Free interpretation of Büchner's Woyzeck  
Piece by Josef Nadj

      « This truth, first of all -known and recognised, but always forgotten : that Woyzeck is an unfinished tragedy, the state of a constantly evolving shape that the author’s death brought to an abrupt halt. Not a play in fragments, but a play in pieces : for the whole of pieces is not that of fragments, it is less noble, it has not lain in science and does not form itself into a network but piles itself up in a simple way, one stratum after another. Pieces displayed, piled up on the stage, here and there...
      The voices talking in Woyzeck talk amidst the insanity that the law should not (or no longer) exist and that, for the poor, the place of the law should be taken by nature, but like an empty space : bottles drunk in cabarets, animals gleams in the night. Since it is written before « the poor » form themselves (or are formed) into
revolutionary subjects -thus before they gather around a law or whatever can take the place of the law -the story of Woyzeck and Marie, although it is situated from a historical point of view, and even situation in the rathole of low sky Vormäz, in Germany, is beyond any heroic agitation, and beyond any biased or edifying
recitation. »

                                                                                                                           Jean-Christophe Bailly
                                                                                                                               Woyzeck, wild with thought

      Alone among Josef Nadj's works, Woyzeck ou l’Ébauche du vertige is explicitly based on a dramatic text. Nevertheless, that text is a work under construction, or as Jean-Christophe Bailly wrote, “a form in evolution, stopped dead by the death of the author”. The manuscript Georg Büchner left behind is in fact composed of four distinct versions, four “rough drafts”, each more or less long, complete, consistent, detailed and super-imposable.
 
      Rather than isolate one version, rather than arbitrarily extract a single linear account from these scattered fragments, Nadj cultivated their unfinishedness – and the repetitive character they give off. He hollowed out the text, disunited it even further, bringing out the author's “voice” and his obsessive questioning of human nature and the inexorable march of destiny. Moreover Nadj has drawn a connection between Büchner's precocious death and the madness that inhabited him at the end of his life with two key components of the drama: the crime of passion committed by the character Woyzeck, and the unbearable pressure exerted upon him – a process of dehumanisation leading him to madness and murder.
 
      In Nadj's Woyzeck, tragedy really does take place. In a possible echo of the fratricidal war that tore Yugoslavia apart at the time of the piece's creation (1993-1997), Nadj's reading offers a vision of decomposition gradually gaining the bodies and minds.
 
      Woyzeck ou l’Ébauche du vertige is crude, trivial, organic, a piece that has been skinned alive, where nevertheless a climate of burlesque reigns. Confined in a restrained space, misshapen beings, almost human in appearance, abandon themselves to their cruel play against a background of festive music.

                                                                                                                              Myriam Bloedé 

Credits

Choreography: Josef Nadj

Music: Aladar Racz

Lighting designer: Raymond Blot

Interpreters: Josef Nadj, Istvan Bickei, Denes Debrei, Gyork Joseph Szakonyi , Peter Gemza, Henriata Varga, Franck Micheletti.

This performance was awarded the first Prize of the publicat the 32e Festival du « BITEF » in Belgrade en
1998, and the « Masque d'or » of the best foreign performance presented in Russia in 2002.

Josef Nadj was born in 1957 in Kanjiza, a province of Vojvodina in the former Yugoslavia, in what is today Serbia. Beginning in childhood, he drew, practiced wrestling, accordeon, soccer and chess, intending a career in painting. Between the ages of 15 and 18, he studied at the fine arts high school of Novi Sad (the capital of Vojvodina), followed by 15 months of military service in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Afterwards, he left to study art history and music at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the University of Budapest, where he also began studying physical expression and acting.

In 1980, he left for Paris to continue his training with Marcel Marceau, Etienne Ducroux. Simultaneously he discovered modern dance, at the time in a period of swift expansion in France. He followed the teachings of Larri Leong (who combined dance, kimomichi and aidido) and Yves Cassati, also taking classes in tai-chi, butoh and contact improvisation (with Mark Tompkins), began himself to teach the movement arts in 1983 (in France and Hungary), and participated as a performer in works by Sidonie Rochon (Papier froissé, 1984), Mark Tompkins (Trahison Men, 1985), Catherine Diverrès (l’Arbitre des élégances, 1988) and François Verret (Illusion comique and La, commissioned by the GRCOP, 1986).

In 1986 he founded his company, Théâtre JEL – “jel” meaning “sign” in Hungarian – and created his first work, Canard Pékinois, presented in 1987 at the Théâtre de la Bastille and remounted the following year at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

Up to now, he is the author of about thirty performances.

In 1982, Josef Nadj completely abandoned drawing and painting to dedicate himself fully to dance, and would not begin showing his work again until fifteen years later. But in 1989 he began practicing photography, pursuing it without interruption to the present. Since 1996, his visual arts and graphic works, most often conceived in cycles or series – sculpture-installations, drawings, photos – have been regularly exhibited in galleries and theatres.

In 2006, Josef Nadj was Associated Artist for the 60th Festival of Avignon, presenting Asobu as the festival's opening performance in the Court of Honour of the Palais des Papes, as well as Paso doble, a performance created in collaboration with the painter Miquel Barcelo at the Celestins Church. In July 2010, he returned to present Les Corbeaux, a duet with Akosh zelevényi.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov, Valery Shadrin, director of the Chekhov International Theatre Festival and Artistic Director of the Year 2010 France-Russia, invited Josef Nadj for the creation of a show dedicated to the playwright, which was performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Josef Nadj was present at the Prague Quadrennial of 16 to 26 June 2011. TheQuadrennial held in Prague since 1967, is the most famous event in the world for performing arts. More than sixty countries attended this year. Josef Nadj was selected to participate in the project "Intersection" based on intimacy and performance. An ephemeral village was created, which consisted of boxes (“white cubes / black boxes") that stood for thirty world-renowned artists, each one represented by a different box. Since 1995, Josef Nadj has been the director of the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans.

Source : Josef Nadj

En savoir plus : http://josefnadj.com/