ISBN 978-3-8233-8550-9 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. Arteel / Felber / van der Haven (eds.) Susanne Kennedy Forum Modernes Theater Schriftenreihe | Band 59 Inge Arteel / Silke Felber / Cornelis van der Haven (eds.) Susanne Kennedy Reanimating the Theatre Susanne Kennedy Forum Modernes Theater Schriftenreihe l Band 5 9 begründet von Günter Ahrends (Bochum) herausgegeben von Christopher Balme (München) Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven (eds.) Susanne Kennedy Reanimating the Theatre DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783823395508 © 2023 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Überset‐ zungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0935-0012 ISBN 978-3-8233-8550-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9550-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0477-7 (ePub) Cover picture: Women in Trouble, Volksbühne Berlin. © picture alliance/ dpa/ Silas Stein Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® 7 23 39 59 75 95 111 127 147 169 185 Contents Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre. An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Transactional Love. Mannerism and Pornography in Susanne Kennedy’s Over Dieren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze. Baroque Frontality in Kennedy’s Staging of Fleißer’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Puppets in a Panic Room? Observations on Gesture and Pose in Susanne Kennedy’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) Theatre as an Exercise in Dying. The Hollow Body in Exhibition . . . . . . . . Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble. Troubling (Theatrical) Time . . . . . . Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice. On Recent Theatre Projects by Susanne Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement . . 205 217 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy. Brussels, RITCS, 24 January 2020 . . . . . Notes on contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 1 This is the oldest theatre student award of the Netherlands, https: / / theaterencycloped ie.nl/ wiki/ Top_Naeff_Prijs (accessed 8 Oct. 2021). 2 Quoted from the jury report of the 2010 Erik Vos award (a biennial award for upcoming 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). theatre makers), http: / / www.dutchheights.nl/ winnaars/ erik-vos-prijs-2010-susanne-k ennedy (accessed 8 Oct. 2021). Unless otherwise mentioned, all translations are ours. 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 8 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 3 Quoted from the jury report as rendered on: http: / / www.greek-theatre.gr/ public/ gr/ gr eekplay/ index/ newview/ 1303 (accessed 8 Oct. 2021). 4 Jake Witlen, “Existentialism in 8-bit: ULTRAWORLD at the Volksbühne”, in: Exberliner (25 February 2020), https: / / www.exberliner.com/ whats-on/ stage/ existentialism-in-8-bi t-ultraworld-at-the-volksbühne/ (accessed 8 Oct. 2021); Christian Rakow, “Come in and find out”, in: nachtkritik.de (17 January 2020), https: / / www.nachtkritik.de/ index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=17567: ultraworld-volksbuehne-berlin-sus‐ anne-kennedy-und-markus-selg-entdecken-schimmer-der-ironie-in-ihrem-transhu‐ manistischen-theaterprojekt&catid=1629&Itemid=100476 (accessed 8 Oct. 2021). 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 medi‐ tative 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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 9 5 Since the completion of this manuscript, three further Kennedy shows have premiered: Jessica - an Incarnation, another cooperation with Markus Selg (Volksbühne Berlin, 24 February 2022), Kennedy’s first full-fledged opera production, a staging of Philipp Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (Theater Basel, 4 June 2022), and, again with Selg, Angela (a strange loop) (Brussels, 11-May-2023). 6 “Eine Art Wiederbelebungskur fürs Theater. Susanne Kennedy im Gespräch mit Karin Fischer”, in: Deutschlandfunk (3 January 2018), https: / / www.deutschlandfunk.de/ reihe -eine-frage-der-zeit-eine-art-wiederbelebungskur-fuers.691.de.html? dram: article_id=407442 (accessed 8 January 2021). 7 Ibid. 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 10 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 8 See also Thomas Oberender, “Im Glitch den Vorhang öffnen. Die Regisseurin Susanne Kennedy macht das Betriebssystem unseres digitalen Zeitalters erfahrbar”, in: Theater der Zeit 12 (2019), pp. 22-25. 9 As Rodrik Biersteker says: “We all play the game together”. In: Programmheft Drei Schwestern, Münchner Kammerspiele 2019, p.-16. 10 Oberender, op. cit., 2019, p.-25. -, 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 dramatur‐ gical 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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 11 11 Id., p.-24. 12 Dramaturg Helena Eckert in a conversation with Inge Arteel at the Münchner Kam‐ merspiele, 26 June 2019. the audience, immersion not meaning smooth surrender and thoughtless iden‐ tification 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 12 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 13 Kennedy quoted in: Sven Ricklefs, “Porträt einer Künstlerin, die Theater macht. Thea‐ terregisseurin Susanne Kennedy”, in: Bayrischer Rundfunk. Kulturjournal (5 December 2017). 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 mecha‐ nisms 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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 13 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 14 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 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 contri‐ bution 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 discus‐ sion 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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 15 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 16 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 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, Ken‐ nedy’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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 17 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 expe‐ rience 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 scenog‐ raphy, 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 18 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 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 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 19 14 The information on the earlier productions is taken from the Dutch website TheaterEncyclopedie, https: / / theaterencyclopedie.nl/ wiki/ Susanne_Kennedy (accessed 8 Oct. 2021). 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 productions 14 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 - Toneel‐ groep Oostpool, Arnhem - 2013-11-05 August Strindberg, De pelikaan - Toneelgroep Amsterdam - 2014-03-23 20 Inge Arteel, Silke Felber, Cornelis van der Haven 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 Produc‐ tions / Kunstenfestivaldesarts et al. - 2023-05-11 Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre 21 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 demon‐ strate, 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. 1 Life 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 24 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 1 Elfriede Jelinek, Over Dieren, trans. Tom Kleijn, unpublished 2009, p. 2. (all translations into English of this and other texts are mine). (Dutch quote: “Pogingen om u voor mij dicht te schuiven als een gordijn mislukken maar de poging alleen al niet van u te houden is ook heel inspannend”.) 2 Id., p. 5. (Dutch: “Wanneer je altijd eerst moet reserveren, wat voor plezier heb je er dan nog aan als je haar gebruikt”.) 3 Id., p. 6. (Dutch: “In de liefde wijdde ik me aan mijn grootste zorg om jou, hoe je over mij zou beslissen. Ik gaf je bij voorbaat in alles gelijk, want zo zou je vrij zijn in wat je zou beslissen. […] ik wilde alles vermijden […] wat je ook maar op het idee zou kunnen brengen me niet te gebruiken”.) 4 Id., p.-8. (Dutch: “Waarom bedien je je niet van mij? ”) 5 Id., p. 11-12. (Dutch: “En je valt die vrouw aan, zodat de adem weer gaat en ze ook in de juiste positie is. Niet voor haar juist, maar voor ons juist, zodat je niet meteen in de nattigheid grijpt van pure opwinding”.) in itself is also very strenuous”. 1 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? ” 2 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. 3 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. 4 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. 5 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. Transactional Love 25 6 Elfriede Jelinek, De contracten van de Koopman, trans. Inge Arteel, Amsterdam 2010. 7 Inge Arteel, “Jelinek on the Dutch-speaking stage: from marginal attention to drama‐ turgical success”, in: Austrian studies 22 (2014), pp. 43-58, here p.-52. 8 Id., p.-56. 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, 6 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”. 7 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. 2 When 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” 8 , 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 26 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 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 Jeli‐ nek’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 Transactional Love 27 9 Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Bevrijd van het eigen ‘ik’. Het buitenaardse oeuvre van Sus‐ anne Kennedy”, in: Etcetera 158 (2019), https: / / e-tcetera.be/ bevrijd-van-het-eigen-ik (accessed 1 Febr. 2021) (Dutch original: “playbackende marionetten, cyborgs zonder gezicht”). 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 (Volksbühne, 2017) depicts the multiple lives of Angelina Dreem. Her face is covered by a latex mask and her life develops along the artificial lines of a soap opera. The revolving stage takes you from one cabinet to another: all of these depict pop-like, semi-futuristic rooms in which the same woman (but is it the same? ) seems to be waiting for something that will not come. In Kennedy’s version of Drei Schwestern (Münchner Kammerspiele, 2019), the Chekhovian universe becomes a sterile, machinelike, and claustrophobic environment in which the three sisters are mere appearances, robotlike, dehumanised entities whose eerie presence reminds us of the dystopic series Black Mirror. In Over Dieren, Kennedy transforms the stage with minimal means (that will change later, as the aforementioned examples show) into an alienating universe that sometimes reminds one of the legendary anime Ghost in the Shell (1995): a technological environment of surveillance and perverse voyeurism, a world in which people drift about like lost atoms, looking for contact. In Kennedy’s hands, the actors become “playback marionettes, faceless cyborgs”. 9 They look like avatars, wandering around in Jelinek’s gruesome, dystopian world. The end of the performance is pitch-black. One of the women is writhing across the floor in some sort of epileptic fit, sperm dripping from her mouth. On the left the other woman is on her knees, praying sanctimoniously with her hands raised to heaven. In the background the older woman is dancing exuberantly, while the three men look on impassively. “Life is life”, in the Teutonic version of Rammstein, is blaring from the speakers. Another night gone wrong. 3 Aesthetics of the surface In Über Tiere Jelinek painstakingly describes how all human relations - partic‐ ularly those of sexual and affective nature - have turned into mere transactions, always superficial, never profound. Even sex, the most intimate and physical relationship possible, is just an exchange, of valuta and of bodily fluids. Kennedy radicalises this dystopia not only through the pronounced, anti-psychological direction of her actors, but also through her translation of this dramaturgical 28 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 10 Anne Surgers, Scénographie du théâtre occidental, Paris 2009, pp. 83-113; Thomas Crombez, Jelle Koopmans, Frank Peeters, Luk Van den Dries, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Theater. Een Westerse geschiedenis, Tielt 2015, pp. 107-109. 11 Jean-Marie Apostolidès, “Le théâtre de la frontalité”, in: Tangences 88 (2008), pp. 15-27, here p. 17 (French original: “n’est pas seulement une autre technique picturale, mais interpretation into a very specific approach to space and stage. In Over Dieren, Susanne Kennedy opts for a frontal direction. The television sets are arranged in a number of rows, on straight lines parallel to the edge of the stage. The back of the stage is bordered by a flat rear wall; there are no side walls. In this way, Kennedy avoids any kind of scenographic depth. The actors consequently perform frontally to the audience; there is no fourth wall. This frontality, which seems to refuse any possible perspective or sense of depth (the fourth wall is demolished on all possible levels: acting, scenography, address of the audience, etc.), is the backbone of Kennedy’s aesthetics for Over Dieren: there is no attempt whatsoever to hide the fakeness of the theatrical reality on stage. In this way, the dramaturgy of the play is most coherently translated in a “superficial” theatre aesthetics. In her production, Kennedy harks back to the frontal aesthetics of pre-dra‐ matic theatre in which the idea of perspective had yet to be developed. Under the influence of Italian architects and stage designers, perspective was introduced into European theatre during the Renaissance. 10 Its aim was to provide a hierarchic order in a world no longer ruled by God, but by man. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics gave this conception of man and reality an even firmer grounding. In Aristotle’s view, dramatic action is driven by man. He takes decisions and intervenes in reality, for better or for worse. Man acts from a psychological disposition: his choices are therefore internally motivated. Aristotle’s view of theatre is in perfect keeping with the anthropocentric world view of the humanists, in which man becomes the driving force behind the progress of history. The history of Western theatre is built on this Renaissance perspective. This not only offers the viewer an abstract idealisation of reality, but also has the aura of a scientific nature and clarity. Thanks to this perspective, reality becomes measurable, reproducible and thus verifiable. Moreover, it offers the possibility of sociological stratification of the public: after all, not everyone has the same ideal view of the depicted reality. According to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, perspective “is not just another pictorial technique, but a new way of ordering the world, i.e. of defining the possible, the real and the true, as well as man’s place in the universe”. 11 The spectator is outside the scenic reality of the stage: he contemplates, just like the creator. After all, the creator is not required to Transactional Love 29 une manière nouvelle d’ordonner le monde, donc de définir le champ du possible, du réel, et du vrai, ainsi que la place de l’homme dans l’univers”). 12 This search was very difficult. The official theatrical aesthetics often proved to be out of sync with the reality of theatre as a social practice. However, the divergence between theory and practice in Western-European theatre history would take us beyond the scope of this article. Cf. Crombez et al., op. cit., 2015. 13 Apostolidès, op. cit., 2008, p.-22. 14 Christian Biet, “Séance, performance, assemblée et représentation : les jeux de regards au théâtre (XVII e -XXI e siècle)”, in: Littératures classiques 82, 3 (2013), pp. 79-97. question reality either, it is the product of his gaze. The triumph of perspective is thus the triumph of a self-conscious image of man, in which reality becomes an orderly space and time. Perspective painting draws you into the image, placing you as viewer where the painter wants you to be. Your gaze is programmed by the image. The reality depicted becomes an autonomous reality, peopled by characters who are absorbed by the depicted reality. Aristotle’s Poetics allows humanists to also translate this vision of image and reality into a theatrical form. The stage must become an autonomous reality, separated from social reality by a fourth wall, populated by actors who pretend to have forgotten that they are on a stage (Diderot will use the term “absorption” in this context). From the Renaissance onwards, the dramatic illusion becomes the desired cornerstone of Western theatrical practice: throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even deep into the twentieth century, attempts were made to translate these theoretical ideas into theatre practice through interventions in the auditorium (seated audience in the parterre, lights out in the auditorium, etc.) and on stage (lateral stage elements, depth effect through light and scenery, historically authentic costumes, etc.). 12 Frontality works differently, as Jean-Marie Apostolidès explains. Frontal theatre works in the same way as the aesthetics of the fresco, as we know it from the Middle Ages. A fresco organises the dramatic action according to the principle of accumulative juxtaposition. 13 As a viewer, you have an orderly overview of the whole picture, and you can let your gaze travel across the image. Frontal theatre produces the opposite effect of perspectival space. Instead of hiding itself, frontal theatre shows itself. The perspective masks the theatricality through the suggestion of a reality, frontality lets the theatre be theatre: a place where people, spectators and actors, come together - theatre historian Christian Biet invariably uses the word “assemblée” 14 in that context - to reflect on reality, by showing that same reality again, representing it, through a system of mimetic codes. These codes are artificial, and therefore not realistic, but make it possible, through the formal qualities of theatre, to evoke another reality without actually 30 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 15 Christian Biet & Christophe Triau, “La comparution théâtrale. Pour une definition esthétique et politique de la scène”, in: Tangences 88 (2008), pp. 29-43. suggesting or showing it. The theatre stage remains what it is: a stage on which figures “appear” and show themselves to the public. 15 Rather than incarnating characters whose actions and words are psychologically motivated, the actors are allegorical apparitions. Perspectival theatre suggests depth: therefore, the perspectival scenography of European theatre is in perfect keeping with the psychological concept of acting: the space of the stage and the image of man coincide perfectly. Frontal theatre, however, reveals the two-dimensionality of reality, and thus its superficiality. Transactional Love 31 16 Apostolidès, op. cit., 2008, p. 22 (French: “En perdant la perspective, c’est aussi la psychologie des profondeurs qui déserte la scène, créant ainsi un sentiment d’étrangeté de la part du spectateur”). Fig. 1 and 2: Over Dieren by Susanne Kennedy, Nationale Toneel, The Hague 2010. © Deen van Meer In frontal theatre, the viewer finds himself face to face with a series of appari‐ tions - not characters - that hide their inner selves, and are, moreover, devoid of any inner life. “By losing perspective”, Apostolidès writes, “psychological depth (or rather: the psychology of depths) also leaves the stage, thus creating a sensation of strangeness in the mind of the spectator”. 16 Perspective allows the spectator to disappear into the illusion and at the same time it offers him, through a linear course of action, the perspective of catharsis. Frontal theatre, on the other hand, imposes itself on the spectator, makes identification and thus the cathartic effect impossible. In her production, Kennedy consciously exploits this frontality. Moreover, the frontal theatricality of Over Dieren constitutes the beating heart of the performance’s dramaturgy. There is no scenographic depth, there is nothing to hide, there is only flatness, surface. The ugly sugar aesthetic of the performance, reminiscent of Jeff Koons’ kitschy work or of video clips like 32 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 17 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham 1992. 18 William Egginton, The Theater of Truth. The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, Stanford 2010. 19 Diane Bodart, Renaissance and Mannerism, New York 2005; Patricia Falguières, Le maniérisme. Une avant-garde au XVIe siècle, Paris 2004. “Barbie Girl” (1997) by the Scandinavian dance-pop group Aqua, captures the essence of Kennedy’s reading of Über Tiere: behind the ugly reality, behind the layers of make-up, behind the masks and grins, there is only a gaping void. Under the surface of reality there is nothing. Not the existential emptiness of baroque art, just the banal, echoing nothing. The reality in Over Dieren is painfully flat. The tragedy of this performance lies not in the terrifying gap in reality, but in its plastic superficiality. Even the violence in this world is mechanical, flat, numbing. “Depthlesness” is how Frederic Jameson describes the postmodern condition: instead of depth, there is only surface, in visual language, but also in thought. Image and thought are literally un-deep. 17 In Over Dieren, Kennedy deploys this un-depth dramaturgically. The seemingly superficial, or better flat, aesthetics are the translation of the image of man that Jelinek mercilessly puts on the cutting table in her text. The viewer is saddled by a feeling of alienation, of distance - not the critical, emancipating distance of Brecht, but an existential distance: “this cannot be my world”, that is about the only thing the viewer can think. Kennedy’s theatre is sometimes described as baroque because it is said to be exuberant, colourful, outspoken, formally self-conscious. This association is understandable but reduces baroque to a purely aesthetic matter. Rather than outward display, the baroque is grounded in a thoroughgoing preoccupation with depth. 18 Baroque is a complex game of showing and hiding, of seduction. In Over Dieren there is no seduction, no depth, no playing with reality. Here, there are no complex games with illusions and different realities, but only the flat reality in its excessive banality. Rather than a baroque performance, Over Dieren is a mannerist performance. Mannerism is the art of “exposure”, of excess, of exhibitionism. 19 This style, often seen as a degeneration of Renaissance culture, shows reality in all its artificiality and unreality. Painters such as Pontormo or Fiorentino did not aim to depict reality, but to perfect it, to make it more “stylish”. Not nature is the norm, but the unnaturalness of the style, the “maniera”. Mannerism is the hyperinflation of style and formality, with a great predilection for the bizarre, the eccentric, the excess, the monstrous. The mannerist wants to perfect reality only to reveal its distressing superficiality. The baroque, on the other hand, tries to do exactly the opposite, namely to create Transactional Love 33 20 Ludwig Binswanger, Trois formes manquées de la présence humaine. La présomption, la distorsion, le maniérisme, Paris 2002. 21 Pol Dehert. The world of a/ the Monkey. Een anatomie van de barokke theatraliteit, Gent 2016, p.-162. 22 Anneriek de Jong, “Jelinek verdient meer baldadigheid”, in: TM Kritieken (1 May 2010), https: / / tmkritieken.wordpress.com/ 2010/ 05/ 01/ over-dieren-door-het-nationale-toneel (accessed 1 Febr. 2021). the illusion of naturalness, only to reveal the complex construction behind that reality. Mannerism is the art of the unreal, the artificial, the ghostly. The artificiality of this art form is so explicit that it almost makes you look death in the eye. And that is precisely the core of Kennedy’s direction: the artificial formality of the performance, its hideous flatness, its banality confronts the spectator with a lifeless, dead reality. The economy of the jungle and exploitation has sucked all life out of man. What is left are robots, devoid of any internal desire or impulsion. In Trois formes manquées de la présence humaine, Ludwig Biswanger describes mannerism as a pathological form of life: it is the opposite of life, it is the appearance of life. 20 Mannerism, he says, is a form of compulsive repetition, of increasingly complex (self)quotations. Mannerism is a disembodied art, says Pol Dehert: “The mannerist does not live in his own body. One borrows and copies, copies and borrows. If necessary, one steals”. 21 The mannerist needs an audience, he needs the gaze of the other, otherwise he does not exist. But he does not look back: his gaze is hollow, empty. His personality is a pure two-dimensional surface. The mannerist has no body, only the suggestion of a body, inorganic, artificial. Mannerism is an art form without feelings, showy exhibitionism, but empty, just as the characters in Over Dieren experience their sexuality, showily, even as it does nothing for them. They do not even find vulgar pleasure in their quest. Even that pleasure does not escape the depressing compulsion. 4 In search of the unbearable In Over Dieren, Kennedy seeks out extreme violence and in so doing pushes the boundaries of the representable. She does not opt for the in-your-face approach we know from performance art, but uses explicit theatrical codes, which represent the violence in a cold and mechanical way. “Stylised (anti-) pornography for the advanced”, is how one reviewer aptly describes the monstrous choreography. 22 34 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 23 See for example https: / / tinyurl.com/ 2p8p2f86 On the television screens, we see the disturbing faces of powerful men. They look at us and make us complicit in the perverse violence that is suggested on stage. When the crackling voice takes over the body of the older woman, the screens begin to flicker and bounce. We see fragments of an exorcism. We see a young girl pass by on the screen. “Listen, Lord”, it sounds. The exorcism on the screens refers to a real incident. The German Anneliese Michel (1952-1976) began to hear voices after having been hospitalised. She had visions and suffered from demonic apparitions. Many photos of the young woman circulate on the internet: emaciated, deep, black rims around the eyes, feverish blisters on the lips, catatonic postures. She has the same hairstyle as the central actress in Over Dieren. Michel was subjected to exorcism several times, with the complicity of her parents and the local Catholic authorities. In 1976, she died of dehydration and malnutrition. Even after death, she was not allowed to rest: in 1978, her body was dug up at the request of her parents, officially because they wanted to bury her in a nicer coffin, but primarily because they wanted to prove that their daughter was actually possessed: these corpses do not decompose. The corpse, however, turned out to be following a perfectly normal decomposition process. An (unattested) audio recording of Michel possessed by a demon is circulating on the internet. 23 We hear the same abrasive voice in the recording as we do in Kennedy’s production. Kennedy thus makes the link between Michel’s demons and the perverse men who possess the older woman’s body. Here the demon is not called Satan, Lucifer or Beelzebub; here the voice of powerful men speaks, for whom a woman’s body can only be a “possession”. Kennedy thus creates a decadent and perverse universe that is often reminis‐ cent of the novels of the Marquis de Sade. Sadian decadentism, as we find it in a novel like Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage (written in 1785) is invariably structured according to two basic principles. First, any sense of reality is lost and unwanted and is instead replaced by a tangle of formal, external rules and by complex, ritualistic procedures without purpose. Secondly, any form of common interest disappears: only one’s own pleasure and instant gratification count, the rest has no value whatsoever. The world of Over Dieren is one of decay and degeneration. An often-recurring metaphor in fin-de-siècle literature is that of the greenhouse, as for instance in La curée (1871) by Emile Zola, in Serres chaudes (1889) by Maurice Maeterlinck, or the padded villa of De Esseintes, the main character in A rebours (1884) by Joris Karl Huysmans. Man wanders around in that feverish universe like an artificial greenhouse flower, sickly and overheated. Over Dieren contains no explicit reference to fin-de-siècle Transactional Love 35 24 Frank vande Veire, Neem en eet, dit is je lichaam. Fascinatie en intimidatie, Nijmegen 2005. literature, but Kennedy’s theatrical universe evokes the same kind of sweaty, moist atmosphere of lukewarm, groping hands which just take what they think is theirs. Anyone who sees Over Dieren in Kennedy’s version cannot help but think of Salo (1975) by Pasolini. In Pasolini’s hands, pornography literally becomes unbearable. The violence is exclusively formalistic, pointless. It does not lead to pleasure, it has neither origin nor reason, it cannot be explained, and it leads to nothing. As Frank Vande Veire observes in his book Take and eat, this is your body. Fascination and intimidation, in Pasolini’s universe no one comes. 