a heightened awareness which may deepen and enrich the audience member's experience. In his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan discusses the relationship of interactivity and awareness. Tuan connects a better understanding of space in more traditional societies to a higher level of interaction with construction. Tuan writes, "[...] a person is most aware when he has to pause and decide. [...] One cause of such greater awareness is active participation. Since nonliterate and peasant societies do not have architects, everyone makes his own house and helps to build public places" (103-104). Similar to the society without an architect, Woyzeck is a storyworld of scenes without an order. Audience members must make decisions and interact with tangible interfaces to construct their own narrative sequences. The aim of including this decision making process in the story experience is to aid the audience member in achieving a different kind of awareness than is experienced in more traditional media.

My design seeks to diminish as much as possible the feeling of distance created by a page in a book, a proscenium arch or raised stage in a theater, or a screen and removed audience seating in a cinema. By placing the screen as close to the eye as current technology will allow (AR goggles) and using various tangible interfaces to tell the story, the hope is to create the illusion that the spectator's body is in the same space as the characters in the story. By tangible interfaces I mean physical objects in the installation space that the audience member must interact with, using his or her body, in order to discover part of the narrative. The tangible interface is a physical, graspable object that allows the user access to digital information. In this installation, the objects include decapitated dolls accompanied by their severed heads, a life-sized mannequin, and a windowless dollhouse. These tangible interfaces and AR goggles are used to create a way for the spectator to physically inhabit the world of Woyzeck. This placement along with a lack of set pieces or props also allows the dancer's body to be highlighted. Audience members can see the dancer perform exactly the same movement again and again, never tiring, at a range closer than ever before.

This brings to mind Edward Gordon Craig's Übermarionette, or super puppet, theory of acting as well as the general fascination with mimetic automata in pre-industrial ages. Craig was an influential, eccentric, and avant-garde theater artist at the beginning of the twentieth century. He created very few works, due in part to the complex nature of his projects, but fortunately wrote a great deal about his ideas on theater. He is perhaps best known for his theory of acting, the Übermarionette. Craig felt that precisely choreographed stage pictures, including precisely choreographed and stylized actors, best communicated emotion to an audience. Craig wrote in praise of the puppet's ability to keep its own personality out of its performance and his preference for general, symbolic emotion over affectation on stage (Innes 123-126). Craig's aim was not to do away with the human actor's body but to control it with great precision, something that can also be achieved in film editing post-production processes.