Woyzeck

Georg Büchner died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three, leaving Woyzeck, one of the plays that heralded modern theatre, unfinished. Fragmentary and incomplete, it remains open to countless interpretations. This is the auéééu collective’s version: a performance inspired by Büchner’s celebrated character—victim and anti-hero, proletarian and madman, a “poor devil” burdened by a world undergoing rapid transformation—and by the tableaux vivants of Sergei Parajanov’s film The Colour of Pomegranates (1969).

In collaboration with filmmaker Manuela Viegas, sculptor Fernando Roussado, illustrator Filipe Andrade, and lighting designer Daniel Worm d’Assumpção, auéééu creates on stage “a scientific laboratory where humanoid machines obey an artificial order of intelligence that is not governed by ethical values.” Within this dystopian environment, these figures “operate exclusively in the name of progress.”

“And what lies behind all this?” asks Woyzeck. Perhaps the answer can be found in this performance.