24 Vande Veire draws the parallel between de Sade and fascism, aptly described by the words “diabolic formalism”. At the end of every atrocity, only superficial, unsatisfactory redemption remains. Salo’s world is a mechanical reality, functioning and continuing on its own: everything comes about, without lust or intention. Bodies are property, not a source of passion, not even of perverse desire. In this universe there is no passion, only cold willingness; as in the case of the older woman in Over Dieren. Every sexual act is a tenuous, doomed attempt to escape the existential void. When the men in Over Dieren have sex with one of the women, we see mechanical robot-like movements. Every movement is cold and bleak, ordinary. The reality of Over Dieren is the opposite of orgiastic: it is mechanical, industrial and impersonal, just like in de Sade’s sexual universe. There is never any pleasure or lust, only compulsive, obsessional repetition. In Over Dieren, the pornography is empty and purposeless, just as in Salo. Jelinek and Pasolini refuse to give the violence a reason or an explanation. This refusal goes against our Aristotelian software: we are prepared to look at the filth of existence, on the condition that it makes us better. Vice must lead us to catharsis through pity and identification. This view of theatre is perfectly in line with the bourgeois ethos: the citizen can and may allow himself a pleasure within measured limits, provided his pleasure as a viewer also serves a higher, moral purpose. Bourgeois accountability also operates in theatre. But such accountability is impossible here. Susanne Kennedy translates the deeply pessimistic view of man as a sexual being into a crystal-clear acting code. She turns her actors into soulless man‐ nequins. She dehumanises them, directs them as objects. This radical anti-psy‐ chological approach is very reminiscent of Gordon Craig’s Übermarionette. Inspired by Greek theatre and eastern traditions such as Kabuki and Noh, Craig 36 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 25 Monique Borie, “The living body and the object-body: an anthropological approach”, in: Carole Guidicelli (ed.), Surmarionnettes et mannequins. Craig, Kantor et leur héritages contemporains, Montpellier 2013, pp. 147-152. 26 Tadeusz Kantor, Le théâtre de la mort, Lausanne 1977, p.-184. 27 Karl Toepffer, Theatre, aristocracy and pornocracy. The orgy calculus, New York 1991, p.-137. regards an actor’s body as a life-size puppet, static, without inner life, driven by external forces. In his theatrical aesthetics, the actor’s ego becomes completely superfluous: the actor becomes an apparition, a phantom-like presence, and the theatre a formal ceremony. The same approach, in which the actor’s body becomes an “object-body” 25 , is also found in Tadeusz Kantor, and more recently in the work of Gisèle Vienne and Kris Verdonck. In Kantor’s theatre, actors no longer imitate life, but activate the memory of death: “the concept of life can only be reintroduced into art by the absence of life in the conventional sense of the word”. 26 The bodies of the actors are living bodies, but there is no life in them - they are objects without substance, empty shells. Kennedy’s actors are marionetted, they have become puppets, between life and death, but without an inner world, driven by an external mechanism of money and power. Over Dieren is thus somewhat reminiscent of the pornographic puppet theatre described by Karl Toepffer in Theatre, aristocracy and pornocracy. The orgy calculus. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which restored an important aspect of pre-revolutionary rights to the French aristocracy, a new fashion emerged in Paris. Pornographic marionette theatre is an obscure subculture: “occasional performances […] not in the boulevard, but on side streets and in small cellars, or undesignated studio-garrets”. 27 The puppetry consists of woodsy suggestions of sexual acts. A narrator, always a man, reads a text in the meantime. The actual pornographic layer is in the text, which evokes very explicit scenes. The story is always the same: one person is dependent on another for his pleasure and instead of wooing that other person, that other person is ordered to be available. Here again, bodies are commodities, dehumanised from any individual identity or independent desire. Female desire is reduced to a marionette without its own impulses, or rather: the only source of “life” is the male imagination. And just as in Kennedy’s performances, the discourse is completely disconnected from the bodies. It speaks for the bodies that feel nothing themselves. These bodies no longer desire anything. Transactional Love 37 5 Conclusion Susanne Kennedy’s directorial choices in Over Dieren are explicitly formal choices. They go against any sense of realism. Kennedy directs her actors as if they were puppets and makes them speak with a voice that does not seem to be their own. She strips her actors of their individuality. She deliberately frustrates the viewer who is looking for points of reference: that is why she opts for a radical frontality. This frontal aesthetic forces the spectator to inevitably relate to the theatrical reality that is revealed before their eyes. Each of these formal choices, however, is grounded in a profound, substantive reading of Jelinek’s text. In that text, the female body is reduced to property, to merchandise in a perverse phallocracy where men try to compensate their own existential emptiness with empty, unsatisfying pleasure. Both Jelinek’s text and Kennedy’s play propose a highly critical reading of a pornographic society in which women are reduced to mere objects of consumption and men are by definition violent dominators devoid of personality and internal emotions. All are part of a perpetual industry of violence and self-gratulation, in which bodies are not objects of desires but sheer property. Devoid of love, intimacy, eros, pleasure, there is only compulsive behaviour in this sick, sweaty universe. And it is precisely this lack of satisfaction that forces them into an increasingly violent spiral. Kennedy translates the pitch-black description of the gender relations in Jelinek’s text into a radical, rigidly formal language that gets under the spectator’s skin. In other words, the pronounced theatricality of Kennedy’s directorial aesthetics - the theatre shows itself as theatre, without ironizing itself - produces a performative effect. 38 Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Université Libre de Bruxelles) 1 Simone Dattenberger, “‘Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt’ in den Kammerspielen”, in: Münchener Merkur (11 January 2013). 2 Christine Dössel, “Diese Figuren sprechen nicht, sie führen sich selber auf ”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung (11 January 2013). 3 “Figuren die in sich selbst gefangen sind”. Steffen Becker, “Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt - Susanne Kennedy inszeniert berührend künstlich an den Münchner Kammerspielen: Der ‘Schafft-sie-weg! ’-Reflex”, in: nachtkritik.de https: / / nachtkritik.de/ nachtkritiken/ deutschland/ bayern/ muenchen/ muenchner-kam merspiele/ fegefeuer-in-ingolstadt-susanne-kennedy-an-den-muenchner-kammerspiel en (accessed 30 May 2023). The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze Baroque Frontality in Kennedy’s Staging of Fleißer’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) The staging of Marieluise Fleißer’s Fegefeur in Ingolstadt by Susanne Kennedy for the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2013 caused quite a stir in the German the‐ atre world. The “expressive Verfremdung” (expressive alienation) of Kennedy’s direction was praised by some and detested by the other. The characters were said not to be real characters, but only “Schaustücke” (showpieces), which would eventually bore and even irritate the audience. 1 Other reviews pointed to the alienating power of the staging, which did not place an emphasis on language, but on the physicality of the characters: “These characters don’t speak, they perform themselves”, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung. 2 There was also a very mixed reaction among the audience, from long ovations to booing during the performance and the making of an ostentatious exit from the theatre at the premiere. Although arousing irritation, the artificiality of the characters appears to be precisely the purpose of this production. As one of the reviews states, the production does not presume the oppression of a strict Catholic upbringing (as with Fleißer), but presents the hell of “characters trapped in themselves”. 3 The 4 Silvia Henke, Fehl am Platz: Studien zu einem kleinen Drama im Werk von Alfred Jarry, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marieluise Fleißer und Djuna Barnes, Würzburg 1997, p. 125 (n. 257). 5 Annette Bühler-Dietrich, Auf dem Weg zum Theater: Else Lasker-Schüler, Marieluise Fleißer, Nelly Sachs, Gerlind Reinshagen, Elfriede Jelinek, Würzburg 2003, p.-59. 6 Henke, op. cit., 1997, pp. 138-146. technique of frontal play is used by Kennedy to let the audience stare at the frozen postures and looks of actors who, in reverse, stare at the audience for a long time - an inescapable interaction of looks and gazes that could irritate, as these gazes do on stage, causing tensions and irritations between the characters about who is (not) looking at whom. 1 Alienation and the baroque Kennedy has made major adjustments to the original play in her direction of Fleißer’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt: Schauspiel in sechs Bildern. The piece has been considerably shortened and scenes often break off halfway due to sudden blackouts. Kennedy is not the first to thoroughly revise Fleißer’s play with her staging. Even the premiere directed by Moritz Seeler for the Junge Bühne in Berlin in 1926 was already to a large extent an adaptation of Fleißer’s original piece from 1924. Seeler received the script from Brecht, who had deleted or adapted several scenes from the manuscript. 4 Even the original title, Die Fußwaschung (The foot-washing), did not survive the process. Almost half a century later, Fleißer would authorise a second version of the play, which premiered in 1971. 5 In the 1970s, Fleißer was more critical of Brecht and his dramaturgical views than she was in her youth, but despite this “break” there are many elements in Fleißer’s work that still recall a Brechtian approach and can be classified under his well-known “V-Effekt”. As with Brecht himself, many of those effects also have a (neo-)baroque undercurrent, as I would like to show in this contribution by means of Kennedy’s direction, which emphasises a number of the estranging elements of the play. This mainly concerns the frontality of acting that emphasises the gaze of actors (and the audience), the tension between looking and being looked at, between voyeurism and exhibitionism and the Zurschaustellung (display) of characters. 6 As far as the latter elements are concerned, my analysis is partly based on the intriguing interpretation of the play by Silvia Henke from 1997. Anyone who reads Henke’s analysis of Fleißer’s work cannot escape the impression that it also has left its mark on Kennedy’s subsequent interpretation in 2013. In my own analysis, however, I would like to give more weight to the neo-baroque characteristics of the original play and 40 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 7 On the postdramatic turn and the tendency in “theatre after Brecht” to follow Brecht’s dramaturgy on the one hand while “leaving behind the political style” and “tendency towards dogmatizatoin” on the other, see: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon 2006, pp. 32-33. 8 “Auch sind ihre Gesten nicht sozial im Sinne eines Allgemeinverständlichen, sondern weitgehend asozial, weil sie Ausdruck eines Unverständlichen und Unverstandenen bleiben”. Henke, op. cit., 1997, p.-144. how these are further enhanced by Kennedy’s staging. For Fleißer, this interest in historical theatre forms is expressed in the way she has conceptualised it as a martyr tragedy, similar to her play Karl Stuart (1946), which has a direct relationship with Andreas Gryphius’ seventeenth-century martyr play about the same historical figure. The instruments to create effects of estrangement used by Kennedy are numerous. First of all, the theatrical space has an alienating effect. It looks like the inside of a viewing box, too small even for the actors, and providing an claustrophobic atmosphere. The space is empty and the stage is a raked stage that slopes upwards, away from the audience. The actors are placed in this empty room quite randomly. Their posture is static and their movements are often mechanical like puppets. The actors do not wear masks, as in many of Kennedy’s later stagings, but their white-painted faces remain expressionless for most of the time. The alienation is reinforced by the sound technique and the regular use of blackouts, after which the actors suddenly reappear on the stage in an equally static, slightly different arrangement, or completely different setting. The exposure is cold and flickering. The voices of the characters are recorded and the dialogue is performed using a playback technique, which further enhances the feeling of alienation. Many of the techniques used by Kennedy can certainly be traced back to the idea of estrangement and the post-dramatic turn in theatre since Brecht, although the estrangement intended by Fleißer does not have the same polit‐ ical-social function as with Brecht. 7 According to Henke, her characters are isolated and seem to be incapable of any contact, which means that their acting is not “social” but “largely anti-social because they retain an expression of something incomprehensible that remains uncomprehended”. 8 The effects of estrangement in Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt, however, are not only connected with Brecht. We should also consider their connection with the theatrical techniques of the already mentioned martyr plays that remained popular until the baroque. In this contribution, I want to further investigate this baroque aesthetic in Fleißer’s play under the direction of Kennedy and the substantive connection with the martyr drama on the basis of three elements: the frontal play and the The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 41 9 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Semiotik des Theaters. Eine Einführung. Band 2: Vom “künstlichen” zum “natürlichen” Zeichen. Theater des Barock und der Aufklärung, Tübingen 1995, pp. 157-176. 10 Id., p.-70. 11 The idea of the stage as an “image” (tabula) is present in baroque theatre architecture as well, according to Ulrike Haß, who refers to the paradox of baroque perspective use of gestural signs; the power structure of looks and gazes on stage; and the tableaux-like staging of the play’s “martyr” (Roelle). 2 Frontality and the baroque theory of signs Frontal acting in the early modern period was not so much an aesthetic principle as a practical necessity (see also Vanhaesebrouck’s contribution in this volume). Especially before the emergence of perspective theatres, frontal plays directed towards the audience were the most obvious way of acting. The frontal posture was necessary to convey the complex language of the baroque as well as the coded postures and affect representations comprehensible through gestures and facial expressions. The spectator had to be able to properly interpret these gestures and therefore, a certain emphasis and frontality of the depiction in language and attitude was necessary. Emphatic exposure of the actors was important to interpret these body signs, but also to get a better understanding of the costumes of the characters and their attributes that were coded as well, as in allegorical plays of the baroque. Perspective theatre is often seen as announcing the end of frontal acting. This acting practice, however, continued in many countries and existed well into the eighteenth century, up until the first handbooks were published that argued for a more natural way of acting, regarding intonation, facial expressions and body posture. Handbooks like that of J.J. Engel mark that transition from artificial signs to these “natural” signs on the stage. 9 Under Kennedy’s direction the stage in Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt slopes upwards at an angle to the rear, like most of the stages in the baroque. 10 However, the space does not look very baroque, rather on the contrary: it is completely bare and contains hardly any attributes, with actors that wear very simple costumes that transform them into stock characters, like the conservative and authoritarian father (in black suit with heavy glasses), the schoolboys (with shorts and trousers) and the two sisters (with simple dresses). Due to this bare space and simple mis-en-scène, however, the audience’s attention is drawn to the actors and the “images” they perform in this “Schauspiel in sechs Bildern” (play in six images, the subtitle of Fleißer’s play). 11 Their acting mostly is frontal, 42 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) theatres as stages without a “space”, the stage as “piktoraler Schnitt durch eine optische Architektur”. Ulrike Haß, Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Bühnenform, München 2005, pp. 370-371. Fig. 1: Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2013. Scene with (from the left to the right) Olga, Berotter, Clementine, 2 ministrants, Roelle. © Julian Röder except for some sudden head movements and puppet-like movements of the body. This frontality and artificially of movement has an alienating effect from a contemporary perspective and is not accompanied by a complex coding of movements, facial expressions or costumes. Not only the acting but also the text has been stripped down by Kennedy, with many scenes shortened or omitted through sudden blackouts that break off the performance in the middle of the action. The remaining parts of the text are recorded and performed through the playback and miming of the text, with a lot of silences in the recording. In the performance, those silences are maintained as such. Some of them are tense, a tension that is intensified by the continuous flickering of the lighting on stage. Affect plays an important role in Fleißer’s play. It is expressed mainly through language, but also through the gaze, which I will discuss in more detail later. The cut back on text by Kennedy means that affect is often expressed through non-textual elements. The light and sound effects are certainly part The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 43 12 Franz Lang, Abhandlung über die Schauspielkunst, ed. A. Rudin, Bern/ München, 1975, p.-187. 13 Ibid. 14 Id., p.-203 and Fischer-Lichte, op. cit., 1995, pp. 56-61. 15 In the original play this sentence is expressed by Christian, a character that is left out in Kennedy’s staging. Marieluise Fleißer, “Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt. Schauspiel in sechs Bildern”, in: Marieluise Fleißer, Gesammelte Werke. Erster Band: Dramen, ed. Günther Rühle, Frankfurt am Main 1972a, pp. 61-125, here p.-64. of this expression, but also the sudden movements of the actors, as well as the occasional appearance of mimic signs, often supported by gestures. In the baroque era, a precise depiction of those signs became of great importance for a proper understanding of a performance. For example, fear could only be expressed by squeezing four fingers of the right hand to a point and pressing that hand against the chest. 12 In one of the important handbooks about acting from the eighteenth century, the Abhandlung über die Schauspielkunst (Treatise about the art of acting) (1727) by the Jesuit dramaturge Franz Lang, it is made clear that it is of great importance that the actors keep their body and especially their face and the eyes directed at the audience, at all times - when entering or leaving the stage and during the performance itself. 13 In baroque dramaturgy, the eyes play an important role in the expression of affect and the spectator therefore should be able to see them clearly. Even when several characters appear on stage at the same time and are in dialogue with one other, the focus should be mainly on the spectator. According to Lang, the interaction with the audience is more important for a successful performance than the interaction with the other actors. The body can be directed towards the interlocutor, but the face and eyes are always directed at the audience. 14 The frontality in Kennedy’s staging is clearly not about paying more atten‐ tion to the facial expression of the actors, because the expressions on their white-painted faces are quite static and only change when they perform a certain “figure”. However, the static frontality does ensure that more attention is paid to such moments when the “frozen” actors suddenly start to move, expressing affect through their movement. In fact, the emphatic emphasis of affect by such a bodily sign is characteristic of Kennedy’s dramaturgy. The repeated opening and closing of a curtain and window (behind which nothing can be seen) by the character Clementine is an example of such a sign. The first time such an opening occurs in the play, the curtain is opened expressively with a jerk, followed by her statement: “Der Roelle kan mich schon ärgern” (Roelle can annoy me). 15 She opens the curtain after a sudden shift from the side of the stage to the centre where the window is located, a movement that interrupts the hitherto static frontal play and emphasises a certain excitement, as well as the 44 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 16 Walter Benjamin describes this Brechtian acting technique as a way of isolating the gesture (sperren) that makes this gesture zitierbar (“quotable”) for the performer. Walter Benjamin, “Was ist das epische Theater? Eine Studie zu Brecht”, in: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band II-2, Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 519-539, here p.-536. 17 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-67. annoyance expressed in the text. The annoyance of Clementine relates to the play’s main character that the audience does not yet know Roelle, a character that is still part of the outside world behind the curtain. While nothing becomes visible, the opening of the curtain is also characteristic of the inner world of the characters: although they express affect, their emotional state often remains inaccessible to the spectator, as well as to the other characters. This isolation and inaccessibility is oppressive because it condemns the characters (and also the spectator) to a kind of blindness, represented here by a “blind window” behind a curtain. There is a desire to open an inner world of the characters, but that wish is never fulfilled. Like in baroque theatre the audience is given more than enough time to analyse this sign because Clementine remains in the same position for at least a minute, with her hand on the half-open curtain. After this scene, she takes up the frontal playing position again. The sudden movements are thus highlighted as “affective figures”, as signs that deserve particular attention. Other characters do not speak at that moment and all attention is therefore focused on the body movement of Clementine. Such signs are also present in Fleißer’s stage directions, but Kennedy uses those moments to temporarily stop the action and allow the audience to concentrate on the sign as such. Doing so, she strengthens the Brechtian element of “frozen” gestures in Fleißer’s play that interrupt the action through a style of acting that temporarily isolates these gestures from the action. 16 The performed sign, executed in slow motion or with a long pause after it, is often comical and reminds us of slapstick and clownish performances. An example of this is the falling of the father (Berotter) in the first “image” (Bild 1). In Fleißer’s directions, the indication is: “Er stürzt” (He falls). 17 In Kennedy’s staging, this falling becomes a fall in slow motion, a hesitant and prolonged fall that emphasises the prelude of falling (the loss of equilibrium) more than the fall itself (I: 5: 56’). Kennedy thus transforms the act of falling into a “sign” with even more emphasis than in Fleißer’s script, expressing the father’s impotence. The way in which Berotter performs the sign recalls the puppet play, with his arms hanging in the air, as if the fall is performed with strings. The father’s falling and lying on the ground are shown to the audience in silence. The figure of falling here The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 45 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Henke, op. cit., 1997, p.-130. 21 Id., p.-134 (n. 269). replaces much of the dialogue omitted by Kennedy. In this dialogue, Olga and Clementine react to the fall of their father with ignorance, after which Berotter responds with the following statement: “Ich möchte wissen, warum wir einander nichts zu sagen haben” (I want to know why we have nothing to say to each other). 18 Kennedy combines this silence, as well as the impossibility of actual communication, with a figure that is intended to be explicitly seen: a figure of silent falling. The father then explicitly asks to be seen in his reclining pose, so that it is clear what his fall should express. The request to look at him sounds like an order, an imperative, while the falling should reveal his impotence. This impotence, expressed as a sign, serves as compensation, a form of penance for the mistreatment of his now deceased wife, words that Kennedy includes in her staging: “Betrachtet mich, wie ich hier liege” (Look at me lying here). Pause - the eyes of the other characters are turned to the father. “Dieser ist es, der mit seiner Anna so hart war. Die Kinder müssen es wissen” (It is the one who was so hard with his Anna. The children need to know ).19 3 Looking and being looked at The opposition between looking and being looked at is an important theme in Fleißer’s work, which is highlighted by Kennedy. Silvia Henke already reflected on this tension in Fleißer’s work. She differentiates between two forms of seeing that precede this tension: to “see” with the inner eye as a receptive view (sehen), and to communicate with one’s gaze (Blick) in a more aggressive way (schauen). 20 The opposition and tensions between looking and being looked at is related to this two-fold approach of the gaze in the work of Fleißer. Henke characterises Fegefeuer as a play in which the act of looking is even more important than the act of speaking. Communication between actors takes place through the gaze, which was further enhanced in the 1926 version of the play by the stage directions that had many indications for gazing and gaze directions, probably added by Seeler and/ or Brecht (later removed by Fleißer in her second version of 1971). 21 Under the direction of Kennedy, it is the tension between wanting to be seen without actually being seen, that largely determines the tragedy and the voyeuristic way in which the characters approach each other. Kennedy explores the fields of tension surrounding looking and being looked at by stripping the play of many scenes and details and highlighting the 46 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 22 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-63. elements of the play that create this tension in what has left from Fleißer’s script. At the same time, she limits the facial expressions and movements of the actors by using frontal play. This frontality is only interrupted by gazes that are periodically focused on one of the other actors instead of the audience. As in the baroque, this frontality also confronts the spectator with his or her own viewing attitude. Not only the actors, but also the spectators feel themselves being watched, which at the same time confronts them with their own gaze. Frontal play forces the spectator to look at actors that stand in the same position for a very long time, which transforms their “looking at” into a kind of “contemplation” (Betrachtung), or to put it in less elevated words: the spectator “gawks” at the actors (glotzen). Frontal play can be intrusive, presenting a world that wants to be seen and forcing the onlooker to look at it. In baroque stage aesthetics, this emphasis on the directed view of the audience is often reinforced by a metatheatrical representation of an audience on stage. Characters themselves play the role of spectators, transforming the act of looking at each other into a theme in itself. Silent scenes on the early modern stage, like pantomime or tableaux vivants, were often commented on by characters through explanations and moral reflections - like for instance in the chorus that often follows upon these silent performances. The role of the character as a spectator that is so typical for the baroque is exploited by Fleißer, as well as in Kennedy’s direction. Kennedy’s staging of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt contains many silent scenes. The opening scene is an example of this: after watching an empty stage for two minutes, the actors suddenly appear on stage after a blackout, as if they had descended from heaven. They stare at the audience and the audience is forced to stare back. This silent staring is continued for a minute, after which Clementine suddenly pronounces the opening line of the play - “Wo ist wieder der Schlüssel in den Wäscheschrank? ” (Where’s the key in the linen cupboard again? ). 