Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator

It is comparatively easy to set up a basic model for epic theater. For practical experiments I usually picked as my example of completely simple, “natural” epic theater an incident such as can be seen at any street corner: an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.

— Brecht 1964, 121 (emphasis added)

Introducing the Witness

By which analytical strategies can the specific and distinctive features of theatrical performances and performance events—what we usually refer to as their “theatricality”—be most fruitfully examined and analyzed? How can these features be isolated from the other features of such an event? This is no doubt a classical formalist or structuralist question—in line with the attempts to define the literary or aesthetic qualities of a verbal text, what the Russian Formalists termed its “literariness”—and it has in one way or another been the point of departure for most of the existing semiotic approaches to theater and performance studies as they developed, in particular during the 1980s. My aim here is to re-examine this issue on the basis of the notion of “witnessing” as a device used in performances, through which the spectator is “invited” to view the particular performance. I will argue that the notion of witnessing can serve as one (but certainly not the only) point of departure for understanding theatricality, enabling us to understand what makes a certain event theatrical. An examination and analysis of this notion will also enable us to establish an empirical basis for this specific aspect of theatricality. Furthermore, it is my hope that the analytical strategies introduced and employed here will confront the crisis, which the semiotic approaches to theater and performance have been grappling with for more than a decade, introducing a moral as well as an ideological perspective into the seemingly neutral arena of the theory of signs.