Susanne Kennedy E-Book

• Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Forum Modernes Theater
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 421

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

For several years, Susanne Kennedy has been prominently present as a director on the German speaking stage. Her radical adaptations of canonical plays and popular films and her own creations of profoundly other counter-worlds are met with critical acclaim but also with bewilderment. To date, theatre studies has only scarcely engaged with the challenges her work poses. The present volume offers the first edited collection on Kennedy's work. The contributions highlight both older and more recent productions and address the question how Kennedy's aesthetics reanimate the theatre. They include detailed performance analyses to provide theatre scholars and critics with insights in the historical, dramaturgical, intermedial and technological aspects of Kennedy's aesthetics. An artist talk with Susanne Kennedy concludes the volume.

Leseprobe

Inge Arteel / Silke Felber / Cornelis van der Haven (Hrsg.)

Susanne Kennedy

Reanimating the Theatre

Cover picture: Women in Trouble, Volksbühne Berlin. © picture alliance/dpa/ Silas Stein

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395508

© 2023 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen

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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]

ISSN 0935-0012

ISBN 978-3-8233-8550-9 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-8233-0477-7 (ePub)

Contents

Susanne Kennedy’s TheatreReanimating the theatreOverview of Susanne Kennedy’s productionsTransactional Love1 Life as a whorehouse2 When form becomes substance3 Aesthetics of the surface4 In search of the unbearable5 ConclusionThe Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze1 Alienation and the baroque2 Frontality and the baroque theory of signs3 Looking and being looked at4 A martyr tragedy5 ConclusionPuppets in a Panic Room?1 Actors and/as puppets2 From gesture to pose3 Space and gesture4 Concluding remarks: Kennedy’s gestural theatreSusanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage1 The economics of emotions in melodrama2 Reworking the melodramatic spectacle3 Reworking the “other” melodrama4 Melodrama on stage: Kennedy’s disturbing image politics5 Micro-choreographies of slow death6 Starlets on stage. Theatre as melodramatic hypermediumTheatre as an Exercise in Dying1 Enter2 Poeticized mythology3 ORFEO. An Exercise in Dying4 Eurydice in the conflict of figuration as (a) female figure and theatrical figure5 Letting goSusanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble1 Dramaturgies of the cycling2 In between3 On a parahuman theatre4 Instead of a conclusionRe-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research PracticeInfinite games: Exploring the fabrication of (visual) culture [Introduction]1 “Not needing a face to cry out tragic tears”. Transformations of the protagonist in Kennedy’s theatre2 Exploring faces and masks. Aesthetics, artistic production modes and collaboration [Three case studies]Everyday faces becoming surreal: Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?Staging absence: The Suicide SistersMasks as an enigma: Drei Schwestern3 Susanne Kennedy’s masks and masquerades. Play and possibility: an outlookDrei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View1 A spectacle that suffers from its own temporal nature2 The scene as an impossible object3 A self-perceptual shaking4 An autopoietic potential between the stage and the audience5 A pattern of differentiation raised to the “nth” power6 A centrifuge that goes wild7 A fractal opening of the instantThe Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern1 Repetition as Cultural Practice2 The Transmedial Principle of the ‘Strange Loop’3 Repetition and Looping Structures in Drei Schwestern: Interpretative Affordances4 Concluding Remarks: The Cultural and Cognitive Reflexivity of Kennedy’s TheatreBecoming Something Else – Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement1 The virtual and VR2 Theatre ritual as a loop3 Attunement4 Portals: gates and spaces5 Ultraworld. A life6 An exhibition of playArtist Talk with Susanne KennedyNotes on contributors

Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre

An Introduction

Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven

For several years now, theatre director Susanne Kennedy has been prominently present on the German stage, both with her radical adaptations of canonical plays and popular films and with her own creations of profoundly other counterworlds. The productions, some of which have toured internationally, are met with critical acclaim and admiration, but also with irritation and bewilderment. To date, theatre studies has only scarcely met the challenges Kennedy’s work poses. This volume, the first edited collection of essays on her work, wants to make a start with the scholarly reception of Kennedy’s theatre.

Susanne Kennedy started her career in the Netherlands. Born in Friedrichshafen to a German mother and an English father, she studied theatre in Mainz and Paris before moving to Amsterdam to attend classes in directing at the renowned Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. She graduated in 2005 with a production of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, for which she was awarded the Top Naeff Prize.1 For several years, she worked as an assistant director and then as a director at the National Theatre in The Hague and was also engaged as a director at Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Staging authors such as Enda Walsh, Sarah Kane and Elfriede Jelinek, and adapting plays by Ibsen and Lessing, she was applauded for the abstraction and physicality with which she directed her material, the conceptual “precision” of her dramaturgy, her “strong spatial awareness” and the “tensions she provoke[d] between the text and the body language of the actors”.2 In 2014 the Dutch theatre critics awarded her the Critics’ Prize (Prijs van de Kritiek).

In 2011, Dutch director Johan Simons invited her to the Münchner Kammerspiele, where she made her debut with an adaptation of Sidney Pollack’s film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Her 2013 Munich production of Marieluise Fleißer’s early play Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt lead to her breakthrough in the German theatre scene. Several elements of Kennedy’s signature aesthetics are already in place here: the actors are put in an enclosed bare space, with proportions that appear distorted. The puppet-like figures hardly interact with each other, the sound is pre-recorded. For Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt, Kennedy was awarded the 3sat Prize and named Young Director of the Year by the magazine Theater Heute. In 2014, the production was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. One year later, in Warum läuft Herr R. Amok, an adaptation of the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, Kennedy presented her actors wearing latex masks, thereby introducing another key element of her aesthetics. This play too was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen and augmented her fame as one of the most important up-and-coming directors within the European theatre landscape.