22 She jerks her head to the left, looking emphatically at her sister. The frontality is temporarily interrupted here and a power structure in the family becomes immediately visible through the gaze. Now, the staring of the characters is no longer noncommittal gawking, but an expression of reproach. The approached sister (Olga) is sandwiched between the two gazes of Clementine and her father (Berotter), who, after adding several accusations, also looks emphatically at her. The act of looking becomes a tool of torture and the language of address becomes an accusation. The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 47 23 Id., p.-64. Fig. 2: Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2013. Scene with Olga and Clementine staring. © Julian Röder The role of the characters as spectators comes to the fore in Kennedy’s production of the play, but at the same time, she problematises it by letting characters repeatedly reject that role. The first “image” of the play (Bild 1) for example has been stripped and rearranged in such a way that the tension between the characters seeing (each other) and not wanting to see or to be seen, is highlighted. A key passage in Fleißer’s script concerning that tension therefore has not been omitted by Kennedy. It concerns Olga’s accusation against her father surrounding his refusal to show his daughter in public by going with her to a café for instance. Berotter states that it is her lack of verbal abilities (“Du kannst nicht reden” - You can’t talk) that prohibited him from doing so, but Olga states that he was ashamed of her face (“Mein Gesicht war dir nicht Recht, das merkt ein Kind” - You didn’t like my face, a child can tell). 23 Olga wants to be seen by the father and the father wants to be seen by Olga, but 48 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 24 Id., p.-66. 25 Marieluise Fleißer, “Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt”, in: Günther Rühle (ed.), Zeit und Theater. Von der Republik zur Diktatur 1925-1933. Band-2, Berlin 1972b, pp. 105-153, here p.-110. 26 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-68. 27 In the 1924 version, a new scene does start: Fleißer, op. cit., 1972b, p. 111. The distance here also refers to the burning in hell, to which Clementine refers. After their death, Olga would be in hell, while Clementine herself would be in heaven (“in Abraham’s Schoß”), where she will not be able to hear the screaming of the flame-tormented Olga. neither character wants to allow the other to come closer, turning their faces away from each other. Shortly before his “fall”, the father does not want to see Olga’s face, because she would look disapprovingly (“Mach nicht diesen schiefen Hals her” - Don’t make this crooked face). 24 Typical of Kennedy’s approach is the maintenance here of frontal play. The father focuses his eyes on Olga, but does not see Olga’s face at all, while still complaining about her disapproving look. The stage direction from the 1926 version - “(Olga schaut zum Vater)” (Olga looks at the father) - is ignored. 25 Although the father’s stern gaze focuses on the daughter, he can only see her back. The daughter’s disapproving gaze, conversely, can only consist of the fact that she is not looking, i.e. the fact that she is unwilling to see the father, followed by the forced watching of the father, in his fall. That visual distance between both characters is broadened at the end of this scene towards a sensory distance that now also concerns hearing. In a frontal playing position, Olga states, in dialogue with Clementine: “Dann wilst du mich einmal nicht kennen” (Then you don’t even want to know me), to which Clementine replies: “Ich höre es nicht, wenn du schreist. Der Abstand ist zu groß” (I do not hear it when you scream. The distance is too great ) . 26 To “know” each other (kennen) is made impossible here by a distance that is too big (groß), which is given extra emphasis by the elongated pronunciation of that word (groooß) and Clementine’s averted look, after which the scene is suddenly interrupted by a blackout that cuts off Fleißer’s scene halfway. 27 The isolation of the characters is performed at the level of gazing, or precisely through the absence of that gaze, but also at the level of hearing - a physical distance that is not actually present, but that is consciously created or suggested by the characters. In Kennedy’s staging of the play, rejection is expressed by the gaze and the refusal to look. The desire for closeness is expressed in the complaint not to be seen, while the emphatic watching of other characters almost always expresses a power relationship, as we have already seen. In line with the Foucauldian gaze of surveillance, gazing is considered in the play as an instrument to get a grip on others through looking at them (although these attempts mostly fail). 28 Regarding the interaction of gazes between Roelle - the play’s main character - The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 49 28 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power”, in: Power/ Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, Brighton/ Sussex 1980, pp. 146-165. 29 Henke, op. cit., 1997, p.-135. 30 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-70. 31 Id., p.-72. 32 Ibid. and the other characters, especially Olga, we could even speak of the gaze being used as a weapon. 29 Roelle’s self-presentation in the vicinity of Clementine, Olga and the father is aimed at seeing and denying what they think they see when looking at him: Sie sehen an mir keinen Hund mit eingekniffenem Hinterteil. Sie sehen kein mit der Angst behaftetes Lebewesen. Was aber erblicke ich, wenn ich mich zu Ihnen wende? Vor meinen geistigen Auge stehen Sie wie ein Häuflein Elend. 30 This integral passage from Fleißer’s play is spoken by Roelle in Kennedy’s staging, but of equal importance is the “figure” of looking that follows this statement. Roelle stands head-on to the audience at the front of the stage and turns his face backwards, distressingly slow, after which his eyes remain on Olga for ten seconds, then turning his face to the audience again. This turning towards the other may suggest proximity, but in combination with the script, it confirms the distance between both characters. Olga is ordered by Roelle to come a few steps closer, following directly upon the gaze, but his command is not executed. The characters remain in place, only the gaze direction potentially changes the relationships between both characters. The issue of distance and proximity gets a physical undertone when it comes to the character of Roelle and his body odour. The question of whether or not he stinks is a recurring theme in the play. Roelle’s stinking is finally exemplified by the characer’s extensive smoking, which lasts 2 minutes in the staging of Kennedy. The “figure” of smoking and the sensory imposition of Roelle on the other characters leads to the remarkable statement by Olga that she would like to be seen with him (“Ich will mit Ihnen per Arm gehn vor der ganzen Stadt” - I want to walk with you by arm in front of the whole city). 31 The emphatic gaze of Roelle with which Kennedy closes this scene, is a good example of the gaze intended as an instrument of power. The much maligned Roelle wants to control Olga through his gaze. That look is an addition by Fleißer to the 1971 edition. It follows Roelle’s statement: “Ich kann auch einmal eine Macht haben” (I can have a power once) 32 ; and a catechetical questioning of Olga, after which he approaches her, looking at her from face to face. His gaze is a response to Olga’s remark that fate brought her freedom: “Roelle: Meinen Sie - so? ” (Do you mean 50 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 33 Id., p.-73. 34 On the dynamics of male gazing and the “man as bearer of the look”, see: Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke 1991, pp. 19-24. 35 Andreas Gryphius, “Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus, König von Groß Britianien, Trauer-Spil”, in: Andreas Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe der deutschsprachigen Werke, Band IV: Trauerspiele I, ed. Hugh Powell, Tübingen 1964, pp. 53-159, here p. 136. - like this? ). 33 Now, Roelle turns his face to Olga, gazing at her, then a blackout follows that concludes the scene. The figure of the gaze expresses the wish to execute power and the “freedom” that struck Olga seems to arrive in the form of submission. Her gaze is, again, enforced by the gaze of the (masculine) other that acts as an active controller of the gaze, although he is not in control at all. 34 Roelle’s subjecting gaze can be compared with the father’s fall - both “signs” are meant to enforce the other’s gazing and to express masculine control, but they actually express the impotence of both characters. 4 A martyr tragedy One of the central scenes of Fleißer’s play is the fourth “image” (Bild 4) of the angelic conjuration, in which Roelle is forced to execute a kind of fairground performance in public. The explicit display of the suffering subject in a “play in the play” is a metatheatrical practice that we also encounter in martyr tragedies of the seventeenth century, such as in the oeuvre of Andreas Gryphius. Two of his three martyr tragedies show the death of the martyr in question by way of using this technique. Several characters on stage are involved in such plays in the play, with the martyr himor herself as the main actor and several characters as spectators. Through the gaze of these spectating characters, the gaze of the audience can be directed towards the suffering subject. The audience learns how to look at the suffering martyr and which lessons can be drawn from that suffering. In Gryphius’ play Carolus Stuardus (1663) the execution of Charles I by Cromwell in 1649 is shown on stage. In a soliloquy, Charles compares himself with Christ and takes the Saviour’s self-sacrifice as an example. The interpretation of the scene is provided by spectators like Bishop Juxton, who describes the scaffold as a stage on which the display of Charles’ martyrdom has to impress the spectator in such a way that he or she would realise that all worldly goods and status are but vanity: “Den Schau-Platz grimmer Pein! Auff dem ein ider findt / Daß alle Majestät sey Schatten, Rauch und Wind” (The stage of grim pain! On which one finds / That all majesty is shadow, smoke and wind ).35 The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 51 36 Johan Koppenol, “Nodeloze onrust: Het ‘roomse karakter’ van Vondels Gysbreght van Aemstel”, in: Nederlandse letterkunde 4 (1999), 313-329, here p.-320. 37 Ibid. A comparable criticism of the martyr figure for the theatricality of his own mar‐ tyrdom can be found in Leo Armenius (1650) by Gryphius. M.S. South, “Leo Armenius oder die Häresie des Andreas Gryphius. Überlegungen zur figuralen Parallelstruktur”, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 94 (1975) 2, pp. 161-183. 38 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-95. See also Henke, op. cit., 1997, p.-140. 39 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-98. The Christ-like representation of the martyr was criticised as well by spec‐ tating characters, especially in plays of Protestant origin. In the well-known Amsterdam tragedy Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637) by Joost van den Vondel, in which medieval Amsterdam is destroyed by a covert invasion of the town on Christmas night, one of the city’s monasteries falls prey to the enemy. A tableau vivant of the conquest of the monastery shows the bishop Gosewyn in a silent scene to the spectators being killed at the altar of the church, while the nuns present in the church are raped and killed too. Gosewyn had the opportunity to flee from the church where he would lead the mass, but he decided to stay and to become a martyr. He is blamed for the fact that his martyrdom is self-chosen and therefore a “false martyrdom” not wanted by God. 36 A messenger reports extensively to the title hero about the events that took place in the church, referring in a disrespectful way to the bishop as a “sacrificial bull”. Even the hero himself (Gijsbreght) accuses Gosewyn of the fact that his martyrdom is born out of vanity and that he has been shedding innocent blood unnecessarily by playing the martyr hero: “En maecktghe zelf uw ziel noch schuldigh aen dien moord? ” (And do you still make your own soul guilty of that murder? ). 37 The “play in the play” in Fegefeur in Ingolstadt not only shows Roelle in his role as a martyr, but also enables other characters to criticise that role. This is done by way of a kind of rarity show organised by the two “Ministranten” (ministrants). Roelle’s alleged ability to conjure up angels is framed here as a deceptive and not very convincing fairground act. Kennedy has stripped this scene down to the two ministrants showing Roelle to the public, who adopts the posture of Christ with outstretched arms. Roelle also becomes a spectator of himself and reflects on this Christ-like posture explicitly: “Die Hand kann man so heben. Die Hand kann man auch so heben” (You can raise your hand like this. You can also raise your hand like that). 38 The ministrants organise the performance and at the same time remain spectators, instead of making themselves invisible as the stage directions indicate. 39 By pushing a button, one of the ministrants interrupts the performance with a blackout, in order to let something happen on the stage, but no change occurs in Roelle’s attitude and no angels appear. In fact a transformation does take place regarding Roelle, who gradually turns 52 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 40 Id., p.-99. 41 Ibid. 42 Henke, op. cit., 1997, p.-139. 43 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-111. 44 Henke, op. cit., 1997, pp. 140-141. into a Christ-like martyr until he is thrown with stones at the end of the scene. The humiliation here is threefold, via the stones, the disapproving “Stimmen” (voices, performed by the ministrants) and Roelle’s submission to the audience’s gaze, both on stage and in the house. Through his subjection Roelle transforms the audience’s gaze into a sardonic look that hurts. One of the ministrants makes fun of the trembling Roelle: “Ich sehe schon und auch Sie müssen es sehn, der Mann wird größer. Beobachten Sie seine Verzückung, wel in diesem Augenblick der Engel erscheint” (I can see and you must see it too, the man is getting bigger. Watch his rapture at this moment of the angel’s appearance ).40 Apart from the analogy with fairground performance, there is also a similarity to the baroque tableau. Tableaux vivants were mostly performances without any script, apart from the verses recited by the “explainer” of the tableau who informed the audience about the content of the performance and its moral lesson. The actors with that role often operated as intermediaries between the performer and the audience. A similarly ambiguous role is exploited by Kennedy when she merges the text of the ministrants with the voices (“Stimmen”) that should represent the responses of an onstage audience in Fleißer’s script. Doing so, the baroque ambiguity regarding the roles of the performers, showmen and audience is highlighted: performers are part of the audience, as the audience is part of the performance. In their role as “Stimmen”, the ministrants criticise their own performance as “Gaukelei” (trickery) and even initiate the stoning, after which Roelle falls down. 41 They are both organising the performance as showmen and pulling it apart until the true nature of Roelle’s performance can be made visible. No angels appear on stage and the fake performance only shows what Henke calls the “Entblößung” of the character. 42 This uncovering is expressed in the trembling of Roelle’s body and his falling down after the stoning, which at the same time expresses his submission. The actual baring (“Entblößung”) of Roelle takes place in the fifth “image” (Bild 5). 43 Here, too, Roelle is exhibited, again with a reference to a motif derived from the Bible: the washing of the feet by Christ (John 13: 1-17) (II: 28-30’). Roelle is undressed by the other characters in order to wash his feet. The spectators on the stage act like voyeurs: they want to see Roelle naked. For Roelle there is a tension between the desire to display himself on the one hand and the fear of being displayed on the other. 44 This tension is “baroque” in the sense that the martyr The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 53 45 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-111. should always be modest and submissive, whereas the theatrical representation of martyrdom cannot do without a sense of exhibitionism regarding the hero and voyeurism on the part of the audience. As in the seventeenth-century plays mentioned above, the (Protestant) critique on the martyr’s vanity and his or her exhibitionism often goes hand in hand with the nonetheless explicitly showing, in a very baroque way, of the hero’s calvary. Fig. 3: Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2013. Detail of the “fifth image” (without Berotter). © Julian Röder In the fifth “image”, Kennedy reinforces the analogy between Roelle and Christ by placing Olga as a kind of guardian angel behind Roelle in a pose that forms the cross to which Roelle would be nailed. Roelle clearly identifies himself as the martyred Christ in words that are a reversal of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5: 3-11): “Ich war nackt und ihr habt mich nicht bekleidet. Ihr habt mich mit Hohn übergossen, und jetzt blickt es euch an” (I was naked and you didn’t dress me. You poured mockery over me, and now it looks at you). 45 The “jetzt blickt es euch an” is also a reversal. The miserable state of the tortured person is “staring back” at those who are looking at him and who are torturing him with their gazes. The gazing of Roelle contains an implicit charge against the torturer. Roelle’s 54 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) 46 Karl-Heinz Habersetzer, “Dichter und König. Fragmente einer politischen Ästhetik in den Carolus Stuardus-Dramen bei Andreas Gryphius, Theodor Fontane und Marieluise Fleisser”, in: Richard Brinkmann, Karl-Heinz Habersetzer, Paul Raabe, Karl-Ludwig Selig and Blake Lee Spahr (eds.), Theatrum Europaeum. Festschrift für Elida Maria Szarota, München 1982, pp. 291-310, here p.-308. self-staging as a martyr thus encourages critical reflection on the act of staring from the viewer’s perspective. The moral message is no longer contained in the comments of the ministrants, as in the fairground performance, but in the figure of the mocked martyr himself, who pours scorn on his audience by letting his body become the mirror of their own staring. Fig. 4: Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2013. Detail of the “fifth image”. © Julian Röder The baroque ambivalence concerning the martyr-Christ analogy was not foreign to Fleißer’s work. According to Habersetzer, her martyr play Karl Stuart (1946) bears a resemblance the aforementioned piece by Gryphius from 1663. 46 The self-confident pose of her Charles I can be seen on the one hand as an example of a twentieth-century “existentialist attitude”. On the other hand, it shows his entanglement in the contradictions of political action that forced him to his self-staging as a martyr in the name of the freedom of his people. This The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 55 47 Dirk Niefanger, “Carolus Stuardus (A-Fassung)”, in: Nicola Kaminski and Robert Schütze (eds.), Gryphius-Handbuch, Berlin 2016, pp. 221-232, here p.-230. 48 “Wir haben ja uns zu erquicken / Ob unser Sachen gutem Recht, / Und an dem GOtt der an-wird-blicken / Voll Gnad’ und Libe seinen Knecht”. Andreas Gryphius, “Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus, König von Groß Britianien, Trauer-Spil”, in: Andreas Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe der deutschsprachigen Werke, Band IV: Trauerspiele I, ed. Hugh Powell, Tübingen 1964, pp. 53-159, here p.-136. 49 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972a, p.-111. 50 Id., p.-112. characteristic reflects on the hero in a negative way in the tragedy by Gryphius, where Charles I is represented as a royal figure who is unable to limit his vanity even in the moment of impending death. 47 This “self-fashioning” of the martyr, who enforces gazes of appreciation for his suffering from the audience, is more likely to be found in the character of Roelle than in Fleißer’s historical drama about Charles I. On the one hand, Roelle is a victim of violence, exhibited during a fairground performance as a “rarity”, but on the other hand, he is manipulating other characters to look at him, directing their gazes in a self-conscious way. In Gryphius’ play, this manipulation is part of the protagonist’s suffering from an inflated ego. Charles addresses God in his role as a spectator who is summoned to stare at him (“an-wird-blicken”) in order to see how His “poor servant” comes to an end. 48 This self-glorification is certainly not strange to Roelle, an element that is reinforced by Kennedy through Roelle’s pose before Olga as his living cross, who is summoned by Roelle not to look at him (“Die Olga soll wegschaun” - Olga should look away). 49 However, since Olga has become a cross herself, standing behind Roelle, she is unable to look away. She has to look and in that situation she expresses the universal meaning of the martyrdom depicted by Roelle: to be bound to a body that one has not chosen and that one cannot get rid of. The real drama of the play lies in the physical and mental isolation of characters that are captives of their own bodies, as Olga explains to the audience by way of the following sententia following upon Roelle’s staging as Christ: “Ach, daß wir in eine Welt der Gemeinheit fallen mit jedem Tag, wie wir in diesen Leib gefallen sind und wir haben ihn an uns” (Oh, that we fall into a world of meanness every day, as we have fallen into this body and we have it on us). 50 5 Conclusion Frontal play and the use of tableau-like silent performances are striking ‘baro‐ que’ characteristics of Fleißer’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt under the direction of Susanne Kennedy (2013). The artificiality of acting through the use of complex 56 Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University) gestural signs in baroque plays is further enhanced in Kennedy’s interpretation of the play by using modern techniques such as playback and black-outs. The movements of the characters 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. Because of the lack of bodily movements, one element that is typical of Fleißer’s play takes on a special meaning: the exchange of gazes. Kennedy further exploits that characteristic of the play in her staging. Characters operate from isolated positions and their tragedy consists of the fact that in spite of their expressed wish to be seen by other characters, these other characters avert the gaze and ignore them. The way in which gazes are manipulated transforms these gazes and gaze-directions into instruments of power. 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 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 subjecting gazes that enforce the gazing of other characters, is not meant to glorify examples of martyrdom but shows the impossibility of true social contact, which in the end transforms all characters into both martyrs and potential torturers. The Enforced, Rejected and Subjecting Gaze 57 1 Christoph Leibold, “Aus der Präzision kommt die Unheimlichkeit. Laudatio auf Susanne Kennedy zum 3sat-Preis”, In: Berlinerfestpiele.de. Preisverleihung 3sat-Preis an Susanne Kennedy 2014, here p.-2. (Emphasis in original) https: / / www.berlinerfestspiele.de/ media/ 2014/ theatertreffen/ downloads/ tt14_laudatio _3sat_preis.pdf (accessed 25 Dec. 2020) Puppets in a Panic Room? Observations on Gesture and Pose in Susanne Kennedy’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) On February 8 th 2013, Susanne Kennedy’s staging of Marieluise Fleißer’s drama Fegefeur in Ingolstadt premiered in the Schauspielhaus of the Münchner Kam‐ merspiele. Kennedy’s production received considerable attention from theatre critics. She was named young director of the year by Theater Heute and received the 3sat-Prize for her Fegefeur-production in 2014, an annual award presented to directors and ensembles for artistically innovative achievements. In his laudation on Kennedy delivered during the 3sat-award ceremony, theatre critic Christoph Leibold praised Kennedy’s innovative adaptation of Fleißer’s so-called ‘kritisches Volksstück’, i.e. the genre typical of the inter-war period in which authors such as Fleißer, Brecht and Horváth critically depicted petit bourgeois mores, small-town social life and its oppressive power relations, a tradition which was later rediscovered by Fassbinder, Kroetz und Sperr in the politicised theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. Leibold notes amongst others how Kennedy does not transpose or update Fleißer’s drama - which premiered in Berlin in 1926 - to the contemporary age. On the contrary, she seems to have freed the play from the constraints of (historical) time altogether: “Sie hat Fleißer’s ‘Fegefeuer’ aus der Zeit überhaupt herausgelöst und dazu auch gleich noch aus dem Raum im regionalen Sinne”. 1 In Leibold’s view, the audience is thus not confronted with scenes from provincial life in the 20 th or 21 st century. Rather, spectators encounter grotesque puppets 2 Ibid. 3 Cf. Marieluise Fleißer, Ingolstädter Stücke, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p.-8. 4 Münchner Kammerspiele, Programmheft. Material zur Inszenierung Fegefeur in Ingol‐ stadt von Marieluise Fleißer (2013), here p.-1. https: / / www.yumpu.com/ de/ document/ vi ew/ 21167094/ fegefeuer-in-ingolstadt-munchner-kammerspiele (accessed 20.12.2020) and zombie-like characters in an abstract, almost nightmarish setting. In this uncanny space, that acts as a claustrophobic “Panic Room” 2 , primal fears, the failure of communication and the longing for redemption are critically addressed. Kennedy’s Fegefeuer-production features a radical adaptation of Fleißer’s play: secondary characters such as Christian, Peps, Hermine Seitz, Crusius and anonymous altar boys are cut, 3 corresponding dialogues are shortened and the different spaces of Fleißer’s ‘Bilder’ are compressed into a tight, living-room-like space with neon-light. A projector furthermore screens an image of the room back onto itself. Nonetheless, the narrative and dramatic core elements of Fleißer’s ‘Volksstück’ are retained. There are individual characters, identifiable through their different costumes. The central theme of ‘purgatory’, in line with Fleißer’s drama, refers to the oppressive family reality and religiously conno‐ tated forms of rituality. In particular, the production addresses the exclusion and outsiderism of the different characters in their search for a better life: “Sie sehnen sich nach Liebe und jagen dem Wunsch nach, anders zu sein, in einer anderen, besseren Welt zu leben”. 4 The uncanny energy of Fleißer’s ‘Volksstück’ has also been redirected to‐ wards the constellation of actors and their movements on stage. In other words, the intermediate state of ‘purgatory’ can also be applied to the corporeality of the actors involved in the production. The zombieand puppet-like appearance of the different actors, noticed by Leibold and other critics, emphasises the crucial importance of body language in Kennedy’s production, both with regards to the individual actor/ character and his/ her positioning vis-à-vis others. The minimal movement of the actors within an oppressive and claustrophobic ‘panic room’ moreover raises questions on the (non-)figurative aesthetics of Kennedy’s production. In this contribution, I propose to analyse Kennedy’s production of Fegefeuer as a form of gestural theatre that relies on specific modes of (panto)mime and minimal gestures. In particular, this gestural theatre experiments with alienating forms of corporeality and questions the phenomenological unity of the actor’s body and voice. In the following sections, I will focus on three closely related constellations that characterise Kennedy’s adaptation of Fleißer’s Volksstück: (1) the philosophical and theatrical concept of the actor as an uncanny puppet; 60 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 5 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Geschichte des Dramas. Bd. 2: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen/ Basel 2010, 163-171, and Jochen Kiefer, Die Puppe als Metapher, den Schaus‐ pieler zu denken. Zur Ästhetik der theatralen Figur bei Craig, Meyerhold, Schlemmer und Roland Barthes, Berlin 2004. 6 Edward Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Über-Marionette”, in: The Mask, 1, 2 (1908), pp. 3-15, here p.-11. 7 Id., p.-7. (2) the dialectical performance of gestures and poses; and (3) the intricate relationship between gestures and theatrical space. 