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Susanne Kennedy

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
219 Seiten
Deutsch
Narr Francke Attempto Verlagerschienen am04.09.20231. Auflage
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.

Prof. Dr. Inge Arteel is full professor of German Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. PD Dr. Silke Felber is Senior Fellow at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Prof. Dr. Cornelis van der Haven is associate professor of Dutch literature at Ghent University.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextFor 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.

Prof. Dr. Inge Arteel is full professor of German Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. PD Dr. Silke Felber is Senior Fellow at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Prof. Dr. Cornelis van der Haven is associate professor of Dutch literature at Ghent University.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783823304777
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum04.09.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
ReiheForum Modernes Theater
Reihen-Nr.59
Seiten219 Seiten
SpracheDeutsch
Dateigrösse35160 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.12373097
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven
Susanne Kennedy's Theatre. An Introduction

Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Transactional Love: Mannerism and Pornography in Susanne Kennedy's Over Dieren

Cornelis van der Haven
The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze: Baroque Frontality in Kennedy's Staging of Fleißer's Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt

Mathias Meert
Puppets in a Panic Room? Observations on Gesture and Pose in Susanne Kennedy's Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt

Inge Arteel
Susanne Kennedy's Cinematic Melodrama on Stage

Eva Döhne
Theatre as an Exercise in Dying. The Hollow Body in Exhibition

Silke Felber
Susanne Kennedy's Women in Trouble: Troubling (Theatrical) Time

Birgit Wiens
Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice. On Recent Theatre Projects by Susanne Kennedy

Mauricio Perussi
Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow's Point of View

Janine Hauthal
The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy's Drei Schwestern

Ulrike Haß
Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy's Theatre of Attunement

Artist talk with Susanne Kennedy

Notes on contributorsmehr
Leseprobe


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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 : 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? 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.

 

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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...
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Autor

Prof. Dr. Inge Arteel is full professor of German Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

PD Dr. Silke Felber is Senior Fellow at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

Prof. Dr. Cornelis van der Haven is associate professor of Dutch literature at Ghent University.