In 2015, Kennedy ventured into the realm of musical theatre. For the yearly theatre festival Ruhrtriennale, she conceived Monteverdi’s Orfeo as a walk-through parcours. Together with Ole Brolin (sound), Rodrik Biersteker (video) and Jurgen Kolb (light), Kennedy created a polyphonic space that kept the audience constantly in motion, mirroring Eurydice’s unhappy trajectory through the underworld. It was the first of several productions in which she dissolved the separation between audience space and stage. Kennedy returned to the Ruhrtriennale the following year, with her installation performance Medea.Matrix (2016), a cooperation with visual artist Markus Selg.

For the 2017 Munich production Die Selbstmord-Schwestern (The Suicide Sisters), realised alongside stage designer Lena Newton and costume designer Teresa Vergho, Kennedy received the Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities. Based on the eponymous 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides and its filmic adaptation by Sofia Coppola in 1999, Kennedy’s team created an evening that made the boundaries between theatre, installation art and performance seem fragile. The jury of the Europe Prize motivated its decision by the fact that Kennedy succeeded in exploring “the link between theatre and other forms of art and is able to make actors, words and ideas move and intertwine in her works which are performed in spaces that are at times stages and visual art installations”.3

In Women in Trouble (2018), created at the Berlin Volksbühne, physical and virtual worlds seemed to overlap. On the continuously rotating revolving stage, a clean, seemingly germ-free and yet brightly coloured series of open rooms were designed, in which the masked actors moved to the sound of pre-recorded dialogues. In Coming Society (2019), another Volksbühne production, Kennedy and Markus Selg envisaged a future community shared by actors and audience. The audience, limited in numbers, was invited to join the actors on the once again rotating stage and to partake in a journey along several simultaneously present sanctuaries and shamanic practices, resembling an eclectic and meditative rite de passage. Deconstructing the tradition of the proscenium stage, the evening raised elementary questions of coexistence and survival in the anthropocentric age by recourse to Nietzsche’s idea of the “Übermensch”.

Also in 2019, Kennedy adapted Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Though for this production Kennedy worked on a traditional stage, Lena Newton’s stage design dissolved, more radically than she had done in Women in Trouble, any distinction between virtual and real dimensions, especially regarding the fourth wall as a separation between stage and audience seats. A kind of peep-box seemed to float in the middle of the large image that dominated the fourth wall. With the help of a gauze curtain, the high-tech visuals (Biersteker) cleverly projected onto it and an overwhelming soundscape (Richard Janssen), Kennedy’s team provoked a fascinating uncertainty in the audience with regard to the perception of digital and physical space. The production received the Stage Design of the Year award in the critics’ survey conducted by the Theater Heute magazine.

For Ultraworld, which premiered at the Volksbühne in January 2020, Kennedy combined the serial narration of computer games with the epic narratives of the heroic quest into a stunning multimedia production that critics termed both “psychedelic” and “nightmarish”.4 Markus Selg and Rodrik Biersteker were awarded the 2020 Faust prize for stage and video design. Oracle, Kennedy’s 2020 Munich production, revisited the design of an immersive walk-through parcours and adapted it to the COVID pandemic, with single audience members meeting up with three posthumanly transformed actors and an ancient mythic oracle transformed into an AI entity. For I AM (VR), that premiered in Tokyo in February 2021 and was coproduced by several international theatre institutions, Kennedy’s team transformed the Oracle production into an exclusively virtual experience of 35 minutes that confronted the spectator with questions on the nature of human ontology, consciousness and singularity.5

Reanimating the theatre

In a 2018 interview with the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Susanne Kennedy described her view on theatre making as “a kind of reanimation course” for contemporary theatre.6 Her commitment to reviving theatre does not aim at overcoming its history but rather at confronting high-tech dramaturgy with the ritualistic meaning that has characterised theatre since antiquity. Kennedy’s interest therefore is both explicitly timely, addressing the pressing question of what theatre as an “old” medium can mean in times and societies so profoundly shaped by “new” digital media and virtual reality, and also timeless, in that it firmly believes in theatre’s unique ability to meaningfully reflect on exactly that question. In her description of that theatrical quality, Kennedy identifies three major aspects: the temporality of a theatre performance as an event in the here and now; the bringing together of the living bodies of actors and audience; and the space or stage that enables that ritualistic assembling in the first place.7 In all three of these aspects Kennedy confronts, transgresses and fuses “old” and “new” theatrical technologies and aesthetic styles, opening up a realm that, in its simultaneity of incongruous elements, remains indecipherable and uncanny, but also appeals in its invitation to cross the threshold into that other possible world.

Kennedy’s theatrical worlds testify to her preoccupation with spiritual questions of life and death, of the processes of living and dying, and her locating these questions within the site of theatre. Drawing on ancient mythological material – as she has explicitly done in Orfeo – Eine Sterbeübung and Oracle –, non-Western indigenous cultures and shamanistic rituals – the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to name just one –, as well as on the trashy esoterism of consumerist culture, her productions explore ambiguous, floating existential states. These conditions confuse or reverse the oppositions between life and death, presence and absence, reality and virtuality, warm-blooded corporeality and mortification or evacuation of the flesh, always in full awareness of their digital (re)mediation in mediatised and globalised times.8 Again, it is not a grand gesture of overcoming that is at stake – overcoming the human condition of death – but rather a negotiation with the ontology of dying and the cycle of elementary return. Both processes are not only insolubly linked with all living matter but also traditionally addressed in the ritual of theatre and reworked in digital technologies.