1 Actors and/ as puppets In several of Kennedy’s later productions, from Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (2015) to The Virgin Suicides/ Die Selbstmord-Schwestern (2017) and Drei Schwes‐ tern (2019), actors are transformed and/ or deconstructed into dehumanised ‘puppets’. They wear latex masks so as to avoid mimic expressions, psycholog‐ ical realism and spectatorial identification. In so doing, Kennedy repeatedly confronts her audiences with post-humanistic forms of subjectivity within a technological and mediatised society of globalisation. Kennedy’s characters, rather than lamenting the loss of their traditional-bourgeois individuality, feel uncannily at home in their post-humanistic worlds. In her earlier Fegefeuer-pro‐ duction from 2013, there is no virtual space nor are there doll-like, latex masks. In this production, Kennedy develops an understanding of the ‘actor as puppet’ that can be seen as a precursor to the aesthetics of her later productions as it goes beyond the puppet as a mere figure of speech or metaphor. Historically speaking, puppets and marionets have played a pivotal role in the historical development of (western) modernist theatre and its critique of naturalistic acting. In turn they contributed to the so-called ‘re-theatralisation’ of theatre conceptualised by the historical avant-garde. 5 Puppets have served as a prototype, (counter)model or even as a substitute for the actor and his/ her movement on stage. In his well-known essay The Actor and The Über-Marionette (1908), theatre practitioner and theorist Edward Gordon Craig famously advo‐ cated the “noble artificiality” 6 of puppets and marionettes and dismissed the emotionally charged and expressive body of human actors. According to Craig, human actors are unable to reach a state of “mechanical perfection” 7 , i.e. they are unable to completely discipline and control their bodies. Craig warns his reader that human actors make the art of theatre and performance subject to chance, improvisation and the subjective ego of the ‘star’ actor. His programmatic vision of the new actor as a mechanised puppet rejects the flesh and blood of the Puppets in a Panic Room? 61 8 Id., p.-12. 9 Kenneth Gross, Puppet. An Essay on Uncanny Life, Chicago/ London 2011. 10 Cf. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Pyscholog‐ ical Works of Sigmund Freud, XVII, London 1955, pp. 217-256. 11 Münchner Kammerspiele, op. cit., 2013, p.-9. 12 Kennedy quotes Nancy in German translation: “Sein ganzes Leben lang ist der Körper auch ein toter Körper, der Körper eines toten, des Toten, der ich lebend bin”. (Ibid.). Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, New York 2008, p.-15. traditional actor and focuses instead on “the body in trance”, clothed with a “death-like beauty while exhaling a living spirit” 8 . Craig’s influential manifest turns the traditional notions of life and death around; its influence and impact can be discerned in contemporary theatre and performances, amongst others in Robert Wilson’s stylised theatre of images and gestures. Seen against this background, the topos of the puppet provides an interesting starting point for an analysis of Kennedy’s theatrical aesthetics. It touches upon the subjectivity of the acting individual, the questioning of mimetic-realistic theatre and crucial dichotomies such as life/ death and animate/ inanimate. In this regard, Kennedy’s Fegefeur focuses in particular on the performance of alterity in the (actor’s) body, which is connected to several dimensions of the puppet-topos. Craig proposes an idealised vision of a new theatre inspired by puppets and death. This new theatre aims to exclude traditional notions of re-presen‐ tation and realism from the stage. At the same time, he seems to ignore the “uncanny life” 9 often associated with puppets and marionettes. According to Sigmund Freud in his classical essay on The Uncanny (1919), the alterity of puppets and the experience of the uncanny can be traced back to mechanical processes at work beneath the ordinary appearance of animation, driven by (unconscious) strategies of repetition. 10 In a selection of preparatory notes for the Fegefeuer-production, which were published in the program booklet of the Münchener Kammerspiele, Kennedy mentions several (philosophical) sources of inspiration for her production that focus on repetition, alienation and alterity. For instance, she refers to the principle of repetition with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. At the same time, she is interested in unnatural, heavy and burdened forms of corporeality to be depicted on stage (“schwere Masse, belastete Körper” 11 ). She also quotes French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: “In the span of its lifetime, the body is also a dead body, the body of a dead person, this dead person I am when alive” 12 , a quote which seems to refer directly to the alienating appearance of the zombie-like actors on stage. Nancy’s statement on the dead body stems from his philosophical study Corpus (1992) where he develops a critique of ontological, phenomenological and theological traditions of corporeality. Starting from the liturgical concept 62 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 13 Nancy, op. cit., 2008, p.-2. 14 Id., p.-31. 15 Id., p.-33. 16 Freud, op.cit., 1955, p.-226. 17 Fleißer, op.cit., 1972, p.-13. 18 Judith Schäfer, “Sprache, Körper, Raum. Szenische Konstellationen bei Laurent Ché‐ touanne und Susanne Kennedy”, in: Heinz Georg Held, Donatella Mazza and Laura Strack (eds.), Akustische Masken auf dem Theater, Stuttgart 2019, pp. 213-221, here p. 219. of consecration, condensed in the performative hic est enim corpus meum (“For this is my body”) 13 , Nancy theorises the body as a fundamental space of alterity: “An other is a body because only a body is an other”. 14 According to Nancy, the body is fundamentally exposed, marked by ruptures, discontinuities and characterised by openness towards its environment and others bodies. Crucial for Nancy’s philosophy of the body is its state of exteriority and exposition, neologistically defined as ‘expeausition’ (“Skin-show”) 15 , which views the body in a perpetual state of being outside, in the midst of visual perception, haptic contact and moments of touch. Kennedy’s actors rarely touch (each other) on stage. Corporeal distance seems to be permanently installed, and the body’s exposition is presented as an act of voyeuristic perception, a violent theatre of the gaze with two addressees: characters are continuously observed by other characters while frontally addressing the audience at the same time. In the opening scenes of the production, in what appears to be some sort of epileptic seizure, the character of Berotter (Walter Hess) falls on the stage. The actor is far from portraying a realistic occurrence of the proverbial ‘falling sickness’, which is traditionally seen as a textbook example of the uncanny. 16 On the contrary his movements are discontinuous, grotesquely slowed down as if frozen in time, giving him ample opportunity to gaze upon Clementine (Anna Maria Sturm) and Olga (Çiğdem Teke), as if both daughters are directly invited to watch the event taking place on stage. Laying down, the isolated Berotter lifts his head and immediately proceeds to comment on his own position: “Betrachtet mich, wie ich hier liege”. 17 His lament, addressing both his daughters and the audience, puts his body on display as a site of pathological alterity, enacting a voyeuristic manifestation of the performative ‘hic est enim corpus meum’. In several of her productions, Kennedy acts as a hidden manipulator, showing actors and characters that border on the unsettling. As stated before, the Fegefeur-production from 2013 still features individualised characters without latex masks. And yet, their faces seem artificial, almost made out of wax. Their clothes are (too) short and tight. They construct a panorama situated in between hyperrealism and phantasmatic stylisation 18 , triggering an alienating effect that is reinforced by the atmosphere of the depicted (family) room. Puppets in a Panic Room? 63 19 Roland Barthes, “On Bunraku”, in: The Drama Review, 15, 2 (1971), pp.76-80, here p. 78. 20 Genia Schulz, “Fußwaschung und Weihwedel. Fleißers sprachlicher Körper”, in: Maria M. Müller and Ulrike Vedder (eds.), Reflexive Naivität. Zum Werk Marieluise Fleißers, Berlin 2000; pp. 78-89. Kennedy severely restricts the actors in their play on stage. In particular, she disconnects voices from their uttering bodies. The seemingly natural unity between body, speech and movement is thus revealed to be nothing more than what Roland Barthes has called the “illusion of totality” 19 typical of (western) theatre. The text and dialogue of the play have been pre-recorded and are played back, creating a situation of continuous lip-synching. In Fleißer’s drama, language is viewed as parasitical and deindividualised. 20 It is oriented towards dialect, employs an unnatural syntax and is consistently interspersed with biblical references to salvation and damnation, making characters appear overambitious and grotesque at the same time. Fleißer’s language embodies the suffocating and alienating dimension that religion and the mores of provincial life have on the subject’s personality. Her characters do not use language, but are used by it. In Kennedy’s mise-en-scène, the alienating and incongruous dimension of language is radicalised, as language and body are fundamentally dissociated. Corporeal gestures merely pretend to accompany the disembodied voice-over. In other words, there is no auratic speech but only the gesture of lip-synching, which remains ambivalently throughout the production. Specific scenes mark the disconnection between speech and body more radically than others. During one scene, Roelle’s mother (Heidy Forster) is shown sitting in the far-right corner of the stage, reciting prayers while at the same time drinking soup. While drinking, the recorded voice on playback continues whispering the Lord’s prayer. The scene indicates an impossible simultaneity of activities and a momentary disconnection between the utterance of speech and the body consuming food. Put differently, the voice-over recording turns the lip-synching actors into mimes and paradoxically turns the production into an ambiguous pantomimic play. In so doing, Kennedy guides the spectatorial attention repeatedly towards the actor’s (lack of) movement and their gestural body language. 2 From gesture to pose The actors in Kennedy’s Fegefeur hardly seem to move at all. Except for a limited corporeal proximity between Roelle and his mother, there is no running across stage, no prolonged haptic contact. Most of the time, the actors seem to remain stationary, almost frozen, occasionally moving their arms or 64 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 21 Cf. Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Die Überwindung des Individuums als Chance”, in: etcetera, 158 (2020), pp. 68-76. 22 Fleißer, op. cit., 1972, p.-33. 23 Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, Stuttgart 1984. 24 See for instance Günther Heeg, Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt. Körper, Sprache und Bild im Theater des 18.-Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main/ Basel 2000. hands for the deictic purpose of pointing towards others. Communication between characters is primarily achieved through explicit gazing, accompanied by recurring head-turning and/ or eye-rolling. Theatre critics have noticed the connection of Kennedy’s theatre to installation art, not least with respect to the static corporeality and positioning of the actors on stage. 21 In one of the scenes featuring Roelle (Christian Löber) and Olga (Çiğdem Teke), both actors lip-synch the following adapted lines from Fleißer’s play: ROELLE Mit ihrer unausgesetzten Beobachtung werde ich bald verstimmt. […] OLGA Ich schaue mir den Bug an bei Ihrem Gesicht. ROELLLE Sein Gesicht sucht ein Mensch sich nicht aus. OLGA Weil ich sage, dass Sie nicht stimmen. ROELLE Warum täte ich nachher nicht stimmen? OLGA Das ist so bei der Physiognomie. Weil sich da die Instinkte malen, auch wenn sie verborgen sind. […] OLGA Warum regen sie sich nicht? Sie sind wie ein Tier, das sich totstellt. 22 In this scene, Olga explores two cultural-historical paradigms in order to interpret and account for Roelle’s status as an outsider. On the one hand, she refers to the classical paradigm of physiognomy, popularised in the 18 th century by Johann Caspar Lavater. Lavater sought to analyse and determine an individual character based on the shape of the human face. 23 In Lavater’s view, mimic expressions unavoidably reveal hidden aspects of subjective indi‐ viduality. On the other hand, Olga also turns to a pathognomic understanding of character in line with acting theories since Diderot and Lessing. Promoted and institutionalised since the 18 th century, the pathognomic performance of characters in theatre starts from the assumption that humans express and reveal their emotions and individuality through movements and gestures. 24 However, both paradigms fail to offer a deeper insight into Roelle’s character, who literally and figuratively ‘plays dead’, especially in Kennedy’s production. In this case, gestures do not reveal a universalised language of the soul typical of 18 th century theatre, nor do they manifest a hidden psychic depth found in realist or naturalist performance. The actors, on the contrary, exhibit the phenomenology of the Puppets in a Panic Room? 65 25 Jens Roselt, “In Ausnahmezuständen. Schauspieler im postdramatischen Theater”, in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Christian Dawidowski (eds.), Theater fürs 21. Jahrhundert, München 2004, pp.166-176, here p.-173. body as both dead and alive, a site of radical alterity as described by Nancy. The comment made by Gervasius (Edmund Telgenkämper) on Roelle’s position as a (social) outsider symptomatically addresses this fundamental condition: “Du kannst nicht aus deiner Haut” (You cannot get out of your skin). The actors showcase dissonances between language, voice and body. In so doing, they can be seen as contributing to what Jens Roselt - in contrast to dramatic theories of empathy and ‘Einfühlung’ - has named a (postdramatic) strategy of “Ausfühlung”. This strategy, as Roselt points out, leads to the disenchantment of theatrical fiction and the questioning of the spectator’s own experience: Die Figur wird nicht auf den Punkt gebracht, sondern durchgespielt. Die Frage ist dann nicht: Wo und wie haben sich Zuschauer in den Figuren auf der Bühne wieder erkannt, sondern wodurch haben sie sich unterschieden? Was war ihnen fremd? 25 Furthermore, Kennedy’s Fegefeur contains several mute scenes where no voice-over dialogue is heard. These scenes create standalone scenic images where the connection to pantomime aesthetics is obvious. During one particular scene, Berotter and his daughters Olga and Clementine sit together for what appears to be a common family lunch. The audience witnesses the actors eating, mute and without a voice-over, until Berotter stands up, suddenly slaps Olga on the cheek, and returns to finish his lunch. A mute scene like this testifies to the (latent) tyranny of the paterfamilias and the power relations found within a dysfunctional family context. Violently acting out, as this scene shows, constitutes an almost unavoidable form of interhuman communication. Nonetheless, the scene does not focus primarily on Olga’s position as an individual victim of intrafamily violence. She does not even react at all. Olga, with her back facing the audience, neither expresses pain nor protests against the received injury and slowly returns to her previous posture. The outburst of the slap is just a ripple on the surface of the inherently violent family. Kennedy thus presents a structural view from within, a perspective on the patriarchal family as a constellation of violence that can be compared to the mythological notion of Pandora’s box. Here, violent energy is accumulated, sealed, contained and lived through in the context of the family room. The corporeality of Kennedy’s lip-syncing actor throughout the production differs strongly from the conception of gesturality found in earlier traditions of pantomime. 18 th and 19 th century traditions of pantomime in particular often relied on a pathognomic understanding of character and were traditionally 66 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 26 Cf. Johann Jacob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik, Hildesheim 1968 [1785/ 86] and Heeg, op. cit. 27 See for instance Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous essay Über die Pantomime (1911) which strongly links gestures with individual subjectivity: “So tritt in reinen Gebärden die wahre Persönlichkeit ans Licht […] Die Sprache der Worte ist scheinbar individuell, in Wahrheit generisch, die des Körpers scheinbar allgemein, in Wahrheit höchst persönlich”. Cf. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 10, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, pp. 502-505, here p.-504-505. 28 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in: Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis 2000, pp. 48-60, here p.-58. 29 Id., p.-59. 30 Id., p.-56. linked to a codified grammar of body movement. 26 These codifications developed a logocentric form of sign language where words or concepts are translated into specific gestures. At the beginning of the 20 th century, modernist pantomime sought to dispose of the abstract, grammar-like codification of body language. Several modernists theorised the gesture as the radical opposite of speech, developing it as a universal mode of communication that (un)consciously expresses the alleged true individuality of the subject. 27 Kennedy’s theatre, when read against this background, clearly does not subscribe to a pathognomic and individualised understanding of character and theatrical narrative. According to Giorgio Agamben, any understanding of gestures either in terms of means addressing a specific goal, or as an end in itself, will fail to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. The gesture is rather “the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such”. 28 Drawing upon Walter Benjamin, Agamben proceeds to define gesturality as the “communication of communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality”. 29 In his Notes on Gestures (1992), Agamben is concerned with elaborating a conceptual distinction between images and gestures. In cinema or art history, for instance in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-atlas, Agamben defines the image as an apparently immovable medium that merely contains the main focus of the study, i.e. dynamic gestures. Images are seen by Agamben as movie stills, frozen renditions and reifications of (virtual) movement. In order to regain their “true meaning” 30 as dynamic gestures, Agamben proposes that images, like movie stills, need to retain their potentiality of movement or be restored into their lost ‘film’. Kennedy, however, does not seek to restore or return to a continual flow of gestural movement. She concentrates on the movement of repetition instead. Her playback-theatre questions the actor’s corporeality as a sphere of pure and endless mediality and/ or communication. Rather than showing fixed images, Puppets in a Panic Room? 67 31 Gabriele Brandstetter, Bettina Brandl-Risi and Stefanie Diekmann, “Posing Problems”, in: Bettina Brandl-Risi, Gabriele Brandstetter and Stefanie Diekmann (eds.), Hold it! Zur Pose zwischen Bild und Performance, Berlin 2012, pp. 7-21, here p.-13. 32 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London/ New York 1998, pp. 15-22, here p.-20. 33 Lucia Ruprecht, Gestural Imaginaries. Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford 2019. Kennedy presents the performative and dialectic relationship between gestural movement and corporeal poses. The posing body constitutes an intermediate state, a zone of corporeal ‘pur‐ gatory’ oscillating between immobility and movement. Kinetically speaking, a pose constitutes a moment of arrest and retardation. It interrupts the flow of action and movement. The theatrical pose thus creates a paused action and construes a prolonged sense of temporality: it stretches not only movement but also time, both for the posing subject and the spectatorial gaze. Both agencies are inextricably intertwined, as the attitude of posing draws attention to itself and requires the reciprocating gaze of the spectator to be recognised as such. 31 In his reading of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theatre, which relies amongst others on the socio-political dimension of the ‘Gestus’, Walter Benjamin develops a new understanding of the gesture as pose. While Brecht’s ‘Gestus’ primarily embodies social relations, Benjamin’s ‘Geste’ focuses on interruption and quotability. Poses interrupt the play and movements of the actors, create a pause, and delineate a beginning and end: “[…] For the more often we interrupt someone in process of action, the more gestures we obtain”. 32 According to Benjamin, the same interrupting logic underlies the interdisciplinary practice of quoting. To make gestures quotable, Benjamin points out, is one of the essential achievements of Brecht’s epic theatre. In so doing, it questions through alienation the self-evidentiality of gestures, their corporeal manifestations and contexts of performance. ‘Quoted’ gestures and gestures do not just refer to ordinary movements performed in everyday activities. They can also create “gestural imaginaries” 33 and refer to body/ image repertoires and archives that are strongly shaped by cultural memory and history. The character of Roelle, for instance, is clearly associated with a pseudo-mes‐ sianic figure, amongst others by his mother who is not only shown feeding him throughout the production, but also religiously kneels in front of him, adopting a praying position that - literally - pushes him towards the edge of the stage. Additionally, Roelle’s status as an outsider is strengthened by his claim to be in contact with angels. Forced by Gervasius and Protasius to summon an angel, Roelle adopts a crucifix-like position - “eine ungewöhliche Körperhaltung” -, yet fails in summoning an angelic presence on stage, either 68 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 34 In the German-language area, cantastoria were popular from the 17 th till the 19 th century and were often performed in combination with music in fairs and market spaces. See Leander Petzoldt, Bänkelsang. Vom historischen Bänkelsang zum literarischen Chanson, Stuttgart 1974. as a separate autonomous entity or through the divine possession of his own body. The actor playing Roelle starts to tremble lightly, and continuously holds this pose to no avail. This indicates not only his failure to summon an angelic being, but also the corporeal intensity of keeping the body in the same position for several minutes, physically tiring, suffering and continuously risking a fall from that specific pose. As a form of (corporeal) purgatory, the posing body creates an experience of temporality that does not seem to end. The scene is presented as a cynical parody of unio mystica, the mystic experience of religious ecstasy, communion and oneness with God. The crucial contact, being touched (“Berührung”) by an angel, does not take place. The supposedly intimate mystic experience is presented to the audience as a public event, a cirque-like show to be witnessed for purposes of entertainment. Subsequently, the performance is exposed as a fraud. Gervasius and Protasius - interchangeable twin characters who eponymously refer to Christian martyrs from the second century - seem to directly address the audience, warning the spectators not to disturb the posing subject entering a trance-like state. Imperatively speaking, they shift the audience’s attention to Roelle’s body: “Beobachten Sie seine Verzückung”. In what seems to be a quasi-ekphrastic way of speaking, they describe the corporeal transformations apparently taking place on Roelle’s body: his neck becomes longer, his body gets pulled apart as it reaches towards the angel in order to pull him down towards earth. Roelle’s body, however, does not change or undergo any transformation, nor does it perform the actions apparently being described. Gervasius and Prostatius, adopting the audience’s perspective, mark the failure of the ekphrastic performance on stage: “Aber wir merken ja gar nichts”. The Voice-over from the twin characters and the posing body of Roelle point to two different realities and showcase a striking dissonance. Roelle remains standing in the same position throughout the entire scene, arms lightly spread as in a crucified position and continues to tremble. The actions and position of Gervasius and Protasius furthermore evoke the setting of theatrical cantastoria (“Bänkelsang”), drawing attention to the historical tradition of displaying a performance or series of pictures in public spaces, markets or fairs. 34 In order to shift the public’s attention towards Roelle as well as to himself, Gervasius positions himself on the very edge of the stage, as close to the audience as possible. During the playback of the recorded dialogue, he gestures energetically with his arms and hands so as to point to Puppets in a Panic Room? 69 35 Cf. Bertolt Brecht, “On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms”, in: Willet John (eds.), Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, London/ New York 1964, pp. 115-120., and Viola Schmidt, Mit den Ohren sehen. Die Methode des gestischen Sprechens an der Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch Berlin, Berlin 2019. 36 Gernot Böhme, “Die Kunst des Bühnenbildes als Paradigma einer Ästhetik der Atmos‐ phären”, in: Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zu einer neuen Ästhetik, Berlin 2013, pp. 101-111. 37 Angelika Jäkel, Gestik des Raums, Berlin 2013, pp.128-144. Roelle. Moreover, he emphasises the intonation of his voice, which seemingly accompanies his wild gestures. The combination of his gesturing body and the voice-over create the illusion of an expressive totality. In its announcement of the spectacle, the voice-over makes use of an affected tone, creating an exaggerated unnatural rhythm that emphasises certain words (‘Berührung’, ‘Engel’, ‘lebensgefährlich’). According to Brecht, gestures not only relate to the corporeality of the actor/ character. They also influence the rhythmical and melodic structure of (public) speech. Language that incorporates the attitude of the person speaking - in this case, the spectacle announcing gesture of Gervasius putting Roelle on display - can be thought of as gestural. 35 The announcing attitude of Gervasius as stage and show master quickly turns towards that of a prosecutor, denouncing the performance as mere illusions and tricks, “Alles bloß Gaukelei”. 3 Space and gesture In Kennedy’s Fegefeur, the experience of the uncanny intertwines the alienating corporeality of the actors with the claustrophobic ‘atmosphere’ 36 generated by Lena Müller’s stage design. The specific staging of (theatrical) space takes on a gestural character, or more accurately: that of a pose. In architectural theory, the concept of the gesture has productively been used to analyse the relationship between specific rooms and their users. According to Angelika Jäkel, this relationship can best be theorised as a corporeal and gestural one. 37 Architecture, buildings and spaces can suggest movement, inciting their users to respond in a specific way, either by (imaginatively) following the dynamic impulse of the space or through the imitation of the proposed gesture. Kennedy’s and Müller’s stage does not effectively move, but suggests subtle movement amongst others through its use of light effects. With the projector screening the contours of the scene back onto itself, the light subtly flickers and the walls seems to tremble, recalling the movements typical of Roelle persisting in his attempt to summon an angel on stage. The flickering and trembling of the 70 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 38 Münchner Kammerspiele, op. cit, 2013, p.-8. room is reminiscent of the intermediate status of the corporeal pose, oscillating between static immobility and the potentiality of movement. The shoebox-like stage, which slightly goes upward, is constructed as a ‘Guckkastenbühne’, separating the stage from the audience’s auditorium and drawing the gaze of the spectators inwards. It is sparsely equipped, featuring only a door occasionally used by the actors, a window covered by a transparent curtain, and a crucifix hanging on the wall in the right hand corner of the stage. In some scenes, a table is put underneath the window, transforming the stage into a family dining room. The condensed stage is thus stripped of Ingolstadt’s couleur locale and functions allegorically, a characteristic already emphasised by Fleißer herself and strategically reprinted in the programme booklet of the Münchener Kammerspiele: “Ingolstadt steht für viele Städte”. 