Seven dirty creatures awake to life in a dimly lit room. A restless action on questions of human nature, fate and insanity plays here on a type of puppet stage. In a firework of ingenuity, the simplest movements and burlesque moments through to joking show the soldier, Woyzeck, who is driven to murder by the unfaithfulness of his wife, Marie. The leaden skies of the pre-March era in Germany in the original are stylised by a theatrical language that is exaggerated to the absurd and of which the unusual form has made the choreography a cult piece in French theatre.

»Woyzeck – ou L’ébauche du vertige« (»Woyzeck – or The hint of vertigo«) is based on the unfinished stage fragment by Georg Büchner (1813-37), which is based on a true event: the murder by Leipzig wig maker Johann Christian Woyzeck of his unfaithful beloved, for which he was beheaded in the market in 1824, in Leipzig’s last public execution. Büchner’s »Woyzeck« is one of the most frequently staged dramas in German literature and, with his opera of the same name (Berlin 1925), Alban Berg created one of the most important musical stage works of the 20th century.

Shown for more than 200 times in numerous countries in the meantime, the piece won the first audience award of the 32nd BITEF festival 1998 in Belgrade and the »Golden Mask« in Moscow for the best foreign production shown in Russia in 2002.

»A brilliant, ill-fated choreography. Not a sentence is spoken yet everything is said. Confused and submissive, we attend a cruel ceremony, which passes off magnificently in its furious process« (Frédéric Ferney, Le Figaro, Paris, 19.07.1997).