It is therefore no coincidence that structures of repetition, (re)turning and the cyclical, including the variations that open up in their folds, build the dramaturgical concept of Kennedy’s productions. The actual time of the theatrical event is thereby confronted with a durational temporality composed of fractured, serialised moments. Kennedy’s practice takes it even further in that it stages the mechanics of theatre, the technology that creates this durational temporality – including traditional ones such as the spatial loop of the revolving stage and more recent ones such as computational visual loops – as a meaningful force beyond (human) directorial control.

In the multimedia design of the productions all modes and media are deployed to dynamize the experience of time and space and to transcend the singular human condition into a possible other world. As the short overview of Kennedy’s career stages indicated, teamwork is key to this design, with visual, sound and video artists playing a fundamental role in the concept, alongside the stage and costume designers.9 Several of them have been working with Kennedy more or less continuously, including sound designer Richard Janssen and video-artist Rodrik Biersteker, stage designers Katrin Bombe and Lena Newton, and costume designer Lotte Goos. Visual artist Markus Selg has played a crucial role in Kennedy’s installation theatre.

As “scenic ecologies”10 the high-tech stage design, soundscape, video art and light depend on one another to materialise as an immersive space for the audience, immersion not meaning smooth surrender and thoughtless identification but rather resulting from a compelling, affective engagement with the forces of mediation, simulation and artificiality in matters of life and death. In Kennedy’s productions, both performers and audience become part of the large transformative apparatus that is the theatre.11 Sometimes it is the relentless frontal gaze of the actors that transmits this address (as in older productions such as Über Tiere), sometimes it is the invitation to a corporeal and subjective involvement for each of the audience members, such as with the walk-in theatrical installation Coming Society. Though there certainly is a spectacular quality to Kennedy’s directorial aesthetics, it is not the kind of spectacle that seeks to overwhelm with the power of aggrandised narratives and intimidating gestures, on the contrary: Kennedy invites the spectator to partake in the spectacle of the elementary. Each and every element, be it the notes of the soundscape, the pixels of digital images, verbal interjections or the micro-choreographic gestures of the actors, is magnified, presenting them as the elementary energetic material that the hyperreal world of the play is made of.

For the actors, Kennedy’s theatre equals an “exercise in modesty”12: they are often masked and voiceless – their words are spoken by other people, often lay actors, and the soundtrack of their speech is synchronised with the actors’ presence. Face and voice, considered natural indicators of individuality and reliable media of expressivity, and their integration into a dramatic character, are purposefully decomposed. The corporeal presence of the actor remains key to Kennedy’s theatre, but these bodies too are treated as elementary material, not meant to play nor represent someone, but asked to upload every detail of their presence in the carefully choreographed and controlled performance with energy and intensity, an energy that is in place when the curtain is drawn and still fills the room when the curtain closes. The interaction between the actors is similarly non-dramatic. Contrary to the dramatic, psychological play of the traditional ensemble of actors, in Kennedy’s productions the actors relate to each other from their position and function in the intermedial structure. As elements within that structure, their interdependence shows itself in the concentrated attention with which they relate to each other and the technological design.

“Where does the possibility for identification lie?”, Kennedy asks, “Which element do we identify as human? Is it the voice, the face, the hands? Is it someone who says ‘I’ on stage?”13 Kennedy questions these expectations of identification and radically opts for the impersonal ritual of theatre to involve the audience: it is precisely the mask, in its broadest sense, that opens up unexpected possibilities for projection and imagination. Kennedy shares this interest with Dutch performers Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, with whom she co-directed the Dutch production Hideous (wo)men in 2013, a performance on the stereotyped gender politics of spectacular culture and the empty self beneath it; their collaboration continued in the ORFEO production and at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Kennedy’s interaction with textual material follows a similar principle of disintegration between actor and text. Already in her early adaptations of classical drama (Schiller, Lessing, Ibsen) and most extremely in Drei Schwestern the dramatic text is reduced to a few elementary scenes and lines, sometimes compiled out of diverse translations, that are repeated and varied in the performance text. The adaptations thus dramaturgically reflect on the mechanisms of repeatedly restaging a canonised text and counteract any illusion of temporal development. Kennedy’s 2008 staging of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for instance, reverses the time order and starts with Hedda’s suicide instead of working towards it. The innovative Dutch theatre culture that had blossomed in the Netherlands and Belgium since the 1980s did not start from a text but from the affordances of an at times grotesque corporeality and site-specific spatiality, and it incorporated everyday language in dramatic text theatre – for instance in Johan Simon’s company of the time, Hollandia, founded in 1985. The afterlife of this theatrical movement is radically updated in Kennedy’s approach. Performance texts of later shows such as Medea.Matrix and Women in Trouble are highly intertextual and citational, combining quotes from diverse discursive contexts, ranging from canonised philosophy such as Nietzsche, to social media and tv shows. It is not so much the pop cultural levelling out of discursive hierarchies that is at stake here, nor an interpretative collage of pre-given material, but rather a demonstration of the communicative potentialities and constraints of these highly diverse utterances that are not owned by their speakers, be they as intellectual as a Nietzschean dictum or as banal as a greeting on a smart phone.