38 The abrupt cuts in between the scenes can be thought of as the temporary interruptions of a uniform, fictional world. The lights are switched off, as if a stage wide black ‘screen’ is shown, accompanied by a loud, mechanical form of white noise. During these intervals, the actors enter or exit the stage and assume their positions as in a tableau vivant without the audience noticing them. The actor’s positions on stage sometimes only slightly vary, presenting mild alterations to the previous corporeal poses. On one occasion, even an empty stage without any actors is briefly shown, strengthening the theatre’s unity of space and the claustrophobic nature of the stage. The structure of the performance thus testifies to the logic of the interval and the interruption of dramatic action. Rather than presenting a continuous flow of linear actions, Kennedy’s production presents different ‘constellations’ of corporeality. These maintain the narrative outline of Fleißer’s drama - Roelle’s position as an outsider, Olga’s pregnancy, the dysfunctional family dynamic - but increasingly open up the story world to strategies of repetition. At first, specific constellations delineated by darkness and white noise are literally repeated: the walking of Gervasius and Protasius towards the audience is repeated three times, including the identical dialogue played back during their movements. Towards the end of the production, the parasitic strategy of repetition infects specific constellations that are stretched in time. Roelle’s attempt to confess is accompanied by a stuttering, anxious, childlike voice that utters the same imperative script over and over. The final constellation concludes with a collective, choric repetition of prayer. The actors continue to perform the same corporeal pose, yet the tonality of the recorded voices reaches an increasing pitch, mimicking an uncanny and unavoidable level of exhaustion. Kennedy’s and Müller’s stage, as Leibold noted, Puppets in a Panic Room? 71 39 Leibold, op. cit., 2014, p.-2. 40 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London/ New York 2012, pp. 253-254. 41 Roselt, op. cit, 2004, pp. 168-169. can be thought of as a specific sort of “panic room” 39 . In contrast with common understanding, Kennedy’s panic room does not represent a safe zone or shelter where characters can hide from danger. On the contrary, the stage functions more like a pandora’s box, a zone filled with panic, anxiety with the uncanny only provisionally kept at bay and potentially repeated ad infinitum. Theatrical space and the actor’s corporeality are inextricably intertwined. The gesturing and posing body of the actor occupies space, constitutes its own space, and also produces space and vice versa. Phenomenologically speaking, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out that the notion of space should therefore not merely be understood as the “the milieu (real or logical) in which things are laid out, but rather [as] the means by which the position of things becomes possible”. 40 The frontal communication and the constellative positioning of the actors not only draws attention to the intermediate states of corporeality, it also questions the conventional understanding of theatre as an event producing a twofold communication, on an internal (between characters) and an external (audience) level. In (postdramatic) contemporary theatre, frontal acting has become a common strategy. In several of Michael Thalheimer’s productions for instance, such as his staging of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 2001, the actors occupy a similar frontal position. They apparently only address the audience and not the other characters, speaking in front of them, without fixating on any one spectator in particular. As Roselt notes in his analysis of Thalheimer’s production, their body language is equally reduced to a selection of minimal movements and gestures. 41 The status of the dialogue thus becomes ambivalent. There is hardly any corporeal interaction between the characters, nor does the production present a closed and hermetically sealed story world. At the same time, the dialogue does not exclusively address the audience either. Characters can each be thought of as communicating entities, even if there is no direct visual or corporeal contact. Yet, what specifically drives and motivates their speech and communication is not transparent. Kennedy contributes to this communicative ambivalence, rendering internal and external levels of communication opaque. She radicalises this procedure, in the case of Fegefeuer not through the integration of different (digital) media of reproduction (video projection, live recording, …) into the performance but through the dissociation of voice and body, which opens up pathways to the staging of alterity and gestural repetition. 72 Mathias Meert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 4 Concluding remarks: Kennedy’s gestural theatre We may summarise that Kennedy’s Fegefeuer-production from 2013 presents a complex form of gestural theatre. As a theatrical adaptation, it presents Fleißer’s small-town life through a condensed box on stage. Its narrative structure is mediated through changing constellations of posing bodies, caught between immobility and potential movement. Actors hardly seem to move, their kinetic repertoire consists of minimal gestures and gazes. In Fegefeuer, Kennedy explores several themes and strategies that recur in some of her later productions: posthuman and uncanny forms of corporeality; the notion of the individual subject as outdated; and the related questioning of spectatorial identification. In her adaptation of Fleißer’s ‘Volkstück’, Kennedy presents the actor as a puppet stripped from conventional playing. In particular, she performs an ‘Entkopplung’ of dialogue and gesture, a separation and dissociation of the phenomenological unity of voice and body. Kennedy’s play-back theatre presents both media - voice and body - as alienated materials manipulated on stage. The body is, to quote Nancy, exposed, revealed to be quasi-dead, a fundamental space of alterity. Its movements are interrupted and slowed down. Corporeal gestures are no 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. Puppets in a Panic Room? 73 1 Jeroen Versteele, “‘Alvorens je hoofd een besluit neemt, heeft je lichaam al gekozen’. Susanne Kennedy regisseert They Shoot Horses, Don’t They bij de Münchner Kammerspiele”, in: Etcetera 124 (2011), https: / / e-tcetera.be/ alvorens-je-hoofd-een-besluit-neem t-heeft-je-lichaam-al-gekozen/ (accessed 2 Oct. 2021). 2 Ibid. Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) In a conversation about her first production at the Münchner Kammerspiele, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (premiered 27 February 2011), Susanne Kennedy mentions the condition of the “near-dead” as the starting point for her theatrical aesthetics and her research into “existential fatigue” 1 . “The theatre I make”, Kennedy explains, “focuses on people exposing themselves to an audience and showing how they are dying”. For Kennedy that audience is compelled to look into the abyss that opens up between life and death. In order to approach that immense and disturbing condition, Kennedy works, in her own words, “outside in”: she starts from a form, a structure, an arrangement of materiality. By working attentively and precisely on that form, she tries to touch the emotion. Kennedy furthermore calls the way in which she directs her actors a compositional one, composing the interaction of the speaking voices, as well as a choreographic one, minutely organising the movements and gestures of the acting bodies. These bodies are often presented as a group, with all actors simultaneously present on stage. Through utmost concentration they transform themselves into a “humming, breathing, living body”, presenting their characters and the events in a sovereign, self-confident way that provokes the audience. 2 The interview dates from 2011, the same year in which Kennedy subsequently directed Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), a coproduction of the Dutch Nationale Toneel Den Haag and the Flemish NTGent (premiered 21 October 2011). It is notable that the perspective Kennedy brings to her Munich production offers some important clues for a reading of her subsequent Fassbinder show as well. Next 3 The play premiered on 5 June 1971 at the Frankfurt theatre festival experimenta 4, as a production of the Landestheater Darmstadt and directed by Peer Raben. 4 Wolf Donner, “Plüsch und Politik. Die 22. Berliner Filmfestspiele”, in: Die Zeit (7 July 1972). Whereas the staging had not really convinced the critics in its endeavour to put the story on “a second level”, reflecting on the “hypocrisy” in the enjoyment of “emotional trivialization”, the film was met with more success. Of several “uncanny and eccentric” melodramas that premiered at the 1972 International Berlin Film Festival, DIE ZEIT critic Wolf Donner considered Fassbinder’s film to be the only “fascinating and convincing” (ibid.) one. DIE ZEIT critic BH applauded its aesthetic perfectionism in which “the lines between real emotion and mere citation are constantly blurred”. BH, “Filmtips”, in: DIE ZEIT (23 Nov. 1973). For an extract of a review of the play’s premiere, see “Uraufführung des Fassbinder-Stücks ‘Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant’ in Frankfurt, 5. Juni 1971”, in: Zeitgeschichte in Hessen, https: / / www.lagis-hessen.de/ de/ su bjects/ idrec/ sn/ edb/ id/ 2683 (accessed 2 Oct. 2021). 5 Margit Carstensen was awarded gold for her leading role as Petra, Eva Mattes for her supporting role as Petra’s daughter Gabriele, and Michael Ballhaus for best cinematography. There was a nomination of Irm Hermann for her supporting role as Marlene. 6 David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, Cambridge 2005, p.-160. to the formal approach and the existential content, similarities are also to be found in the generic quality of the two texts that Kennedy put on stage, as both have gained fame as melodramas - that is, not so much in their original form, but rather in their manifestations as film adaptations. American writer Horace McCoy situated his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) in the midst of the Californian mania for marathon dance contests during the Depression of the 1930s. McCoy’s story became famous through its eponymous film adaptation by Sydney Pollack in 1969. In reviews, Pollack’s film was often categorized as a melodrama. Fassbinder on the other hand turned his play into a film within months of its Frankfurt premiere in 1971. 3 The film premiered at the 1972 International Berlin Film Festival as an “uncanny and eccentric” melodrama. 4 It was nominated for a Golden Bear at that same Berlinale and won three gold awards at the German Film Awards (Deutsche Filmpreise) in 1973. 5 In the aftermath of the cinematic success, the positive and international reception of the play gained momentum too, turning it into one of Fassbinder’s most produced plays. 6 1 The economics of emotions in melodrama Taking my cue from the aforementioned remarks, I want to look at how Ken‐ nedy’s theatre of the “near-dead” reworks the conventions of melodrama. More specifically, I want to consider how Kennedy’s dramaturgy of the near-dead 76 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 7 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)”, in: Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), pp. 754-780. 8 Id., p.-754. 9 Id., p.-776. 10 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama”, in: Marcia Landy (ed.), Imitations of Life. A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, Detroit 1991, pp. 68-91, here p.-71. 11 Id., p.-72. 12 Id., p.-83. is reminiscent of the notion of “slow death”. Cultural scientist Lauren Berlant introduced this phrase to describe mechanisms of reproduction that exhaust life while at the same time sustaining it, turning existence into an endless battle of exhaustion. 7 Berlant’s critique primarily aims at the economic and political double bind of capitalism’s “attrition of life” as a “deliberative activity”, rendering every day experience “simultaneously at an extreme and in a zone of ordinariness” 8 . She explores the disruptive ways in which people engage with these mechanisms in order to survive, and looks for an “interruptive agency” 9 that cannot be equated with cognitive will nor intentionality, let alone sovereignty. Berlant’s reasoning also provides a useful perspective to look at the eco‐ nomics of emotions in melodrama. Typically, the genre of melodrama, which goes back to the bourgeois tragedy of the 18 th and 19 th century, is predominantly about an excess of emotion originating in a social or ideological conflict between individual aspiration and structural confines, often exemplified in family situa‐ tions. In the end, the potentially transgressive energy of the conflict is levelled out, rendered harmless in the sphere of “interiorisation and personalisation” 10 . Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser points out that the “radical ambiguity” of melodrama might be considered as subversive or escapist 11 , depending on the historical context of the play or film. He also stresses the rhythmical alternation or “dramatic discontinuity” of emotions rising and then falling down “with a thump” 12 as counteracting any climactic linearity. Considering melodrama from Berlant’s perspective allows us to look more specifically for disruptive moments and interruptive gestures in the emotional extravaganza of the melodramatic acting regime; for example in its display of masochism, frustration or endurance as non-sovereign ways in which the characters handle the conditions that exhaust them. As film scholar Laura Mulvey has shown, melodrama’s overdetermined mode of gestural display furthermore displaces the “power of the word” with an elaborate visual language as well as to a multi-layered theatrical aesthetics that shift uncomfortably between figurative representation and self-conscious Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 77 13 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke & New York 1989, p.-72. 14 Id., 75. Mulvey gives the example of Lana Turner playing Lora Meredith in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959). 15 Dance scholar Sabine Huschka works in a similar vein in “Low Energy - High Energy. Motive der Energetisierung von Körper und Szene im Tanz”, in: Barbara Gronau (ed.), Szenarien der Energie. Zur Ästhetik und Wissenschaft des Immateriellen, Bielfeld 2013, pp. 201-221; and in “Opfer(n) in choreographischer Gestalt: Formen der Überschreitung und Energetisierung”, in: Gabriele Brandstetter and Katja Schneider (eds.), Sacre 1913/ 2013. Tanz, Opfer, Kultur, Freiburg i.Br. 2017, pp. 61-80. presentation. 13 Regarding the prominence of eroticised female imagery, Mulvey remarks that in Hollywood melodrama “there is a delicate balance between the protagonists’ self-consciousness and the actresses’ mastery over a self-con‐ scious performance”, leading to the meta-theatrical structure of a real-life actress playing a character that acts being an actress. 14 This ambivalent form of melodrama’s gendered erotica, together with its interaction with the spectator, becomes particularly relevant when looking for the specificities of melodrama on stage and its potentially disruptive quality. By taking this analysis to Kennedy’s reworkings of (cinematic) melodrama, this chapter asks how Kennedy’s dramaturgy engages with the reproduction mechanisms that sustain the emotional economics of melodrama, with their rhythm of dramatic discontinuity and interaction with the audience. In doing so I will address Kennedy’s specific kind of durational aesthetics and the role of space and the body in this time-based dramaturgy, as well as the implications of durational aesthetics for the audience. I propose to look at this aesthetics through the lens of “scenic energy regulation” 15 , a choreographic notion well suited to approach Kennedy’s formal dramaturgy. “Energy” describes the oper‐ ating force as well as the capacity to work, but also the strength of expression; it entails economic, corporeal and aesthetic intensities, all of which need to be “regulated” in order not to run out. A choreographic dramaturgy exploits the scenic energy regulation of the moving bodies and their effect on the audience. I will first consider the McCoy production and its cinematic hypotext with its historical context, before concentrating in more detail on the Fassbinder show. 2 Reworking the melodramatic spectacle The 1930s dance contests at the centre of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? were marathons in an extreme sense. The contestants - participating as male-female couples - would dance and run for hours on a circular dance floor, with only fifteen-minute breaks for sleep or ice water showers, until physical and mental exhaustion eliminated them from the floor. 16 The participants often came from 78 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 16 Frank Calabria, Dance of the Sleepwalkers: The Dance Marathon Fad, Bowling Green 1993; Carole Martin, Dance Marathons: Performing Culture in the 1920s and 1930s, Jackson 1994; Kim Morgan, “Dance of the damned: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? ”, in: The Moviegoer (14 Dec. 2016), https: / / loa.org/ news-and-views/ 1227-dance-of-the-damned-_they-shoot-horses-dontthey_ (accessed 2 Oct. 2021). 17 Morgan, op. cit., 2016. 18 Lee J. Richmond, “A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance: Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? ”, in: Twentieth Century Literature 17, 2 (1971), pp. 91-100, here p. 93. 19 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Screenplay by Robert E. Thompson and James Poe. Dir. Sydney Pollack. Perf. Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Susannah York, Gig Young, and Red Buttons. ABC Pictures, Palomar Pictures, 1969. 20 My description is based on my attendance of the show on 17 April 2011 and a few reviews. poverty and were desperate to be noticed and make it in the Hollywood movie industry. Producers and directors sometimes attended these contests that were considered forms of “base entertainment” 17 and soon evolved into commercial show business. McCoy centres his plot of “879 hours of fictional time” 18 around the female contestant and would be actress Gloria. Her participation aggravates her nihilistic world view, so much so that in the end she demands, sincerely and serenely, that her dance partner Robert, whom she had met by chance, put a bullet through her head, which, obligingly, he does. The story is told in retrospect by Robert, who stands in court charged with murder. Pollack’s film adaptation, 19 starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin, very much forces the spectator to enter the claustrophobic arena, with the camera positioned amidst the dozens of contesting bodies, showing close ups of desperately struggling limbs and sweaty, grimacing faces. The continuous music of the dance orchestra, the cheering audience and the incessant, brutally rousing speech of the master of ceremonies enhance the oppressive atmosphere of this perverse survival of the fittest. The many weeks of fictional time are compressed in less than two hours of film: the repetitive, rhythmical editing, alternating scenes of the crazed dance performances with those of the slowed down decompression during the short intermissions, with the camera never leaving the dance hall and its backstage, abstracts from the progression of fictional time. The scenography of Kennedy’s production mixes the basic structure of a dance hall with the suggestion of a boxing ring (space design Bert Neumann, stage design Jil Bertermann) 20 : on the floor of the black box theatre (the Werkraum of the Münchner Kammerspiele) simple lines lay out the arena, with the audience sitting around it on benches. In the middle of the arena a microphone dangles down for the contest moderator. Kennedy’s theatrical Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 79 21 Wolf Banitzki, “Der Mensch im Würgegriff der Verhältnisse”, https: / / theaterkritiken .com/ kammerspiele-werkraum/ 41-theaterbereich/ hofspielhaus/ 433-they-shoot-horses (accessed 2. Oct. 2021). 22 To be fair, the repetitive editing of the film also prevents the full development of a climactic narrative. Still, the appearance and behaviour of the contestants in the film suggest an ever-growing exhaustion and fatigue. That ever more participants have to leave the floor also supports the suggestion of a development. With the final shooting of Gloria taking place outside, withdrawn from the eyes of the dance hall audience, the film abruptly and paradoxically leads to an anti-climax and a deflation of energy but also to a release of the confines of the contest. 23 Bruce Barton, “‘Stop Looking at Your Feet’. bluemouth’s Dance Marathon and inter/ actual dramaturgy”, in: Performance Research 14, 3 (2009), pp. 13-25, here p.-16. transposition abstracts the figurative story line told in the film through the experiences of a handful of central characters. Rather, she presents a group of grotesquely overdetermined types (costumes Lotte Goos) loosely modelled on the film’s protagonists - a sexually intrusive Gloria (Çigdem Teke), for instance, or Robert (Lasse Myhr) as a provocative, cranked up boxer 21 -, each of whom obsessively performs his or her exhibitionist act in front of the audience. Moreover, the sequence of scenes does not follow a climactic line but seems to be situated in limbo from the very start, in a realm between life and death. 22 Constantly balancing their energy levels between slowed down boredom and the extreme endurance of the circular running acts, Kennedy’s characters already inhabit the threshold of exhaustion that the contestants of the film cross after days and weeks of moving in circles, as if they have already lived through the action that they will perform for us once again. While the film enacts the conflict between the perverse machinery of the spectacle and the naïve, romantic belief in individual agency 23 in the fate of its central characters, exemplified in the killing/ suicide of Gloria and the trial of Robert, Kennedy zooms in on the relationship between performance and spectatorship at the heart of the spectacle. In their “run for life”, their machine-like moving in circles, all characters demonstrate a similar fatal addiction to the kick of transgressing boundaries in the eye of the audience. The circular movements exacerbate their condition: they cannot gaze at the audience from a fixed position but have to constantly adjust their gaze in line with their moving bodies. In the end, they also fail together. They all crouch down on the dance floor, which by then has shrunken to a tiny surface, gazing at the audience with faces distorted by fear. The characters seem to be united in their fear of disappearing out of sight, now that the show is over. The manifestation of durational time that this show develops is both related to and very different from the film’s temporality. 24 Whereas the film creates 80 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 24 Neither film nor play enact durational time in the sense of an extremely long real time. Consequently, if I call Kennedy’s dramaturgy durational here, I do not use the adjective in its common reference to the kind of monumentalised duration in extremely long and energetically exhausting performances. Kennedy, not unlike Pollack’s film, rather creates the effect of duration out of compression. 25 Kati Röttger and Maren Butte, “Das andere Melodrama. Vom Pathos der Fremdheit in Fassbinders ‘Angst essen Seele auf ’, ‘Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss’ und ‘Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant’”, in: Nicole Colin, Franziska Schößler and Nike Thurn (eds.), Prekäre Obsession. Minoritäten im Werk von Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bielefeld 2012, pp. 125-151. the effect of durational time through the spatial confinement of the interior setting - a quite theatrical scenography - and a clever repetitive editing, the play presents itself as an excerpt of a durational time that has been there all along. This is related to the specific energetic regime of the dramaturgy: the characters, as actors, meticulously try to regulate their bodily performance for the whole length of the show, until they implode. Their energy regulation is fuelled by the frantic management of the gaze, the incessant and provocative eye contact with the audience, a sharp contrast with the story world of the film, where the contestants hardly look at the spectators in the dance hall. This scenic energy regulation at least partially detaches the characters from the role of mere victims in the brutally commercialised, dehumanizing amusement of the spectacle and turns them into managers of their spectatorial addiction. It is with this durational energy regulation that Kennedy brings the visual regime of Hollywood melodrama back to the corporeal space and time of the theatre. 3 Reworking the “other” melodrama With her staging of Fassbinder’s Petra von Kant, Kennedy turns to a film that is itself considered an “other” melodrama. 25 Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, as the German original is entitled, relates a turbulent episode from the life of Petra von Kant, a wealthy Bremen fashion designer and divorced, negligent mother of a teenage daughter, Gaby. At the beginning of the story, Petra falls passionately in love with an allegedly penniless young woman, Karin Thimm. Petra promises Karin a career as a fashion model, but their affair only lasts for a short time. Karin leaves and after having suffered a nervous breakdown Petra resolves to strive for a less possessive emotional life, including a fairer treatment of her long time secretary and servant Marlene, whom she offers a professional partnership on equal grounds. In the play, the story ends here, with Petra pleading with Marlene to tell her about her life. The film, which in general closely follows the narrative of the play, proposes a very different ending Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 81 26 E.g. Ruth Perlmutter, “Real Feelings, Hollywood Melodrama and the Bitter Tears of Fassbinder’s Petra von Kant”, in: Minnesota Review 33 (1989), pp. 79-98; Thomas El‐ saesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject, Amsterdam 1996; more recently Röttger & Butte, op. cit., 2012. Already in 1974 Laura Mulvey wrote about the connection between Sirk and Fassbinder on the occasion of Fassbinder’s film Fear Eats the Soul, see Mulvey, op. cit., 1989, pp. 45-48. 27 E.g. Lynne Kirby, “Fassbinder’s Debt to Poussin”, in: Camera obscura 5, 1-2 (1985), pp. 3-27; Susan Nurmi-Schomers argues in a similar vein in relation to Fassbinder’s film Effie Briest, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Fassbinder: Découpage Aesthetics on the Divide”, in: Véronique Plesch, Catriona MacLeod and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds.), Elective Affinities. Testing Word and Image Relationships, Amsterdam/ New York 2009, pp. 369-385. 28 Katherine S. Woodward, “European Anti-Melodrama: Godard, Truffaut, and Fass‐ binder”, in: Landy, op. cit., 1991, pp. 586-595. 29 Röttger/ Butte, op. cit., 2012. 30 Jack Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility”, in: Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin (eds.), Queer Cinema. The Film Reader, New York 2004, pp. 121-136. Reading cinematic posing (in Fassbinder’s films, amongst others) through the lense of Craig Owens’ thoughts on photographic posing, Diedrich Diederichsen calls the in-between position of the pose a “medium” through which coercive imagery can be “queered”. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Zwischen und gegen Engagement und Identifikation: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder”, in: Jürgen Brokoff, Ursula Geitner and Kerstin Stüssel (eds.), Engagement: Konzepte von Gegenwart und Gegenwartsliteratur, 2016, pp. 415-429, here p.-422. 31 Röttger/ Butte, op. cit., 2012, pp. 138-139 (my translation). altogether. Here, Marlene abruptly walks out on Petra, carrying a suitcase with a gun in it. Most scholarship on the film deals with it as one of Fassbinder’s reworkings of Hollywood melodrama, particularly of the so-called “women’s weepies” of director Douglas Sirk in the 1950s. 26 Indeed, the film ticks many boxes in the catalogue of conventional melodramatic motives and aesthetics, such as its focus on a suffering female protagonist whose unhappy love is intertwined with economic conflicts, and a dramaturgical transposition of emotional excess within an extravagant scenography and musical score. Scholars also agree that Fassbinder radicalises the theatricality that is implicitly detectable in Hollywood melodrama and its excessively gendered image politics, 27 thereby thwarting the audience’s full absorption in the story and turning it into an “anti-melodrama” 28 or “other melodrama” 29 , or exposing the artificiality of sexual conventions in line with camp cinema. 30 Kati Röttger and Maren Butte point out that Fassbinder’s film is not a play turned cinema: “Rather, it stages theatricality as a technique of medial observation that allows a critical reflection both on film as a medium and on the structural elements of melodrama.” 31 82 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 32 Id., p.-139 (my translation). 33 The entire film was shot in a single room in a house near Bremen, as Michael Ballhaus explains in an interview on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, https: / / www.youtube.co m/ watch? v=m29XrNFdx6M (accessed 2. Oct. 2021). 