Woyzeck Game is a participatory performance mixing theatre and video gamE.
audience can participate as a spectator, a gamer or a game character. In public or theatre space.
no. people on tour: 4
WOYZECK GAME
The performance explores bodies and machines, dreams, ghosts and precarious life diffusing in cyborg citizenship. It deconstructs Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, neoliberal subjectivities and life in surveillance capitalism. Performance can be played either in public or theatre space.
ABOUT
An interactive work by Lauri Antti Mattila, Viljami Lehtonen, Lin Da, Teija Turtio, Alina Pajula, Jenni Räsänen & Klaus Maunuksela blends live art, video game, theatre, installation into public space.
HOW IT WORKS
Woyzeck Game is a cyborg marionette theatre, where audience can participate as either A SPECTATOR following the game, A PLAYER, or A GAME CHARACTER. Set up consists of a terrarium, seats for the audience, and a separate gamer’s room. It’s a machine that questions the coexistence of technology and humans in relation to everyday life and the use of power.
With the audience observing, one gamer at a time can play the Woyzeck Game. The gamer is situated in a separate gamer’s room. The human-avatar is controlled by remote-controlled human technology (i.e., using earphones, a microphone, a computer, and a video connection).
On stage, there’s a terrarium, where the play happens, and two screens that transmit gamer’s video view and text-adventure-view to the audience seated in front of the terrarium. The performance is every night different depending on the gamers’s choices.
“What could be the kind of change that opposes the transformation that the machinery demands from us and does not consider any change important?
Woyzeck Game pushes its players to constant introspection about the human part, the meaning of work and what it really means to respect each person’s characteristic quality. Is it just a brand or could the respect start from something completely different than suitability for working life?
Rarely do I become as aware of the many emotions associated with a situation of exercising power. The atmosphere of Woyzeck Game becomes vulnerable, even dreamy. The show sensitizes you to encounters and is relentless towards the abuse of power.”
— Maria Säkö, Helsingin Sanomat 21.4.22
(critic of Finland’s biggest newspaper)
THE IDEA
The idea is to picture the contemporary precarious worker that is mixed into machines. Woyzeck game can be seen as a commentary on the neoliberal conception of human. It creates a setup for technology-assisted play where the roles played are interchangeable, and through digital means and the game format explores the possibilities of audience participation.
Its ingredients are depression, exhaustion, sorrow and longing for touch. Its atmosphere is colored by anticipation and some kind of recovery (melancholy after faded trauma). It is a play that dismantles the self into many through game, theater, role changes and acts of care.