***

The contributions to this volume deal with Susanne Kennedy’s work from different perspectives but almost all of them pay special attention to the theatrical techniques Kennedy uses in her productions, from acting techniques, costumes and masks to the intermedial dimensions of her most recent work. Kennedy’s different approaches to theatrical time, space and body are also recurring issues discussed in this volume, as are thematic approaches that focus on themes such as death, the representation of gender and the boundaries between the human and non-human.

Some contributors have taken a more historical stance towards Kennedy’s work. One of them is Karel Vanhaesebrouck, who deals with Kennedy’s earlier production Over dieren (2010), an Amsterdam production that was based on Elfriede Jelinek’s Über Tiere, a text about prostitution, trade in women and phallocracy. Vanhaesebrouck is critical of the characterisation of Kennedy’s theatre as “baroque”, because doing so reduces the baroque to a purely aesthetic matter. Rather than outward display, he argues, the baroque is grounded in a thoroughgoing preoccupation with depth. Baroque is a complex game of showing and hiding, of seduction. In Over Dieren there is no seduction, no depth, no playing with reality, according to Vanhaesebrouck. Here, no complex game with illusions and levels of reality, but only the flat reality in its excessive banality. Kennedy’s formal treatment of the text and the frontal scenography expertly kills off any suggestion of theatrical illusion that is key to baroque theatrical aesthetics. Through a system of frontality, which radically refuses dramatic perspectivism, Kennedy short-circuits the spectator’s culturally conditioned need for empathy. The theatrical universe of Over Dieren is, as Vanhaesebrouck demonstrates, a two-dimensional, superficial world, devoid of depth and perspective. Rather than a baroque performance, Over Dieren can be considered a mannerist performance, defining mannerism as the art of “exposure”, of excess, of exhibitionism.

Cornelis van der Haven draws somewhat different conclusions about the presence or absence of a baroque theatrical aesthetic in Kennedy’s earlier work. Van der Haven discusses the tableau-like silent performances in Kennedy’s staging of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (2013), stating that these performances would highlight the (neo)baroque characteristics of Fleißer’s play. The artificiality of acting is striking in this production. The movements of the puppet-like actors are blown up by contrasting them with the frozen postures that are suddenly interrupted by these movements. These gestural signs function almost like rhetorical figures in baroque dramaturgy. One element that is typical of Fleißer’s play takes on a special meaning in Kennedy’s staging: the exchange of gazes. The martyrdom of the main character Roelle consists of a contradiction between the desire to be seen in his suffering and his awareness that this suffering is at the same time intensified by the gaze of the other. Such fields of tension can also be considered as “baroque”. In seventeenth-century plays, the self-conscious martyr that stages his or her own suffering no longer fitted with the selfless submission to suffering that was still associated with “true” martyrdom. In Kennedy’s interpretation of Fleißer’s play, there is no “true martyrdom”. All characters are isolated subjects and captives of their own bodies. Their self-display and frontal acting, together with the subjecting gazes that enforce the gazing of other characters, are not meant to glorify examples of martyrdom but rather demonstrate the impossibility of true social contact, which ultimately transforms all characters into both martyrs and potential torturers.

Gestural signs and gazing also take centre stage in Mathias Meert’s contribution about the same production (Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt) in which Meert pays special attention to the “pose” as a moment of arrest and retardation. These paused actions enable or force characters to look at other characters, while frontally addressing the audience at the same time. Meert discusses the actors in Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt as puppets that remind us of several (popular) theatre traditions, like pantomime and puppet-theatre, but which are also linked to the uncanny. To unpack the alterity of puppets and the experience of the uncanny Meert refers to Freud but also to other sources of inspiration for Kennedy’s production that focus on repetition, alienation and alterity, such as the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and the idea of the body becoming in the span of its lifetime a dead body, which seems to refer directly to the alienating appearance of the zombie-like actors on stage. The body is exposed, revealed to be quasi-dead, a fundamental space of alterity. Its movements are interrupted and slowed down. Corporeal gestures are not transparent media of universal and/or pure communication, but are transformed into artificial poses, inspired and modified by cultural history, and caught in the loop of a gradually increasing aesthetics of repetition. Kennedy’s artificial “puppets” seem conspicuously at home in their “panic room”, a constellation of thematic, structural and communicative ambivalences that transforms the apparent naturalness of the acting body into an artificial state of purgatory.

The dynamics between poses and gazes are also key to Inge Arteel’s discussion of two other earlier shows of Kennedy, Horace McCoy’s resp. Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (both 2011). Arteel analyses how these productions remediate the conventional aesthetics of cinematic melodrama. Bringing back melodrama to the space and time of theatre enables Kennedy to engage with the mechanisms of reproduction that inform the emotional economics of melodrama. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of “slow death” – the economic condition that sustains life while at the same time exhausting it – and the choreographic concept of “scenic energy regulation” (Sabine Huschka), Arteel first considers Kennedy’s reworking of the marathon dance contest at the centre of Sydney Pollack’s film adaptation of the McCoy melodrama. Here, Kennedy’s dramaturgy zooms in on the relation between performance and spectatorship at the heart of the spectacle. The play’s rhythmical energy regulation, performed in a circular theatre arena, exposes the addiction of the characters to the eye of the spectators and turns them into managers of the gaze. In the second production, the Fassbinder play, Kennedy grotesquely inflates the stylization already conspicuously present in Fassbinder’s film, thereby radicalising its discomforting effects. Here, she situates the characters’ addiction to the gaze in the sphere of sexual visual politics, more specifically those of kitschy, soft porn femininity. A steady, slowed-down micro-choreography supports the characters in their control over their appearances. Situated on the stage of a neo-Baroque theatre, this production engages with the virtual fourth wall as the space where each of the characters negotiates her status as a starlet. The self-confident engagement of Fassbinder’s film characters with the framing camera is exchanged for the management of the full exposure in the proscenium arch.