34 See also Timothy Corrigan on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in his book New German Film: The Displaced Image, Bloomington 1994, pp. 33-54. A central component of Fassbinder’s handling of filmic melodrama is his emphasis on “the techné of the artificial fixation in a film image” with a cinematography that arranges, frames and cuts off the bodies. 32 Fassbinder’s film very much displays the formative power of camera work (camera Michael Ballhaus) in the presentation of bodies, but also of space and time. Petra’s bedroom and atelier are part of a labyrinth-like space that is shot from diverse angles 33 , thus preventing the spectator from having a clear orientation and raising doubts over whether there is a world outside at all. Equally disturbing is the peculiar rendering of the alternation between day and night that is suggested through acts and words but never clearly shot as a physical, “natural” change. The close-ups of the extravagant interior design enhance the confusing effect. There is the nude Bacchus on the huge mural of Poussin’s painting Midas and Bacchus. There are the fashion dummies and mannequins, framed as uncanny witnesses of all that happens within the walls of the bedroom and atelier. The central object is Petra’s bed, often filling the frame, with the characters on and around it. The framing of the characters most prominently displays the reflective image politics guiding the camera: in shifting arrangements with each other, they display themselves in relation to the camera, as if conscious of its presence within the fictional world. The characters’ costumes (Maja Lemcke), wigs and make-up contribute to the excess, as they represent an haute couture that boldly combines historical, mythological and orientalist references. Thus, the cinematography engenders a rhythmical composition of variation and stagnation, of change and arrest, of activity and exhaustion. Fassbinder’s film is an “other” melodrama because its form prevents its heroines from being framed in a coherent, levelled-out image, while at the same time demonstrating the crucial role of cinematography in the melodramatic imagery. 34 The charac‐ ters’ disruptive agency is potentially realised in their conscious engagement with the camera, an engagement for which they rely on their “nature” as posing actresses. Even more stringently than They Shoot Horses, Kennedy’s Fassbinder produc‐ tion reworks the visual regime of filmic melodrama for the stage. It grotesquely inflates the stylisation already conspicuously present in Fassbinder’s film, thereby radicalising its discomforting effects. And it situates the potential Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 83 disruption of the melodramatic regime and the characters’ addiction to the gaze in the sphere of the reproduction mechanisms of sexual image politics. More specifically, it concentrates on the simultaneity of agency and passivity, and visibility and opaqueness, in the figurative image politics of kitschy, soft porn femininity. 4 Melodrama on stage: Kennedy’s disturbing image politics While They Shoot Horses was performed in the arena of a black box theatre, with De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant Kennedy returns to the stage of a neo-baroque city theatre and uses the traditional theatre curtains to frame the performance: the show does not begin with a light effect but with the opening of the travellers, and it ends with them closing. On first sight, the world on stage seemingly exposes its coordinates in full view of the audience, contrary to the film. The scenography (stage design Katrin Bombe) presents a self-contained interior space, shoved like a neatly fitting box into the proscenium arch of the stage. This space has no doors nor any other obvious opening for entering or leaving. Its walls are decorated with a thick, cushioned material, reminiscent of soundproof studios; its upper part, completely closing off the flies above, consists of fake wooden ceiling panels and panel lights. The side walls recede backwards in a slanting line, suggesting a linear perspective; their unequal length and angle evoke the impression of a room slightly out of joint. The back wall has a windowlike opening that simulates a perspectival view on another room that looks like a kitchen with a bar table and bar stools. The material of the windowpane is both translucent and opaque, rendering the quality of the view and the actuality of that other room at the back unstable. This referential uncertainty is augmented by the mirrorlike quality of the pane: on its top side stage right, the phrase “In my Room” is readable in mirror writing, as if mirroring the identical phrase that is written in neon on the transparent signboard hanging stage left from the ceiling at the front of the stage. Integrated in the back wall, a slightly elevated alcove with drawn curtains on both sides suggests a room within the room, or a stage within the stage. Stage right we can detect a bathtub and a stack of white underpants. The high bar stool in the middle seems to be taken out of the simulated kitchen at the back, on which it throws its shade. There is a second, less deep alcove along the length of the wall stage left, with a drawn curtain to one side. In this alcove, which has no windows, the phone is situated. Apart from a serving table with glasses and bottles stage right and a record player on a low bedside table stage left there is only one other prop on stage: a bare mattress that lies on the floor in the exact 84 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 35 Petra von Kant: Els Dottermans, Karin Thimm: Marie Vinck, Marlene: Bien De Moor, Gaby: Lien Wildemeersch, Valerie von Kant: Nettie Blanken, Sidonie von Grasenabb: Betty Schuurman. My description is based on my attendance of the show on 25 January 2012 at NTGent. middle of the room. The dominant colour of the whole design is a kind of baby pink. Though seemingly clearly laid out - suggesting the visibility of a cinematic wide shot -, the stage design is full of ambivalences. The room is spacious yet sealed off, and the hints at perspective and referentiality are mere simulations. This spatial ambivalence corresponds with an equally ambivalent temporal structure. In this world, there is no clock that measures the sequential passing of time. Instead, during the full length of the performance (110 minutes) a metronome slowly but inexorably dictates the pace of life, the heartbeat of that other world on stage. The speed of its nagging beat or pulse (sound design Yves De Mey) lies considerably lower than 40 beats per minute, the lowest tempo on a conventional mechanical metronome, thus evoking an extreme slowness and lending the performance a durational quality. This becomes particularly tangible at the beginning of the play. The beat of the metronome dominates the otherwise silent and static opening scene that seems to last forever. The result of this is that the audience must wait for the first word to be spoken, indeed, it takes six minutes before this happens. The beat also levels out the alternation of night and day, the passing of natural time that is suggested in the narrative of the play. Time and again the beat withdraws into the background when spoken text or musical intermezzi become dominant, rhythms that interfere with the uniform tempo, trying to negate the grip of the metronome on the world. Not to a lasting effect, however: in the closing scene the beat again becomes the predominant sound, directing the constellation of the characters back into a position similar to the one of the opening scene, as if all has passed in the prolonged blinking of an eye. Together with the stage design, the beat of the metronome thus contributes considerably to the effect of referential ambivalence. The most prominent factor in creating that disorienting effect is the appear‐ ance of the actresses. All six of them 35 already occupy their positions on stage when the curtains are drawn, and they will all remain present for the whole length of the play. Importantly, this presence does not function in the way that has become well-known in self-referential postdramatic acting. Rather than real actresses playing that they are on stage and watching each other doing so, we witness fictional characters in the poses of actresses displaying themselves to an outside gaze: characters as stars. They fully and unironically belong to the Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 85 other world of melodrama, they show off as its inhabitants that know and live by its rules. Fig. 1: De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant by Susanne Kennedy, NTGent, 2011. © Phile Deprez Dressed in a broad range of pink tones (costume design Lotte Goos), they blend into the pink world of the room. But with their overdetermined dresses, ranging from a baby doll outfit over erotic nightwear to cocktail dresses, exuberant wigs and mask-like make-up that heavily accentuates the eyes and mouth, they also stand out against the bare walls of the room. These stars perform an incon‐ gruous, grotesque imagery. Synthesizing antiquated, allegorised and mediatised images of female heterosexual stars and starlets into a kitschy and vulgar variant of pop art, their appearances remind us of artists such as the provocative soft porn actress La Cicciolina. Natural elements and images of naivety are rendered obscene, for instance in the combination of Karin’s floral wreath with juicy underwear or in Gaby’s girly tutu-like dress made of inflatable plastic fabric. The voices add to the uncanny mixture of innocence and seduction, as the actresses speak their lines with infantile cartoon-like voices. Hardly ever do they address each other; instead, they speak out in front of them. The scenic composition contributes to the grotesque overdetermination. Exemplary in this respect is the scene where Petra violates Karin - metonymically performed as 86 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) her tearing down Karin’s sexy stockings and underwear - while the Walker Brothers’ highly melodramatic song In My Room plays from the record player and daughter Gaby, lying on the mattress at her mother’s feet, mutely lip-synchs the lyrics (00: 50: 45-00: 53: 35). It is not only the semiotic overdetermination that renders the appearances of the characters disturbing. The self-confidence with which they perform their postures counteracts their total compliance with the stereotypical imagery they at the same time suggest. In taking control of the mediated images, their bodies reject the coherent embodiment of these very stereotypes. The characters put themselves on display but do not meet the expectations of availability and accessibility the display raises. With their bodies, gazes and voices directed at the outside in front of them, they seemingly open up the fourth wall, while at the same time sovereignly guarding the impenetrability of their world. The invisible glass pane between stage and auditorium becomes a wide peephole, with the characters provocatively putting themselves on stage within the confines of their room, yet confident about the untouchable quality of their seductive presence. Considered from the dictate of availability, the characters become idol-like or monstrous in their unavailability. They draw the spectators into the room but do not meet their eye. 5 Micro-choreographies of slow death While in They Shoot Horses the management of the gaze proved challenging for the characters, in De bittere tranen the characters are in full control. Indeed, while in the former production the scenic energy regulation shifted between slowdown and acts of physical endurance with a collective implosion at the play’s climax, in the latter we witness a micro-choreography that steadily supports the characters in their control over their appearances. The slow and regular beat of the metronome displays its full effect here, both dictating and supporting the tempo of the choreography. In a slow and deliberate manner, the characters continuously position and reposition themselves in relation to each other, shifting from twosomes into threesomes, from a single position into a more collective grouping and vice versa. These constellations are not random; in a structural and corporeal manner they demonstrate the shifting power relations within the narrative of the play. The constellation of Petra with her mother and daughter, for instance, points at the generational perpetuation of emotional neglect. Karin’s nearly continuous central position exposes her character as the core of the erotic turmoil - even quite literally so, in the exhibition of her bare belly -, whereas Marlene, the outsider within, frequently stands aside, close to the walls. Across the Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 87 scene, the floor, the walls and the alcoves provide multiple stages for the display of these multiple power constellations in the face of the audience. The intense minimalistic choreography, performed in accordance with the decelerated tempo of the metronome, not only exposes the emotional power relations in the plot. The utter control of bodily movements, postures and gazes engenders an energetic strain that both prevents relaxation and defers exhaustion, installing a meditative state of still life or, indeed, slow death. Keeping up the same level of energy and concentration depends on the skilled regulation of its usage. Psychological conditions or emotional states, that in the dramatic intrigue motivate the bodily actions and movements of the characters, are here translated into a regime of physical and physiological energy regulation. Consequently, the characters’ ups and downs are rendered as momentary disruptions of the steady strain. It is in its shifts and ripples, in the alternation of outbursts, implosions and subsequent levelling out of any irregularities that the plot is enacted. The complex constellation of Petra, Karin, Gaby and Marlene most conspic‐ uously demonstrates this scenic energy regulation. As mentioned before, Karin’s predominant central position is semiotically readable as her being the nexus of the conflict. Corporeally, it is her body that seems most at ease in the posture, and most fit for the challenge to uphold the demanding provocative micro-choreography. Moreover, in Karin’s phenomenological appearance, the starlet imagery of La Cicciolina is imitated to perfection. Gaby’s part in the constellation is semiotically and corporeally more volatile and playful. She often shifts positions and postures, experimenting with the imitation of the poses she witnesses around her. The energetic fitness her body displays in those choreographed poses demonstrates the success of her exercises. Moreover, her appearance explicitly exposes the obscenity of eroticised child celebrities. In several ways Petra and Marlene stick out from the dominant imagery of softporn stardom. Kennedy’s dramaturgy still presents Petra as the protagonist that she is in Fassbinder’s drama. The colours of her hair and costumes are harder than the variants of baby pink that dominate the other costumes. But especially her energy regulation distinguishes her from the others: Petra regularly steps out of the concentrated micro-choreography, acting out her emotional rollercoaster in a more “natural” hysterical manner, speaking and shouting with an authentic human voice rather than that of a dubbed character or cartoon figure. Importantly, these outbursts, severe disturbances of the energetic strain, are followed by something like a deflation of her character: energetically, she is subdued into passivity and repose, while semiotically she is reduced to an infant state: after each outburst Marlene changes Petra’s 88 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Fig. 2: De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant by Susanne Kennedy, NTGent, 2011 (Els Dottermans, Marie Vinck, Lien Wildemeersch, Bien De Moor). © Phile Deprez underwear as if changing diapers. These deflations counteract the outbursts, balancing the energy levels. Thus, while dramaturgically enacting the central role, Petra’s presence also operates as a relic of the melodramatic protagonist, spelling out its antiquated, exhausted nature. Meta-theatrically, Petra enacts the tension between the representation of a psychologically identifiable character struggling to keep up the appearance of authenticity, and the corporeal presen‐ tation of the character as a composite, overdetermined image. Her frequent painful sighing, for instance after the violation scene (00: 56: 55-00: 58: 25), is then not only readable as physical exhaustion after the sexual act but also as a corporeal sign of that stressful metatheatrical in-between state. Marlene too distinguishes herself in several ways from the others. With her long black wig, the high black boots and the tightly fitting sober dress, her appearance is that of an austere S&M mistress rather than a servant. And indeed, as mentioned, her role in levelling out the energetic outbursts of Petra is crucial. Furthermore, she very much acts as Petra’s double. In the narrative it is she who draws the design clothes. In the staging this role is further enhanced with Marlene standing closely behind or next to Petra, doubling Petra’s presence. And though she never speaks, she sometimes lip-syncs Petra’s words, suggesting that both speak with one voice or even that she, Marlene, whispers the words into Petra’s ears. Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 89 Most prominently, Marlene is the “other” of the scenic energy regulation. Not only does she not partake in the micro-choreography, abstaining from the continuous minimal movements. In the end, she even becomes the victim of the regulating exercise. Whereas in They Shoot Horses the deflation of energy affected the whole group, here the group performs the energy regulation to perfection, with the notable exception of Marlene. On the song You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling by The Righteous Brothers, in which love is begged to stay, all characters defiantly embrace the end of the tumultuous love story and Petra’s return to self-control. Marlene’s part, however, is that of sacrifice, burdened as it were with the accumulated exhaustion of the others and paying the price for the restoration of energy that guides all others back to their starting position. Thus, the end differs from the beginning in one crucial aspect: Marlene slumps down in a corner, as if the plug has been pulled out. Deflated, like a mere shell of a body, she lies against the wall, while the others neatly restore the regular energy levels in a static and mute tableau that refers back to the opening scene, including the return of the metronome that prescribes the inexorable tempo of slow death. Fig. 3: De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant by Susanne Kennedy, NTGent, 2011 (Bien De Moor). © Phile Deprez 90 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 36 Huschka, op. cit., 2017, p.-66. 37 Victoria Lowe, Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen, Bristol 2020, esp. pp. 39-90. 6 Starlets on stage. Theatre as melodramatic hypermedium Kennedy’s stagings of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant are exemplary for her way of choreographing the group of actors into what she calls “a living, breathing body”, a way that infuses theatre with a choreographic ritual that “founds order and channels energies” 36 . The scenic choreographic energy regulation of that breathing body allows the performance to explore possible disruptions of the regime of slow death that are inherent in the reproduction mechanisms of conventional melodrama’s heteronormative sexual imagery. Bringing cinematic melodrama to the theatre stage specifically allows Ken‐ nedy to explore how theatre, as an older medium historically, can function as a “hypermedium” for the predating hypotexts of cinematic melodrama’s. 37 As I have explained, both films very much draw their theatrical atmosphere from their scenography: the secluded universe of the dance arena and its backstage in the Pollack film, the labyrinth-like and extravagantly decorated interior of the private rooms and atelier in Fassbinder’s film. This theatrical quality is combined with a conspicuous cinematography, with, in the first example, the camera moving with and offering close ups of the exhausted bodies moving in circles and, in the second, the formative framing of the star-like poses of the characters. Both scenography and cinematography create the effect of an uncanny other world ruled by emotional and imaginary mechanisms of visual reproduction. In the McCoy/ Pollack movie those rules, while promising individual fame and gain, crush any free will, except for those who opt out by an embrace of death. In the Fassbinder film, the disruption of the regime is realised in the conscious and often highly ironic handling of and reflecting on the framing at the basis of melodrama’s image politics - with the notable example of Marlene who does walk out, paying for this act with the price of literally disappearing out of the picture. It is notable that both of Kennedy’s stagings are devoid of any ostensible material references to the film as medium. The productions do not work with the popular contemporary techniques of filming and screening on stage, nor do they use any of the digitalised visuals and soundscapes that will become the sign mark of Kennedy’s later productions. Despite this, Hollywood film is nevertheless referenced as the main medium for melodramatic stardom. Here, Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 91 though, it is theatre, not film, that sets the stage for the engagement with the reproduction of stardom and its condition of slow death. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? opens the circular theatre arena to demon‐ strate how stardom is grounded in the struggle for the gaze of the audience; the scenic energy regulation, rhythmically alternating between obsessive circular running and slowed down posing, performs the precarious success of that endeavour and the need for a constant management of the eye contact between star and audience, keeping the star in the double bind of slow death. By seating the spectators around the arena, thus mirroring the presence of the audience in the dance hall of the film, the theatre audience is implicated in and potentially reminded of its part in that double bind. At the same time, a stark contrast with the hypotext is established: in the film, the close-ups solicit the film audience’s empathy with the ordeal of the main characters. De bittere tranen van Petra von Kant shifts the attention to the neo-baroque theatre stage, displacing its conventions of the perspectival view and the fourth wall with a diversity of medial references. The stage design suggests a perspectival view of the interior room but displaces it with an open, horizontal display as in a cinematic wide shot. The horizontal positioning of the actors resembles tableau-like groups, reminding us of older Baroque theatre instead of the ensemble-like dramatic differentiation between main and secondary characters. The characters’ appearances, poses and actions transpose the extravaganza of Fassbinder’s would-be stars into a grotesquely inflated imagery that amalgamates stereotypical cultural representations of soft-porn female seduc‐ tiveness and innocence. Combined with (parts of) the original film soundtrack of melodramatic songs of the 1960s, this transposition points back at the popular commodified culture of melodrama and its love ideology, exposing its coercive sexualised image politics and its artsy afterlife in soft-porn pop art. It is, however, in its handling of the fourth wall that the play most con‐ spicuously positions itself in relation to cinematic melodrama and imagery reproduction mechanisms: the virtual fourth wall is the space where each of the characters negotiates her status as a starlet and tries to control her image. The self-confident engagement with the framing camera in the Fassbinder film is exchanged for the management of the full exposure in the proscenium arch. As a theatrical fourth wall, that wall is permeable and the characters do transgress it, as it is the presence of an audience assembled to watch the theatrical event that moves and energises the acting bodies in the first place. At the same time, and for the whole length of the performance, they defiantly materialise the 92 Inge Arteel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 38 The suggestion of the one-sided mirror-like quality of the fourth wall is also present in the mirroring of the phrase “In my Room” (cf. supra). wall as an opaque one-way window 38 : their durational frontal acting style and concentrated, relentless gaze both thrust their presence into the open and shield them from it, suggesting that they are engaging neither with each other nor with the audience but exclusively with their own mirror image on the screen of the fourth wall. The fourth wall thus becomes the interface between control of and submission to coercive image politics. As soon as the curtains are drawn, the audience is put in the position of voyeurs in front of a peepshow. A peepshow, however, that disperses the engagement of the voyeuristic gaze by offering the eye several posing bodies simultaneously. A peepshow, moreover, that celebrates the theatricality and artificiality of the starlet and her durational slow-motion energy on the brink of life and death. That is, if we forget about the sacrificial logic still lingering on, as at least one of them is singled out to pay the price of exhaustion. Susanne Kennedy’s Cinematic Melodrama on Stage 93 1 Quoted texts are from Elfriede Jelinek, SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt), published in 2015, accessible freely on the writer’s website: http: / / www.elfriedejelinek.com/ (accessed 30 March 2021). 2 The experiences described here refer to my visit to the production ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung, directed by Susanne Kennedy, Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot at the industrial complex of Zeche Zollverein Essen, as part of the Ruhrtriennale, September 2015. Theatre as an Exercise in Dying The Hollow Body in Exhibition Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 1 Enter “I had been completely hollow, and now I am also flat”. 1 In the labyrinth of the walk-in installation ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung (ORFEO. An exercise in dying) by Susanne Kennedy, Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, I encounter a multitude of Eurydice figures. They besiege the rooms with their bodies. 2 Exhibited as figural-artistic constructions, what the performers have in common, in addition to the obvious costuming and consistent use of full head masks, is that they are all silent. Not a word escapes them. Their language cannot be heard. The only sound is a new interpretation of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, played by the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop, which resonates through 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. These lifeless and speechless female figures of the installation are the depar‐ ture point of my investigation. I would like to take a closer look at the consistent renunciation of language in the staging of the figures and the simultaneous presence and absence of their bodies. Why do they not speak and to what end is their outward appearance so exaggerated? 3 Cf. program ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung, 2015. 4 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, London/ NY 1993, p. 22 and p. 66. Butler stresses the weight of psychoanalytic vocabulary of both repression and foreclosure. 5 Publius Ovidius Naso, The Metamorphoses, X, Orpheus et Eurydice, translated by A. S. Kline, 2000, https: / / www.poetryintranslation.com/ PITBR/ Latin/ Metamorph10.php (accessed 30 March 2021). The translation refers to this edition. 6 Ovid, X, V. 8-10: While the newly wedded bride, Eurydice, was walking through the grass, with a crowd of naiads as her companions, she was killed, by a bite on her ankle from a snake. 7 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge 2015. Mindful of the fact that Eurydice’s narrative is scarcely if at all represented in Ovid’s tale, the three artists opt for a modified reading of the myth. In the program, they refer to Elfriede Jelinek’s theatre text SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt), as having been beneficial for them as an inspiration for an alternative reading. 3 Employing the exposition of the moribund figure of Eurydice, I would like to discuss the conditions of representation and the depiction-praxes of a sexually differentiated female body. Judith Butler’s thesis in Bodies that Matter, which states that the materialisation of power norms is already regulated in the imaginary schema and that any fixation of a visible appearance is problematic in itself, may be productively applied to the representation and staging of the Eurydice figure(s) in the context of this installation. 4 To this end, I will examine the conditions of the appearance of female bodies and the exploration of (im)possibilities of disembodied speech on the stage. Using the mythological figure of Eurydice, I wish to emphasise the relevance of expanding the reception of the myth through a feminist perspective, as well as explore the (im)possibility of a representation of Eurydice’s position within the framework of this installation. Eurydice, as a figure in search of identity, will thus be discussed as a Eurydikemodell; between a bodily husk and a gendered manifestation of sexual difference. 