Nancy’s conception of the quasi-dead body as a fundamental space of alterity, as discussed by Meert, is a recurring topic in other contributions to this volume, especially in those that address Kennedy’s productions since 2015. From that year on, a series of productions were realised in which questions of life and death took centre stage in combination with a theatrical aesthetics of the ritual. The walk-in installation ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung (ORFEO. An exercise in dying), which debuted at the Ruhrtriennale 2015, can be seen as a starting point for this thematic line in her work. Eva Döhne dives into this case with a contribution that is partly based on her own experience as a visitor of the installation performance, with silent actors wearing full head masks. Their language cannot be heard and only a new interpretation of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo resonates in the labyrinth of rooms. The performers occupy the spaces with their bodies, do not speak and, according to the spatial arrangement, repeat, seemingly endlessly, movement patterns and positioning. Döhne further investigates the seemingly lifeless and speechless female figures of the installation. One of her conclusions is that all those involved in the installation vacillate between life and death, on the border between being seen and disappearing. Döhne also highlights the gendered manifestations of sexual difference. Mindful of the scarcely or not at all represented narrative of the mythological figure of Eurydice in Ovid’s tale, the installation presents a modified reading of the myth, inspired by Elfriede Jelinek’s theatre text SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt). Döhne emphasises the relevance of expanding the reception of the myth through a feminist perspective, as well as the (im)possibility of a representation of Eurydice’s position within the framework of this installation.

Silke Felber investigates how Kennedy and her team address questions of living (on) and dying in the productions following Orfeo – Eine Sterbeübung, especially in Women in Trouble, which premiered at Volksbühne Berlin in 2017. This is done through the lens of an aesthetic paradigm shift that occurs in Kennedy’s work after Orfeo, with an increased interest in the interaction of auditorium and stage, and that of physical space and digital space. According to Felber, Kennedy’s innovative spatial aesthetic provokes a specific temporality within which the relation between life and death (traditionally thought of as dichotomous in the Western world) can be newly experienced. This specific temporality challenges the dichotomy between “live” and “mediatized” still presupposed in Western theatre and performance studies. In doing so, Kennedy’s works question the conception of theatre as being based on the binary categories of presentation vs. representation, animate vs. inanimate, and human vs. non-human.

The relevance of the (full head) mask for the representation of the human body between life and death as addressed by Döhne in her analysis of the Orfeo installation takes centre stage in the contribution by Birgit Wiens. The artistic examination of masks and the cultural technique of their usage runs like a thread through Kennedy’s theatre works. The mask plays an important role in the cult of death and connects to Kennedy’s understanding (based on Deleuze and Guattari) of the human face as a “field of death”. In her contribution, however, Wiens also reflects on how the mask relates to Kennedy’s more general take on theatre as a “theatre of non-protagonists”. Kennedy’s theatre decidedly breaks with traditional protagonists in defined roles by no longer understanding their faces, facial expressions and visual features as expressions and identity markers of a person or a character. Instead, associatively and in the broad cultural-historical field of reference, it refers to the complex relation of face and mask – also beyond and outside of the stage – and, in a critical turn, to concepts of identity and individuality. Wiens illustrates this with a discussion of Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (2015), Drei Schwestern (2019) and Die Selbstmord-Schwestern (2017). Particularly in the latter production the link between the mask and death is indisputably present. The production focusses on the secrets of three sisters who act like the “living dead”, wearing heavy colourful masks (only with an opening for the mouth). On the threshold of life and death and dreaming about suicide, the masks of these characters can be understood as a reference to their death wish.

The mask can also be seen as a marker of another crucial element of Kennedy’s work: the way in which she uses the theatre to reflect on its own theatrical traditions of mediation. As discussed by Wiens, the mask enables Kennedy to let her work reflect on a theatrical device that has been used from ancient theatre onwards, connecting it with more universal questions about how we as humans actually interact today with other “embodied” images such as sculptures, paintings, photographs, films and more. This potentiality of the medium to become self-reflective is further explored in the contribution of Maurício Perussi. Perussi discusses the techniques of projection in Kennedy’s staging of Drei Schwestern. At the beginning of that performance, the audience is confronted with an insurmountable barrier: the view is completely obstructed by a white wall made of a tightly stretched fabric, and it is absolutely impossible to see anything that is behind this barricade. An astonishing landscape is projected on that frontal screen, a landscape that collapses through a kind of explosion. Perussi interprets this opening scene as a way to think about the stage as something that folds itself, as if closing the eyelids to stare at its own internal images, confronting the spectator with a spectacular introspection. Perussi considers Drei Schwestern as a theatrical spectacle that meditates on its own ontology. By undertaking a self-reflexive practice, this work presents its reflections primarily for itself, showing itself to us as reflected in its own thoughts. Therefore, we would be facing a performance that is concerned with meditating on the action of time and how it affects bodies, beings and objects, while at the same time making these bodies, beings and objects produce the time on which the performance wishes to meditate. In doing so, through the obstinate reaffirmation of a recursive pattern, the spectacle generates a self-perceptual shaking in itself that resounds in the spectator’s perception, opening up for both of them the opportunity for a transformative change of perspective.

The transmedial techniques that are needed to realise the spectacular experience of the audience in productions like Drei Schwestern are also discussed by Janine Hauthal. Hauthal’s focus is on the transmedial device of the loop that Kennedy employed in the aforementioned production as well as in Ultraworld (2020) and Women in Trouble (2017). Centring on Drei Schwestern, Hauthal investigates the loop as a compositional principle in the interaction of scenography, video, sound, speech, and life action. By comparing the loop to the related principles of repetition and cyclicity, she elucidates the cultural and cognitive reflexivity of Kennedy’s theatre aesthetics that has so far been rarely discussed. Building on musicological research, she shows how the repetitive subjectivities of Kennedy’s theatre – embodied in an exemplary way by the eponymous three sisters of the 2019 production – reflect the way repetition functions as a cultural practice in the medial and mediatised consumer societies of our time. Especially Kennedy’s inclusion of the serial formats of television, video games and digital self-portraiture suggests that using and consuming these media contributes to society’s repetitive entrainment. Moreover, drawing on Douglas R. Hofstadter’s notion of the “strange loop”, Hauthal argues that this notion affords Kennedy’s “radical signature” through and against the self-tangled worlds that her Drei Schwestern and other works create on stage. Hauthal’s chapter thus demonstrates how Kennedy’s treatment of Chekhov’s play does not just illustrate the drama of subjectivity in contemporary Western cultures of repetition, it also becomes a self-reflexive assertion of (authorial) consciousness against repetitive entrainment.

Ulrike Haß argues that digital virtual realities in Kennedy’s theatre are fundamentally considered as possible worlds that do not represent alternative spaces, but rather play with a different dimension of time. Like in Hauthal’s contribution, the concept of the loop is taking centre stage here. According to Haß, Kennedy’s loops confirm the ritualised temporality of her theatre, and at the same time they modulate it in such an extreme overstretching way that it almost comes to a standstill, creating an experience of time that slows down the action so that it becomes alien to us. In the virtual reality of Kennedy’s later plays, the gates and digital portal architectures blur the spatial distinction between “in” and “out”. This not only makes notions of spatial dimensions obsolete, the same is true for the experience of time, as Haß discusses in her reading of Kennedy’s production Ultraworld (2020). Haß also pays special attention to the blurred boundaries between human and non-human and like Wiens she considers the characters in Kennedy’s plays as non-protagonists, creatures that don’t have a face nor a voice as expressions of their individuality. Face and voice are inexpressive bodily elements, placed in a virtual reality that is indefinable as well. According to Haß, time, space and bodies in Kennedy’s theatre work together to enable us to reflect upon our own wish of “becoming imperceptible” (unwahrnehmbar-werden).

This volume is the result of a workshop on the theatre of Susanne Kennedy that took place in Brussels on January 23-25, 2020, just before the pandemic made live social events impossible. It was organised and sponsored by the research group Thalia, a joint research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Ghent University. We want to thank the Brussels based Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound (RITCS) for providing the space and logistic support for the workshop, as well as the Doctoral School of Human Sciences of the VUB for financial support. We thank Thomas Chadwick for his assistance in editing the volume and Parham Aledavood for the draft transcription of the interview with Susanne Kennedy. We especially wish to thank Susanne Kennedy for her presence and the permission to publish the artist talk.

Overview of Susanne Kennedy’s productions14

Author, title – main production venue – date of the first night

Heiner Müller, Kwartet – Theaterschool Amsterdam – 2002-06-06

Tennessee Williams, Ik kan me morgen niet voorstellen – Theaterschool Amsterdam – 2003-02-17

Franz Xaver Kroetz, Männersache – De Regiedagen, Amsterdam – 2004-07-01

Friedrich Schiller, Maria Stuart – De Regiedagen, Amsterdam – 2005-06-30

Susanne Kennedy, Variaties op Jackie O. – Gasthuis Werkplaats & Theater, Amsterdam – 2006-04-12

Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2007-01-20

Susanne Kennedy, Barbie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – Gasthuis Werkplaats & Theater, Amsterdam – 2007-04-04

Falk Richter, Electronic City – Gasthuis Werkplaats & Theater, Amsterdam – 2007-09-21

Gesine Danckwart, Dagelijks brood – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2008-04-17

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2008-12-04

Marius von Mayenburg, Parasieten – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2009-05-07

Enda Walsh, The New Electric Ballroom – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2009-12-03

Generatie Oost – Theaterwerkplaats Generale Oost, Amsterdam – 2010-01-17

Elfriede Jelinek, Over dieren – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2010-04-15

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2010-11-04

Harold Pinter, Het verjaardagsfeest – Het Nationale Toneel, Den Haag – 2011-05-12

Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2011-02-27

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant – Het Nationale Toneel/NTGent, Den Haag/Gent – 2011-10-21

Henrik Ibsen, Kleine Eyolf – Het Nationale Toneel/NTGent, Den Haag/Gent – 2012-05-03

Marieluise Fleißer, Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2013-02-08

Bianca van der Schoot, Suzan Boogaerdt, Susanne Kennedy, Hideous (Wo)men – Toneelgroep Oostpool, Arnhem – 2013-11-05

August Strindberg, De pelikaan – Toneelgroep Amsterdam – 2014-03-23

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Warum läuft Herr R. Amok – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2014-11-27

Susanne Kennedy, Suzan Boogaerdt, Bianca van der Schoot, ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung – Ruhrtriennale / Kaleidoskop – 2015-08-20

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Medea.Matrix – Ruhrtriennale – 2016-09-15

Susanne Kennedy after Jeffrey Eugenides, Die Selbstmord-Schwestern / The Virgin Suicides – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2017-03-30

Susanne Kennedy, Women in Trouble – Volksbühne Berlin – 2017-11-30

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Coming Society – Volksbühne Berlin – 2019-01-17

Susanne Kennedy after Anton Chekhov, Drei Schwestern – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2019-04-27

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Ultraworld – Volksbühne Berlin – 2020-01-16

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Oracle – Münchner Kammerspiele – 2020-06-15

Susanne Kennedy, Markus Selg, Rodrik Biersteker, I AM (VR) – Ultraworld Productions – 2021-02-17

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Jessica, an Incarnation – Volksbühne Berlin – 2022-02-24

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach – Theater Basel – 2022-06-04

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Angela (a strange loop) – Ultraworld Productions / Kunstenfestivaldesarts et al. – 2023-05-11

Transactional Love

Mannerism and Pornography in Susanne Kennedy’s Over Dieren

Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Three men stand in gaudy, pale blue suits. Their faces look like plastic, as if they are wearing a transparent mask. They shine a little; unreal and artificial. The men are grinning, not exuberantly, but furtively, falsely, supposedly politely. Next to them are two women with runny make-up and a bemused expression. They are wearing tightly fitting mini dresses in a garish pink and striking wigs. Someone has stuck arrows on their obscene dresses with some tape to indicate the nipples, the genitals and the anus. So that the gentlemen can immediately find their way to their merchandise. In their midst is a slightly older woman, heavily made up as well, but this varnish barely hides the pain of life. She has fever blisters on her lips and she rants about love while the characters perform an obscene and seductive dance in slow motion. This is not the kind of dance you might use to woo a lover on the dance floor: it is some sort of wiggling, well, maybe just moving, slowly, tardily and obscenely, because that is what you are supposed to do in a brothel, from one transactional pleasure to another. The six awkwardly grinning figures are surrounded by some twenty-five television screens. On each of those screens, a pair of male eyes watches, furtively enjoying the smut.

In 2010 a young Susanne Kennedy directed Over Dieren (original title: Über Tiere), a text by Elfriede Jelinek (translated by Tom Kleijn) about prostitution, trade in women and phallocracy. The production was commissioned by the Nationaal Toneel (National Theatre) in the Hague in the Netherlands. In Over Dieren we find all the ingredients of Kennedy’s aesthetics: a pronounced formal aesthetics; a strict delineation of the actors’ direction; a distant, formal treatment of the text; and a frontal scenography which expertly kills off any suggestion of theatrical illusion. Kennedy translates the subject of Jelinek’s text into carefully chosen formal choices: the form incarnates the content of the text rather than to illustrate it or comment on it. Thus she sketches a sharp portrait of an icy society in which a woman’s body is merely merchandise and sexual intercourse is not an act of love but a forced attempt to escape an existential void. Jelinek’s text shows us that these attempts remain attempts, leaving no other option but to keep consuming.

In both Jelinek’s text and Kennedy’s stage love and sexuality are thus depicted as transactions. In their haunting, claustrophobic universe all affective and sexual relationships are economic in nature, in the harsh, neoliberal sense of the world: completely disconnected of its human nature, sexuality has become a commodity for which, at best, you pay. Kennedy translates this dehumanisation into a specific theatrical aesthetics both on the level of the direction of the actors and scenography. Through a system of frontality, which radically refuses dramatic perspectivism, she short-circuits the spectator’s culturally conditioned need for empathy. The theatrical universe of Over Dieren is, as I will demonstrate, a two-dimensional, superficial world, devoid of depth and perspective. Kennedy’s aesthetics remind us of the highly formal, overregulated language of mannerism, which reduces life to form and perverse rules. We will show how Kennedy, in an utterly coherent reading of Jelinek’s text, brings together dramaturgy, acting and scenography, confronting the spectator with a world of cold, desireless pornography.

1Life as a whorehouse

Elfriede Jelinek based Über Tiere on a Viennese sex-trafficking scandal. Most of the text consists of a montage of police tapes. The Viennese police bugged a luxury escort service and thus came across the sexual exploits of all sorts of high-ranking gentlemen, often with young girls. The text is preceded by a kind of monologue intérieur by an older woman, a writer, played by Antoinette Jelgersma, who seems to be delirious as she rambles on about a romantic love despite her willingness to be that love’s unconditional slave. Jelinek thus explicitly links the violence of heterosexual, romantic love to the forced, commercial exchange of the (high-end) prostitution industry. Both are the product of a perverse phallocracy, in which women can only be possessions. In this sinister world equality and equal rights are just laughable fictions.

In Over Dieren the woman is under the spell of a man who rejects her again and again. She speaks to him, but we never hear his answers. “Attempts to draw you like a curtain for me fail”, says the woman, “but the attempt not to love you in itself is also very strenuous”.15 The woman seems to want to tell the man that he does not have to book her, he can simply possess her: “When you always have to book first, what pleasure is there in using her?”16 Romantic love, the idealisation in which two lovers are absorbed in each other, beyond any kind of material interest, becomes a form of total dependence in the words of this woman:

In love I devoted myself to my greatest care for you, how you would decide about me. I agreed with you upon everything in advance, because that way you would be free to decide. […] I wanted to avoid everything […] that might give you the idea of not using me.17

So unfathomably deep is her desire for this man that she wants to be exploited and abused by him. “Why don’t you use me”, she asks him almost imploringly.18 Meanwhile, the men in the text exchange this and that about “their” women. They sample, they judge, they test, they pass on and throw away. In their phallocentric pornocracy, women are mere objects with the life span of a Kleenex. These men seize women, attack them:

And you attack that woman, so that the breath goes again and she is in the right position. Not right for her, but right for us, so that you don’t immediately grab the wetness from pure excitement.19

Jelinek edits the documentary material from the police tapes into a kaleidoscope of male voices exchanging women as merchandise. They talk about extra or inclusive prices, about in the mouth or in the ass, about young girls who like “Greek”, about fucking without a condom. The voices melt together into a spiral of fucking that becomes more and more coercive: bodies are tied up, teeth are smashed, a girl dies – and all the while, money is made.

Über Tiere is a merciless critique of the neoliberal system that has succeeded in dehumanising every possible desire. In that sense, this text is a kind of prelude to Die Kontrakte des Kaufmans,20 one of Jelinek’s most far-reaching critiques of postmodern capitalism, in which she edits the horny feverishness of the economy into “a merry go-round of repetitions and variations, mimicking the endless circulation of money”.21 In this universe every relationship is a transaction, every body a commodity. “Sorry to interrupt, but is undressing desirable?” one of the two actresses asks the audience repeatedly throughout the text. Everything is trade, everything can be booked. Women’s bodies are only there to be used, or rather, put to use. Women here are “things”, objects without an inner world, utensils with customer satisfaction as their only standard. The men deny the women the right to an individual life. In Über Tiere Jelinek equates the serfdom of the (bourgeois) heterosexual relationship with the economic transactions of the whorehouse.

2When form becomes substance

Susanne Kennedy edits Jelinek’s text in a slightly different way. She interweaves the woman’s monologue with documentary fragments from the Viennese whorehouse. In this way, both discourses resonate with each other. The result is, in the words of Inge Arteel, a “feminist grotesque”22, a parade of hideous, enlarged scenes that uncompromisingly display the ugliness of reality and thus the perverse dominance of phallocentric capitalism.

In her direction, Kennedy radically continues the dehumanisation of the woman in Jelinek’s text. She turns the sex industry into a frigid system of trade and commerce, with the actresses as an identity-free instrument of that system. But just as in Jelinek’s text, Kennedy also denies the men any individuality. They are just as much robots, mechanically looking to satisfy their lust and their ego. All relationships in this play are cold, bleak and mercantile. There is no love, only prostitution. Even when there is love, it is perverted. The character of the older woman, Antoinette Jelgersma, speaks to a lover who does not want to know about her. She wants to be taken, used. She wants to feel like an object, because only then can she be his.

Throughout the performance Kennedy allows her actors to sway their hips slowly: every movement is an all too obvious seduction trick, the kind of strange ritual that mostly takes place at five o’clock in the morning in a brothel with a shag pile carpet, heavy curtains and mirrors wherever you look. The men’s faces seem to be devoid of any emotions: they only grin, the same, artificial grimace throughout the whole play. The two women are past their best: they look pale, have bags under their eyes, nothing remains of their mascara. They move along with the men, listless, uninterested. They have nothing more to offer, that much is clear, and yet the wheeling and dealing continue. In her text, Jelinek, like De Sade in his 120 Days of Sodom, combines grandiloquent philosophical passages about love, freedom and self-determination, with explicitly sexual scenes that she takes directly from the documentary material. Kennedy adds a visual translation to these text fragments in a series of tableaux, in which the three men together use one of the women. The movements are mechanical, bored – there is no excitement whatsoever. They fuck because they can. The three men lick a heart-shaped sugar lolly and make disgusting sucking noises, one of them does a lap on a child’s bicycle and meanwhile delivers obscenities. Everything is surface, nothing has depth. And the more the men’s faces shine, the more disgusting the lack of reality. The actors often look at the audience. Seeing the glazy stare of consumers feels uncomfortable. They seem to be unaware of our presence, their stare is empty and hollow. The rhythm of endless and restless consumption seems to have killed all emotions. We do not even see lust or greed, just emptiness. The women too have expressionless faces: there is no fear, disgust or whatsoever in their eyes, there is just nothing.

When the older woman speaks, she looks and sounds like a robot. The text comes out of her mouth, nothing more. That text spins around, lingers. Without emotion or intention. The acting is dehumanised and radically anti-psychological: no inner world or psychological reality is suggested. The characters look like puppets controlled by an external authority, as if they are all part of a larger system. Kennedy accentuates this suggestion by interrupting the central actress’s discourse with an icy, industrial, distorted voice. This voice evokes gruesome scenes. When, out of the blue, the voice suddenly utters a few sentences, the actress Antoinette Jelgersma mimics the text. It seems as if she is possessed by the devil: a monster speaks through her body.

Kennedy opts for a distinct visual language that is also a body language. She literally uses the actors as objects. They are bodies that say words, perform actions. Through this anti-psychological direction, the actors are reduced to objects in the director’s universe. They are used, just like the characters in Jelinek’s play. They are stripped of their personality, stripped of any individuality. And so the actors literally embody the content of Jelinek’s text. They too become objects, utensils. And the spectator becomes a consumer. In this early production of Kennedy, we find the most important elements of her theatrical aesthetics, which she will later develop under the wings of the Müchner Kammerspiele or the Berlin Volksbühne. For example, Women in Trouble