2 Poeticized mythology In the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, Ovid composes a version of the mythological tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in hexameter. 5 In the opening he recounts the death of Eurydice on her wedding day by way of a snake bite. 6 Ovid devotes his rhetorical art to portraying Orpheus as the ardent saviour to a lost wife. The apostrophic opening with O is used to emphasize the solemn and lofty character of Orpheus’ song. 7 In the second part of his song (verses 29-30), Orpheus addresses the gods directly (vos), and, alluding to Amor’s power, asks to undo the untimely death of Eurydice. This section is often referred to 96 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 8 Michael v. Albrecht, Interpretationen und Unterrichtsvorschläge zu Ovids Metamorphosen, Göttingen 1984, p.-95. 9 Ovid, op. cit., V. 36-37: Eurydice, too, will be yours to command, when she has lived out her fair span of years, to maturity. I ask this benefit as a gift; 10 Id., V. 57-60: Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. 11 Id., V. 62-63: She spoke a last “farewell” that, now, scarcely reached his ears, and turned again towards that same place. 12 Eurydice’s dematerialization appears particularly prominent in verses 56-60. as the “Eurydice section” within scholarly literature. 8 Orpheus pleads and begs the gods with great rhetorical skill, asking them to restore Eurydice’s life and pledging that the gods will be able to take back both himself and Eurydice at a later date. 9 Ovid illustrates the power and effect of the song by having the gods of the underworld cease their activities and indeed summon Eurydice. At this point, the shadow of Eurydice, previously described as one of the weightless throng (leves populos), regains contours as a shadow of the underworld (umbras erat illa recentes inter). In verse 54, Ovid elucidates that the condition set by the gods for a joint ascension of Orpheus and Eurydice is that Orpheus must not look back. However, because Orpheus does not adhere to the gods’ injunction and looks back, Eurydice dies a second time. 10 His gaze brings upon her death. For a brief moment, Eurydice, who tries to hold on, is brought into the foreground of the poem. She strives to be seized by Orpheus’s arms. He merely clutches the receding air. From verse 60 on, Ovid describes Eurydice’s lament as a short outcry (vale), which, nevertheless, can no longer be acoustically perceived by Orpheus. 11 Ovid describes the movements of Eurydice, she does not possess language but appears to hold only sounds. With this outcry, Eurydice takes leave of Orpheus and returns to the underworld, whereupon her body dematerialises. Subsequently, Ovid again devotes himself wholly to the suffering and pain of Orpheus. Within Ovid’s telling, Eurydice serves as a means to emphasise Orpheus’ rhetorical skill and song and in so doing to render his actions as tragic. A contemporary gender-critical reading of Ovid may highlight the phallogocentric perspectives forming the mythological narrative. Aside for her outcry, Eurydice herself does not once come into utterance. Ovid describes her figure first as one among the weightless throng (leves populos), later as one among the recent ghosts of the underworld. 12 She is intangible, immaterial and ephemeral. The ephemerality and intangibility of her figure stand in contrast to Orpheus’ Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 97 13 Theweleit suggests that patriarchal artistic practice can be traced back to human sacrifice - essentially to female sacrifice. Eurydice is sacrificed in order for Orpheus to sing. Klaus Theweleit, Buch der Könige, Bd. 1, Basel and Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 4-5; p.-14; 28, 1105. 14 “Wenn er mich einholt, mein Körper, dann bin ich geliefert, dann kann ich dem Sänger geliefert werden, dann habe ich eine Figur und eine Struktur […]”. Jelinek, op. cit., 2015. 15 Haß also emphasizes that in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries the notion of a natural connection between the speaking and the acting figure had become established in dramatic theatre, substantiating the close relationship between figure and body. Ulrike Haß, “Das Geschlecht in der Maschine des Guckkastens. Zur massenmedialen Entgrenzung von Körper, Blick und Bild”, in: Bettina Bock von Wülflingen and Ute Frietsch (eds.), Epistemologie und Differenz. Zur Reproduktion des Wissens in den Wissenschaften, Bielefeld 2010, p.-83-98, here p.-91. subsequently idealised image of his wife as one who had been robbed of her best years (crescentes annos). Drawing on the poem through the mythological narrative and with recourse to the observation that the figure of Eurydice as well as her body are victims of patriarchal artistic practice, I would like to emphasise the relevance of a feminist interpretation. Orpheus’ suffering, his loss, his desire for his lost wife, and finally his rhetorical skill in changing the gods’ minds with his singing will not be the focus of attention here. As Jelinek does in her text, so do the artists behind this installation distinguish Eurydice’s position by utilising a gender-critical reading. In doing so they develop a radical counterproposal to the classical reading of the mythological narrative. 13 In her 2013 text SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt), Jelinek shifted the perspective of the Orpheus myth, placing Eurydice’s position and her foiled speech at the forefront of her inquiry. As a disembodied shadow of the underworld, Eurydice seems to perceive her existence as liberation from Orpheus. Feeling, on the one hand, at ease beyond her bodily husk, yet, on the other hand, desiring it as a stipulation of existence (“Ohne Körper keine Macht. Ohne Körper keine Waffe”). In the permanent struggle between morphological dissolution and physical presence as an image, Eurydice unburdens herself of her thoughts in the form of speech. 14 In Jelinek’s text, through incessant speech, direct negotiation with the process of Eurydice’s representability is made audible. Both the scenic and physical conditions of Eurydice’s speech, the rhetorical preconditions of the speech itself, as well as Eurydice’s positioning as a wife alongside Orpheus are thus put up for debate. Eurydice speaks despite her uncertain existence. By employing retrospective quotational speech, Jelinek negotiates the artificially enforced relationship be‐ tween language and the body of a dramatic figure. 15 Jelinek deciphers the 98 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 16 Annuß describes Jelinek’s rhetorical arrangement as “quotational speech about one‐ self ”, which exhibits the conditions of appearance of the figures. As the quoted figures speak “of themselves”, they thus “disclose their retrospectivity and fictionality”. Annuß relates this rhetorical figure to the rhetorical device of Prosopopoeia. Evelyn Annuß, Elfriede Jelinek. Theater des Nachlebens, Paderborn 2005, p.-11. 17 Prosopopoeia can be conceived as a figure “through which the dead and the absent in the text, through their fictional speech, are given a voice and an expressive face”. See Bettine Menke, Prosopopoiia: Stimme und Text bei Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist und Kafka, Munich 2000, p.-7. 18 Ibid. supposed connection between the speech and the body of a figure in represen‐ tation while simultaneously allowing the process of detachment to become recognisable as a highly contradictory and difficult process. 16 The difficulty of detachment marks both the non-simultaneity of speech and appearance, as well as the possibility of having Eurydice speak in the role of an absentee. Through the utilisation of the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, Jelinek (re)formulates Eurydice’s voice as a disembodied voice(s). 17 Eurydice speaks, even if it remains uncertain whether she can be fully heard. Yet through her absence the fiction of speech gives her a face, a mask through which she can retrospectively speak. 18 Jelinek indicates that Eurydice is engaged in a struggle between presence and absence, between visibility and invisibility. The writer goes beyond the surplus experience of the mythological figure of Eurydice or her position as a hearer. By enabling Eurydice’s speech and by voicing the presuppositions that govern her constitution as a supposedly unified, female-defined theatrical figure, Jelinek renders the concept of anthropical figuration (Gestaltwerdung) brittle and absurd. Thus, the deceptive notion of the figure as a unity of form, subject, and identity begins to dissolve. It can be surmised that with this text, Jelinek resists the double fictionality of a linguistically invented and scenically substantiated figure. Moreover, this fictionality, as well as the non-presence of the figure itself, are an immanent part of the figuration of Eurydice. Insofar as language no longer seems to be bound to bodies, but rather may be comprehended as detached from any corporeality. Since the body becomes recognisable as an instrument of hearing, the exhibited bodily husk appears to be undefined. Thus, the underworld may be understood as Eurydice’s shelter. To what effect this exposition of the bodily husk and the process of figuration of this husk is done by coercion, governed by norms of power and the male gaze, is taken up by the installation ORFEO. An Exercise in Dying. Even if it may be assumed that the directors of the installation use Jelinek’s approach and inter‐ pretation of the myth as inspiration, it should be pointed out that the theatrical Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 99 19 For the musical version of the opera L’Orfeo by Monteverdi, the artists collaborated with the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop. The electronic sound design was produced by the sound and electronic artists Ole Brolin and Harpo’t Hart. See Jeroen Versteele, “Loslassen von L’Orfeo”, in: Program, op. cit., 2015. 20 “Sound segments overlap or resound with minimal temporal shifts. Existing musical material is used like a construction kit, subjected to its own compositional process and treated with techniques of collage, looping and sampling”. Ibid. text and the installation are to be distinguished from one another. Jelinek’s Eurydice speaks as a reflective figure of the sovereign speech in absentia, the quotational character of her language bringing forth the constructed connection between body and representation, enabling her body to dissipate. Whereas in the installation, the superfluous, hollow body as a plastic, lifeless entity plays the central role in the installation’s representational practice. 3 ORFEO. An Exercise in Dying During the 2015 Ruhrtriennale, Kennedy, Boogaerdt, van der Schoot and their team placed a walk-through installation on the upper floors of the industrial complex at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen. Based on my own viewing experiences of a specific performance, I will explore the following questions: How may the chosen representational practice be brought into discussion regarding the conditions of appearance of the female figures? What may be the function of the figures’ exhibited speechlessness? How might the relationship between physical presence and linguistic absence be understood? In the analysis of the installation, I would also like to examine how the course, the centring of the gaze of the participants, but at the same time, also the disorientation through the arrangement and design of the spaces may be included in the considerations. Before the course can be entered, we participants wait in small groups of five to eight people, in an anterior waiting area in front of the constructed labyrinth. Through headphones, I hear a sound installation, which according to the sound artists is the complete recording of the opera, stretched 230 times. These are sounds stretched into time. 19 The musicians describe this procedure as “zooming into the music”, offering the participants a particular mindset for the altered opera interpretation, irritating spatial and temporal perceptions even before we enter. 20 Contrary to the narrative of Monteverdi’s Renaissance music, which focuses on the main melody sung by a soloist Orpheus with instrumental accompaniment, the opera here is stretched, shifted and radically reduced. As I sit in the foyer of the installation, looking at the light signal flickering above the door, which, according to the clear instructions over the headphones, 100 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 21 Ibid. 22 For the distinction between look and gaze see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, New York/ London 1992, pp. 129-131, here p.-145. will signal entry into the installation, I realise that I have already lost my spatial orientation within the industrial complex. When the signal flickers on, six of us enter the first room. Reinterpreting and contrasting the oversized industrial buildings of the industrial complex, which covers an area of approximately 2,000 square meters, set designer Katrin Bombe created a course under the “aesthetic of the suburban room”. 21 Closed rooms connected with narrow passages and bridges. The rooms look cheaply furnished and artificially constructed - a living room with an artificial leather couch, a kitchen featuring a table with a plastic tablecloth, a bathroom decorated with a synthetic shower curtain and a toothbrush, an orchestra room, another waiting room with plastic chairs and a meagre bedroom holding a bed. Pastel tones combined with neon accessories. Instead of using the breached walls of the industrial complex and the oversized concrete coal bunker, walls and ceilings have been constructed within. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the surrounding industrial architecture has a decisive effect on the resulting labyrinth of rooms, bridges, and passages. In contrast to the dark, cemented walls of the industrial building, which descend into infinite depth, the strongly lit and meticulously yet cheaply furnished rooms with wallpapered walls, misplaced carpets, furniture, and accessories (cell phone, handwritten notes, toothbrush, houseplant) appear hyper-realistic and lifeless. The oppressive architecture of the installation, the strict composition of the sequences and the closed visual effect have an immediate impact on my perception. Paradoxically, it seems that by being designed as a course, the installation initially suggests the dissolution of the centrally directed perspective of the gaze. Yet it is precisely through the steered gaze within the artificial architecture that it produces closed images and closed spaces. The images created in and through these spaces are reminiscent of computer games, but also of a particular aesthetic of cheap furniture stores. Within these images, female-ascribed figures are positioned. They stand in front of the sofa and zap through the TV program, they sit at the kitchen table and chew cherry stones, they stand in the shower or lie in bed. Several performers are dressed in broadly similar pastel-coloured clothing such as stretch pants and knitted sweaters, all wearing the same peroxide blond wigs and full-head latex masks with red made-up lips and holes for the eyes. Apart from the often, convulsive body movements, the gazes of the figures, made possible by the holes in the masks, are their only animated reactions. 22 When our eyes meet, each figure’s eyes linger on me for a few minutes. The multiplying figures Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 101 23 Tatari links the transformation of exhibition and participation as a condition which enables appearance in its self-differentiation of the sensory. Accordingly, I use the term exhibition as “the exhibiting of and participation in”. Marita Tatari, Kunstwerk als Handlung. Transformation von Ausstellung und Teilnahme, Paderborn 2017, here p.-11. of Eurydice in the different rooms, however, seem to me lifeless and ambiguous. After the first encounter with a Eurydice in the living room, we are ushered through a tunnel-like passageway into the kitchen. Our freedom of movement and our perspective are controlled by light signals. For several minutes we watch two additional Eurydice figures trying to put cherries into their mouths through the masks. After an extremely long chewing process, they take out the pips and add them to the expanding mosaic of cherry pips on the kitchen table. Then a cell phone rings. An old Nokia model. When I go to answer it, the display reads: 75 missed calls. Who here wants to call whom? May Eurydice still be reached? In the next room, Eurydice takes a shower behind a milky curtain. The water splashes. I listen to the stretched music, some viewers squat on the carpet and wait. My sense of time has dissolved. I hear the signals coming from the other rooms, and I hear the music of the string quartet blaring over the speakers into the rooms. In the next room, we wait several minutes before the four musicians sitting opposite us - who are also dressed as Eurydice - start playing a sound score. Patterns of time stretching, repeating, and slowing down, continue, all the while accompanied by distant gazes. We are ushered across a bridge that reveals a view of the concrete walls and canyons of the industrial complex and into a waiting room. Once we meet more spectators here, I wait a long time to be invited. Then one Eurydice leads me alone into a gleaming, white-painted oval room, which shatters the dimensions of the previously visited very narrow rooms. Here I meet Orpheus the singer, who sings full of passion and without a mask, dressed entirely in white. He approaches me yet keeps a clear distance. Unlike other locations within the installation, time in this room seems extremely short. Afterwards, I go - now separated from the group - into a meagre room with one bed. Eurydice lies dying on the bed. Lying there as if exhibited. 23 I find myself to be more a spectator of a picture than a participant in the action. And yet we participants are also exhibited in this installation. We watch ourselves spectating while we look at each other. When I pull back the curtain in the last room, I can see the orchestra through a pane of glass. The musicians sit in a glass box at the centre of the labyrinth. In this orchestra room, the opera music is played live and transmitted from there, via loudspeakers, to the other rooms, each in a different sonic translation. In this last room, the dying room, I am allowed to decide the duration of my stay myself. I remain a length of time that can no longer be quantified in minutes. 102 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 24 Kennedy formulates it as follows: “There is no letting go, no releasing, but a clinging. Therefore, Eurydice cannot really die. Orfeo makes an undead out of her”. Program, op. cit., 2015. 25 Letting go is also an important motif in Jelinek’s work. Thus, Eurydice’s last sentence in the theatrical text reads: “[…] ich raffe mich mit letzter Kraft zusammen, mit schattenhaften Händen, ohne Hände, ohne nichts, mit Nichts, raffe mich in mir selbst zusammen, raffe mich, die nicht mehr da ist, Schatten zu Schatten, ich bin nicht mehr da, ich bin”. Jelinek, op. cit., 2015. In the program booklet of the installation, as well as in her article Showing the Wound Kennedy emphasises the moments of letting go, disappearing and dying, describing her work as a “dying exercise”. Similarly, I would like to claim, based on my impressions and reflections on the portrayal of Eurydice, that the figures of the installation are in the process of a disanimation (Ent-Lebendigung) as opposed to animation (Ver-Lebendigung). 24 Eurydice is stuck in a loop of repetition, both in a sexually differentiated female body as well as through the gaze that regulates her. With Kennedy’s term of an exercise in dying, I’d like to refer to two notions. One is the construction of an animated theatrical figure who actually seems to die. The other is the constitutive construction of the appearance of the ascribed female body, opening a line of inquiry between the viable and the inviable body, which can be described as an exercise in letting go, a motif that is also relevant in Jelinek’s work. A final letting go of the bodily husk, the choice to exist as a lifeless being, or as a shadow, seems to take place in the field of morphological ambiguity. 25 4 Eurydice in the conflict of figuration as (a) female figure and theatrical figure In staging Eurydice, Kennedy, Boogaerdt and van der Schoot consistently refrain from using audible language. Orpheus, on the other hand, sings loudly and expressively. This observation may at first evoke a sense of disillusionment since once again it seems to be Orpheus who has the power and the ability to sing and be heard. I would like to suggest that it is precisely the absence of a logifiable language (logifizierbaren Sprache) that makes recognisable the exhibition of the female rendered body. These female regulated bodies are exhibited in the conflict of animation as theatrical figure/ s. The figures do not speak. The figures besiege spaces with their bodies. They appear in the plural. This exhibition leads to the practical dissolution of uniformity in the representation of human beings. In this way, the artists on the one hand emphasise the fragility of the figural unity while on the other hand enabling a specific use of the concept of a figure; figure to be understood as Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 103 26 Brandstetter emphasizes that the conventional use of figure as a homogeneous model of representation has become obsolete. She names the different conceptions of, re‐ spectively, role figure (Rollenfigur), rhetorical figure (rhetorischer Figur), protagonist (Handlungsfigur), figure/ body (Gestalt/ Körper), sound motif (Klangfigur), and motion figure (Bewegungsfigur), as each representing a different specification of the concept of figure, and points out that the concept itself is fragile. See Gabriele Brandstetter, Sybille Peters (eds.), de figura. Rhetorik - Bewegung - Gestalt, München 2002, here p.-7. 27 Susanne Kennedy, “Die Wunde zeigen. Das ideale Theater ist eine Übung im Sterben”, in: Theater Heute, Jahrbuch 2014, p 106 (translation by L.F.). 28 The function of language in the dramatic theatre of the 18th century can be described as an artificial connection between body and representation, whose sole purpose is subject to narrative meaning. See Haß, op. cit., 2010, p. 91; see also Günther Heeg, Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt. Körper, Sprache und Bild im Theater des 18.-Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main 2000. 29 Haß names the establishment of the perspectival stage as a constraint and cause of conflict of lively representation practice: “The modern actor, who in the course of his domestication invents the phantasm of the natural figure, is now burdened with what optical architecture as such lacks: the gaze, the point of history, the soul, the subject, his desire”. Haß, op. cit., 2010, p.-91. (corporeal) contour, which always already refers to its brittleness. 26 The figures in the installation cannot be understood as homogeneous, neither in shape nor as identities. Instead, they may be described as plastic formations, as bodily husks. Yet these multiple husks do not yet seem to have completely shed the last symptoms of an (im)possible animation through representation, which is also indicated by the continual dying process in the last room of the installation. The “letting go” referred to by Kennedy is played out as an approximation in the form of an exercise. Kennedy writes, “The bodies in play die over and over again for us. And we watch and practice”. 27 The Eurydice figures obstruct a mode of representation similar to that of the singer Orpheus, who tries to express his inner states through song and posture. By not speaking, but silently repeating patterns of movement in the rooms - such as chewing on a cherry stone or taking a shower - Eurydice’s characters dissolve any sense of meaning and any artificial connection between body and language. Rather, they are in a state of permanent meaninglessness, since they neither advance an action, nor have a speaking function, nor do they assert a narrative. 28 The coercive relationship described between language and body in the representation of a human figure, reinforced by the prominence of the implicit visibility of the stage, is considered and revealed not only in the physical performance but also in the spatial conception of the installation. 29 The figures elude speech and thus open a sphere that makes all speech seem impossible. The implicitly visible corporeal contours, assigned with gender identity, are presented in separation from pronounceable speech. This allows 104 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 30 “It is the human being that is being exorcised here”. Susanne Kennedy, “Exorzismus”, in: Theater Heute, Juli 2019, p.-56. 31 In connection with the figure of prosopopoiia, Jelinek refers to a theatrics of the personal as well as to an alternative legibility of politics and history. By refusing dominant personalization, Jelinek opens a theatre for the non-presence of those voices that threaten to be lost in common representation. See Annuß, op. cit., 2005, pp. 12-13. 32 Heeg describes the tendency emerging from 1750 on as a “new phase of body mastery” and as “the taking over and use of the body by the senses”. The notion of Vertigo is coined to describe the distance-less relation of the body to the spoken through the incipient priority of the word over the body. Heeg, op. cit., 2005, pp. 172-173. not only a reflection on a sexualised and gendered presentation of the female body but also a reflection on the human figure on the visible stage. 30 By being exhibited, Eurydice’s position as a figure and the supposedly associated female attributes become vulnerable and fragile. At the same time, however, this figure is given a place that in common representation is in danger of being lost. The unheard place holds, on the one hand, the underrepresented placement of Eurydice as a female figure and, on the other hand, raises the question of where the place of her possible speech, detached from the visible body and beyond the figural unity of body, language and image, could be. This search for the place of speech marks once more a connection to Jelinek’s text. This manner of representation, in which Eurydice’s speech is rendered as the speech of an absent figure, resists conformity with the field of visibility. In Jelinek’s work, Eurydice’s voices can be heard as voices from the sidelines, without theatrical speech being tied to a stage character. 31 Jelinek achieves a rhetoric of virtually disembodied speech, thus denying the phantasmatic construction of a speaking person as a whole. The vertigo of the difference between representation and the represented is revealed in Jelinek’s work, in that the body appears only as a vehicle of speech. 32 The phantasm of a supposedly natural, living figure is also obstructed by the way Eurydice is depicted in the installation. Here, too, physical depictions of the performers are deprived of any semblance of life. The female bodies are staged as dying, perhaps already dead, empty figures that carry with them the act of animation (Ver-Lebendigung), yet do not mean to carry it out nor wish to take the risk it affords. They wait in the rooms of the labyrinth. The difference between representation and represented in the installation becomes evident through the silent figures and the exhibition of their hollow bodies. By framing them as inanimate and constructed figures, they indicate the difference between the mode of presentation and a conflictual representation of female bodies and female speech on stage. Always already regulated, defined, constructed and described the contours of the performers of Eurydice appear clearly exaggerated, Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 105 33 Butler, op. cit., 1993, pp. 2-3. 34 Butler again emphasizes the idea already found in Millett (Sexual Politics, NY 1970) that the biological, supposedly natural physical appearance (sex) can be described as a cultural and historical construction of gender identity. Accordingly, sex can only be analysed and deciphered through a gender perspective. Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London 1990. 35 Lacan emphasizes that space is essential in the identification of the subject, describing how “in the lure of spatial identification” a form as a whole is violently produced from what is actually a fragmentary image of the body. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as evoked in particular by the full-head latex masks. The figures thus refer to the denied reprehensibility embedded in the process of subjectivation on the way to an unambiguous external gender identity. Under the constraint of acting out an artificial identity and the obvious marking of this act, they not only show their uncomfortable state but mark the mechanism of exclusion in the process of assuming identity. In order to be visible under the conditions of heterosexualised discourse, Eurydice thus only has the possibility of appearing in a constructed sexually differentiated manner. Even if a feminist reception should initially resist such a sexualised status as objects and exhibits, the artists use the described female body to draw attention to the status attributed to it. In addition to the gaze of the spectators, who become participants in the exercise, the danger comes from Orpheus’ heteronormative white male gaze, which, in Jelinek’s text as well, repeatedly degrades Eurydice into an object. The male gaze, an elementary moment already found in Ovid’s text, is taken up as a defining element in the installation in order to clarify its regulating violence as well as to unmask its effect. Butler’s description of the appearance of gendered bodies as a productive constraint while regarding any fixation of bodily materiality as problematic in itself, takes on central weight when viewing the installation. Butler depicts materialisation processes as unstable, forceful, and normative, noting them to be permanently historically, culturally, and socially repetitive in different manners. As such, with recourse to psychoanalytical thinking, the process of the materialisation of bodies must include the realm of the symbolic order. 33 According to Butler, following among others, Lacan’s writings, the formation of the subject, the contours of the corporeal ego, and the assumption of sex and gender are formed as projections within the psyche. 34 With reference to Lacan, it can be emphasised that the imaginary moment of bodily figuration can be described as a moment of establishing a relationship between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt, as the potentiated multiplicity of the inner world confronts the inexhaustible squaring of the outer world.  35 The normative squaring of the 106 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in: Ecrits: the first complete edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg, W.W Norton & Company, New York, 2005, pp. 93-101, here p.-97. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. outside world becomes spatially visible in the installation, as well as in the imposed body contours of the performers, and the tendencies of unification through masks, costumes, and wigs. A multiplicity of the inner world remains to be surmised at most. I would describe the staging of the eye movements of the figures underneath the masks as a moment of such possible surmising. These movements allow the participants to briefly assume that something is hidden behind the surface, which can be neither represented nor thought coherently nor unified. Like Lacan, Butler emphasises that the materialisation process of the body must be intertwined with the moment of formation of an imaginary image (of the self). 36 Even though the installation refers to the process of figuration, this process is repeatedly demonstrated in its ambiguity and at no point does it merge into a logical and unified representation of the figure(s). For each repetition of the movement patterns is nevertheless infinitely different. This becomes clear in the room with the figures tirelessly chewing cherry stones. Themes of doubling and repetition of music, the staging of time and the spatial arrangement of the course, similarly refer to the process of figuration as a contradictory and unresolvable process. What Lacan specifies as the inner split of the subject - which in the process of its figuration through the luring deception of spatial identification achieves a form “which in its wholeness can be called an orthopedic one” 37 - becomes legible in the installation in the figures’ search for identity. Uncertainty and ignorance, but also boredom and disinterest seem to keep the figures in protracted states of motion. Despite all efforts, the artificiality of their formed figures appears to negligibly persist in the rooms, standardised and attired. Through the exclusion mechanism termed by Lacan in the process of ac‐ cepting identity, the figures oscillate between viable and non-viable existence. If Butler’s considerations lead to the conclusion that only those bodies that persist as viable bodies can appear, I would like to suggest that the process of figuration can be discerned as a conflict over existence as a viable figure. Eurydice cannot appear in the field of visibility as anything beyond a figure with overdrawn sexualised and gendered body contours, white mask, hydrogen-blond hair, and tight-fitting trousers. Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 107 38 Butler, too, is not satisfied with the unmasking of the heterosexualised schema of the imaginary and demands the (re)formulation of discourse. See Butler, op. cit.,1993, p. 75, and Margarte Whitford, Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine, London 1991, pp. 53-74. 39 See Haß, op. cit., 2010, p.-96. As in Jelinek’s work, also in the installation, Eurydice is a figure that fundamentally questions her constitutive construction and thus her appearance and speech in the female body. Eurydice is exhibited as a female delineated figure that can be used to reflect on the conditions of the appearance of the female body. Her appearance as a blond doll, as an object, emphasises the conditions of heterosexualised discourse and allows her appearance itself to become recognisable as the outcome of productive coercion of materialisation. With reference to Lacan and Butler, Eurydice’s representation can be recognized as a superficial entity and thus show the sexualisation that is the heteronormative gaze. At the same time, this staging succeeds in revealing the absurdity of the standardisation of the female figure, in that the characters evoke discomfort through their artificially ascribed identities. They find themselves in a state of ambiguity through the staging features of musical repetitions and dissolution of time and spatial orientation. The installation, as well as Jelinek’s text, can be understood as artistic positionings that call for a rewriting of the mental and imaginary presuppositions of discourse and thus also of art production beyond a heterosexual grid. In the sense of a performance that is aware of its presentability, the installation can exhibit the idea of the standardisation of the female body as a theatrical figure. 38 5 Letting go The starting point for my reflections were the visual experiences and the encounters with the female figures staged in a lifeless and speechless manner, based on the mythological figure of Eurydice in the installation ORFEO. Eine Sterbeübung. Following this, at the centre of my questioning stood the sexually differentiated body in performance and the challenges of such gender represen‐ tation as well as the rhetorical possibilities of disembodied speech. Eurydice can be taken as a model of the discursive practice of reflection upon the conditions of appearance within the framework of representation. Eurydice’s reduction to an image and the observations on her dependency on Orpheus’ male gaze were unmasked as corresponding with her imagined body image. 39 With a brief reading of the Latin text by Ovid, I was able to emphasise that Eurydice’s perspective is an invisible one that disappears twice through 108 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) 40 A note on the concept of position, the close connection between the symbolic order as a realm of laws and a potentially discursive change of this norm. See Butler, Antigone’s claim. kinship between life and death, NY 2000, p.-18 41 See Silvia Eiblmayr, Die Frau als Bild: der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des 20.Jh., Berlin 1993. 42 On the incredible assumption of an identity see Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990, p. 141. On the concept of the superficial entity also Freud, Das Ich und das Es [1923]. In: Anna Freud et al. (eds.): Gesammelte Werke, Vol. I-XVII, GW XIII, London/ Frankfurt 1940, p.-253. 43 See Butler, op. cit., 1993, p.-66, on “contours of the body” as “sites that vacillate”. the evaporating materiality of her figure. Jelinek succeeds in making Eurydice audible in the field of visibility. Kennedy, Boogaerdt and van der Schoot give Eurydice the appearance of a plastic entity, making her invisibility vulnerable within a heteronormative discourse. The installation is an exercise in letting go of space and time, an exercise in letting go of sexually differentiated subjects as well as life itself. In the refusal to represent her figure the form of Eurydice’s representation enables an opening of her discursively occupied position. 40 While Jelinek unmasks the body in the representation as a “vehicle of speech”, the installation places exaggerated bodies, legible along with their female body contours, as senseless, speechless beings in space, engaged in a dying exercise. Their outer husks, costumes, wigs and masks appear exaggerated and refer to the normative process of materialisation in order to appear as a female figure in a sexually differentiated body. 41 The absence of language, action and contexts marks the vertigo of animation (Ver-Lebendigung) and thus the vertigo of the act of describing a body with text in order to represent meaning. The delineated body is the mark of the installation. The figures of the installations appear as incredible superficial entities that are the very projections of the surface located at the point of conflictual assumption of identity. 42 Through the architecture of the rooms and the use of the constantly repeating, slightly altered musical passages, the grid of their materialisation process is further staged to be constricting, compulsive, disturbing and trance-like. Butler emphasises that the imaginary body silhouettes both limit and enable the process of subjectivation. The imaginary process represents norms that are on the one hand characterised by a “constitutive vacillation” yet on the other hand delimit the physically intelligible. 43 The installation is characterised by this very vacillation and, in the exaggerated representation of the intelligible female bodies, allows non-materialised bodies to become conceivable. Bodies that remain absent due to the exclusionary character of the materialisation process within a heterosexualised scheme of the imaginary. The construction Theatre as an Exercise in Dying 109 of Eurydice’s identity thus appears incredible. With Eurydice as the bearer of identity, the binarity of the sexes can be irritated and disturbed. The aesthetics of the installation combine the viability of gender-ascribed bodies with the theoretical question of the representation of a living figure as a human figure. Ultimately, all those involved in the installation vacillate between life and death, on the border between being seen and disappearing. The installation dispels the vertigo of the theatrical figure as a unified human figure and directly connects this letting go with a questioning of the possibilities of the appearance of gendered bodies. Translation: Allex (Liat) Fassberg 110 Eva Döhne (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble Troubling (Theatrical) Time Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Orfeo - Eine Sterbeübung, which debuted at the Ruhrtriennale in 2015, can be read as the prelude to a series of works in which Susanne Kennedy and her team address questions of life and death. Interestingly, however, this performance also marks an aesthetic paradigm shift. Kennedy’s productions become increasingly characterised by an interest in the interaction between auditorium and stage, and that of physical space and digital space. Orfeo, for example, is designed as a walk-through parcours. In Coming Society (2019), meanwhile, the audience is literally brought on stage. In other works, such as Drei Schwestern (2019), gauze fabrics and tricky projections are used to create spaces in which the boundaries between “real” and virtual environments become blurred. Against the backdrop of these considerations, I will explore three intertwined hypotheses: 1.) How through the use of masks and the technique of voice over, 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 experienced anew. 2.) The way in which this specific temporality challenges the dichotomy between “live” and “mediatized” performance, still presupposed in (Western) theatre and performance studies. 3.) How, in doing so, Kennedy’s works question a way of thinking within theatre that is based on the binary categories of presentation vs. representation, animate vs. inanimate and human vs. non-human. For my argumentation, I will draw specifically on Kennedy’s work Women in Trouble, which premiered at Volksbühne Berlin in 2017. 1 Daniele Muscionico, “Der Himmel über Berlin ist offen”, https: / / www.nzz.ch/ feuilleto n/ der-himmel-ueber-berlin-ist-offen-ld.1334719 (= Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1 Dec. 2017) (accessed 1 July 2021). Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own. 2 Ekkehard Knörer: “Es dreht sich halt mit”. https: / / www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/ 2017/ 12/ 01/ es-dreht-sich-halt-mit-zu-susanne-ken nedys-women-in-trouble/ (= Merkur, 1 Dec. 2017, accessed 1 July 2021). 3 Wolfgang Höbel: “Dreams are my reality”, http: / / www.spiegel.de/ kultur/ gesellschaft/ theatre-susanne-kennedy-mit-women-in-tr ouble-an-der-berliner-volksbuehne-a-1181311.html (=Der Spiegel, 1 Dec. 2017, accessed 1 July 2021). 4 Tobias Haberkorn: “Im Kernspin weiblicher Körper”, https: / / www.zeit.de/ kultur/ 2017-1 2/ women-in-trouble-volksbuehne-susanne-kennedy (= Die Zeit, accessed 1 July 2021). 5 Ulrich Seidler: “Women in trouble von Susanne Kennedy zelebriert die Sinnlosigkeit”, https: / / www.berliner-zeitung.de/ kultur/ theatre/ volksbuehne--women-in-trouble--von -susanne-kennedy-zelebriert-die-sinnlosigkeit-28983854 (= Berliner Zeitung, 1 Dec. 2017, accessed 1 July 2021). 6 Manuel Brug: “Dercons Soap”, https: / / www.welt.de/ print/ die_welt/ literatur/ article171193727/ Dercons-Soap.html (= Die Welt, 2 Dec. 2017, accessed 1 July 2021). 7 Wolfgang Höbel: “Dreams are my reality”. 8 https: / / www.volksbuehne.berlin/ en/ programm/ 35/ women-in-trouble (accessed 1 July 2021). 1 Dramaturgies of the cycling “Total theatre” 1 , “Postaffective theatre” 2 , “Plastic theatre show” 3 , “All in all, quite carcinogenic” 4 . Although the reviews of Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble differ in their respective judgments, they are united by their tendency to be apodictic. There is talk of “a lot of indifference, helplessness and fatigue” 5 , of “two hours that seem to have passed in a state of sedation” 6 , but also of the “shrill, funny, brightly colored triumph of a theatre of the future that may no longer need actors or flesh-and-blood audiences” 7 . So how to adequately describe the performance at stake? I will try to do so by first of all quoting the press text that can be found on the website of the Volksbühne: The stage turns. Angelina Dreem One is wearing a latex mask complete with long black hair. She sits on a sofa, characterised by high-gloss reality TV aesthetics, and reclines in a pose. The stage continues to turn. A second set contains fitness equipment and a spa area; Angelina Dreem Two moves through a tomographic scanner. Angelina Dreem’s life is a soap opera. But her life is also real. Angelina Dreem is sick. She has cancer. Throughout the play, new Doppelgängers of her continually appear, falling from one rabbit-hole reality into the next. Growing older; being a woman; remaining oneself; exorcising oneself again. Women in Trouble explores whether there is anything left to learn. Could the next life be a better one? 8 112 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 9 Cf. Susanna Brogi, “Kreis”, in: Günter Butzer and Joachim Jacob (eds.), Metzler Lexikon literarischer Symbole, Stuttgart 2012, pp.226-227, here p.-226. 10 Cf. for example https: / / www.volkstheatre.at/ stueck/ drei-schwestern/ (accessed 1 July 2021). 11 Aristotle, De caelo, Indianapolis 2020. Interestingly, this view is at odds with the teleological thinking that pervades his remarks on tragedy in Poetics. In contrast to productions like Orfeo or Coming Society, for Women in Trouble Susanne Kennedy draws on the concept of the proscenium stage. The audience faces a stage that rotates intermitently for two and a half hours. The performers who act on this spinning platform resemble one another in a striking way. They all wear jeans, sneakers, white T-shirts and silicone masks. The stage design by Lena Newton and Rodrik Biersteker (video) consists of different sets that convey radical artificiality in their color scheme. Equipped with at least one flat screen, these sets evoke recurring scenes that can be read as a gym, a wellness centre, a sanatorium and a film studio. The persistent turning of the stage refuses a linear dramaturgy, i.e. an Aristotelian theatre, in which the individual actions of the characters can be traced back to a specific motivation. On the contrary, Women in Trouble relies on non-linear structural principles such as circularity, repetition, achrony, stasis, and simultaneity. This non-linear dramaturgy is expressed not only by means of the revolving stage, but also on various other material and symbolic levels which will be examined in the course of this chapter. In their reciprocal interlocking they result in a specific intermedial apparatus. However, before considering the ontological dimension of this apparatus, let us first look at the phenomenon of the cyclical from a cultural-historical perspective. In the cultural and scientific history of the so-called West, the concept of the circle has taken on many different and sometimes competing meanings. The circle is a symbol of God and perfection, of the human spirit, of knowledge and creative activity and of magical powers. 9 It stands both for justice and community, and for social isolation and restriction. Particularly pertinent in our context, however, is the idea of eternal return and the fatum, associated with the circle. Indeed, Kennedy emphasises this idea repeatedly, especially in reference to Nietzsche, as in her production Drei Schwestern. 10 This concept can actually be traced back to Aristotle’s cosmological writing De caelo where he emphasises the fact that on the outline of a circle all points are equidistant from the centre. The line thus returns to itself. 11 Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 113 12 Cf. Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung und Entfremdung. Entwurf einer kritischen Theorie spätmoderner Zeitlichkeit, Frankfurt am Main 2016, p.-124. 13 Id., p.-39. Fig. 1: Women in Trouble by Susanne Kennedy, Volksbühne Berlin, 2017. © Julian Röder. With Women in Trouble, Kennedy takes the principle of eternal return to absurdity. The characters at stake here repeatedly die only to be continuously resurrected. The cycle of eternal recurrence, which is reflected on an icono‐ graphic level in the repeated presence on stage of the MRI scanner, the treadmill and the whirlpool, turns out to be a horror scenario that is subject to an altered space-time regime. In fact, in his book Beschleunigung und Entfremdung, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa points out that the component of space, which has prevailed for centuries, is increasingly falling behind in the digital age and is virtually “swallowed up” by time. 12 Thanks to the speed of communication media and transport, space seems to contract and lose its significance. According to Rosa, this phenomenon is due to the social acceleration that characterises our contemporary lives. Social actors of late modernity, however, are not simply helpless victims of such acceleration dynamics, Rosa argues. Rather, they are driven by a specific cultural promise: in secular modern society acceleration represents a functional equivalent for the (religious) promise of eternal life. 13 Nowadays, generally speaking, it is no longer assumed that there is a better life 114 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 14 Id., pp. 40-41. 15 Id., pp. 41-42. 16 Cf. Hartmut Rosa, “Beschleunigung und Depression. Überlegungen zum Zeitverhältnis der Moderene, in: Psyche 11/ 2011., pp. 1041-1060. awaiting us after death. Instead, one tries to realise in earthly life as many of the temptations that the globalised, capitalist world offers us as possible. The hard fact is, however, that the options we have available to us far exceed the options that can be realised in an individual lifetime. The most obvious solution to this problem seems to be the acceleration of the pace of life. According to Rosa, the eudaimonistic promise of modern acceleration lies in the (unspoken) notion that the acceleration of the pace of life is our (that is, the modern) answer to the problem of finitude and death. 14 This perception is reflected in the stage design of Lena Newton. In fact, the stage of Women in Trouble not only rotates, it also spins faster and faster towards the end of the performance. Women in Trouble can thus be seen as a portrait of a society that is itself accelerated and that suffers from a fundamental speeding up of the pace of life. According to Rosa, in late modernity, social acceleration becomes a self-propelling system that is no longer dependent on external motors at all. 15 This acceleration permeates all areas of life - even those we consider leisure time. Against this background, the treadmill on which the performers in Women in Trouble pedal appears as a cipher of a perfidious competitive dynamic that encompasses every social sphere. It can be deciphered as a torture device, invoking the neoliberal subject’s fear of not being able to keep up with the pace, of being left behind, of slipping away. This kind of economy of expenditure, however, is counteracted by the tendency of the performers to move at a decelerated pace. In fact, their slow, halting movements can be read as dysfunctional or pathological forms of deceleration. They invoke syndromes and diseases that may develop in response to excessive acceleration pressure, such as depression, burn-out and cancer. 16 The decisive point according to Hartmut Rosa, however, is that social accel‐ eration entails phenomena of alienation: alienation from space, from things, from one’s own actions - and from time. Such an alienation from time can be seen in the fact that nowadays we are increasingly dealing with isolated episodes of action and experience that are not related to one another. In this context, Rosa mentions a stay in the gym, followed, for example, by a shopping trip to the supermarket and a subsequent visit to a restaurant. Interestingly, it is precisely this kind of juxtaposition of isolated episodes that Women in Trouble is built upon. The production is composed of a series of scenes that show little coherence and cohesion. The different sets designed by Kennedy and Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 115 17 Rosa, op.cit., 2016, p.-140. 18 Ibid. 19 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theatre, Frankfurt am Main 2015, p.-178. 20 Cf. Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (1880-1950), Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 46-47. 21 Id., p.-107. her team are identity-less, relationship-less, and history-less. All painted in the same colours of a Barbie aesthetic and soundtracked with hypnotic, recurring musical phrases, they seem interchangeable. They do not tell stories and do not carry memories. Kennedy thereby does not only quote the dramaturgical logic of telenovelas, but rather she touches on an intersubjective phenomenon that Rosa outlines through reference to Walter Benjamin. “As Benjamin had predicted,” Rosa writes, “we have indeed become richer and richer in experiences and poorer and poorer in lived experiences”. 17 The result of this development, Rosa goes on to explain, emerges as a specific experience of time. It seems as if time is racing at both ends: it passes quickly in breathless adventure, and it shrinks and disappears in memory. 18 Against this background, we should have a look at what Hans-Thies Lehmann emphasises with regard to the eventfulness (Ereignishaftigkeit) of postdramatic theatre. Postdramatic theatre, according to Lehmann, is no longer one that strives to represent an event, but rather to produce it. This kind of event theatre (Ereignistheater), Lehmann continues, is about “das im Hier und Jetzt real werdende Vollziehen von Akten, die in dem Moment, da sie geschehen, ihren Lohn dahin haben und keine bleibenden Spuren des Sinns, des kulturellen Monuments usw. hinterlassen müssen”. 19 However, by dissolving the plot continuum through a sequence of scenes, Kennedy does not, as many claim, completely reject traditional theatre. Rather, she thereby resorts to an aesthetic that we already find in Strindberg - namely, the Stationentechnik (in fact, Kennedy subtitles Women in Trouble with the label Stationendrama). In the Stationendrama, according to Peter Szondi, the unity of the plot is replaced by the unity of the I (ich). This I (ich), whose space is not dialogic but rather monologic, meets others but these others remain alien to it. 20 Szondi emphasises this experience of strangeness through the adoption of the Stationentechnik by the expressionists. He claims that the Stationendrama formally shows the isolation of the human being. Thematically, however, it shows less the isolated ego than the alienated world it faces: “Erst in der Selbstentfremdung, durch die es mit der fremden Objektivität zusammenfällt, hat sich das Subjekt dennoch auszudrücken vermocht”. 21 116 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 22 Cf. Rosa, op. cit., 2016, p.-140. 23 Susanne Kennedy, Women in Trouble, video recording Datum? What Szondi states for the Stationendrama, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, correlates with what Hartmut Rosa states for the so-called Western societies at the beginning of the 21st century. Indeed, Rosa speaks of self-alienation and social alienation and considers them as consequences of the fact that we are no longer able to bring together the episodes of action and experience (and the goods we have acquired) into a whole life. 22 Yet the question that remains is whether subjects are (still) at stake in Women in Trouble. Who or what is it that appears in Kennedy’s performance? 2 In between Actually, what is staged in Women in Trouble, are transitions: transitions from life to death, from one state to the next, from actor to puppet, from human to machine. In fact, Kennedy’s productions always take place in a zone of the transitory and thus shift the focus to the intermediate between mask and face, between act and action, between what is said and what is heard. In doing so, these works question the relationship between presentation and representation and challenge the dichotomous categories of animate/ inanimate and human/ non-human. This ambiguity is further reflected in the chemical property of the material from which Kennedy’s masks are made, namely silicone. Silicones hold an intermediate position between organic and inorganic compounds - mainly between polymers and silicates. Therefore, in chemistry, they are referred to as hybrids. Kennedy’s silicone masks thus prove to be performative artifacts that enable a traversing between different states and attributions. In fact, at one point in Women in Trouble, we hear the following: “Angelina drifts between states of consciousness and madness - and genres. Exploring film-noir-confessions, sci-fi and animated television series. Its ambivalent definition is created by using the possibility of delusion and irrationality as its methodological mode”. 23 Crucially, however, this text does not come from the live and visible per‐ formers on stage but rather as a voice-over delivered offstage. Kennedy therefore has sampled philosophical quotations, biblical passages and spiritual mantras with film and soap dialogues, texts from medication package inserts, blog en‐ tries, but also with excerpts from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Through the principle of voice over, the (re)mixed text is paradoxically separated from and simultaneously connected to the performing bodies and their temporality. As a result, the category of liveness and the associated notions of immediacy, Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 117 24 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, London/ New York 1993, p.-146. 25 Id., p.-146. 26 Id., p.-148. 27 Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance. A new aesthetics. London/ New York 2008. 28 Phelan, op. cit., 1993, p.-148. 29 Id., p.-149. 30 Id., p.-148. presence and unmediatedness come into crisis. The dichotomous categories of live and mediatised, long taken for granted in theatre studies, suddenly become fragile. At this point, it is helpful to look at US performance scholar Peggy Phelan’s notion of liveness. In her still highly influential 1993 book Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, Phelan asserts that performances can exist exclusively in the here and now: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”. 24 Performances, in her view, are characterised by being unique and unarchivable: “Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance”. 25 For this reason, Phelan concludes, performances elude the capitalist logic of commodity exchange. “Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. […] It saves nothing; it only spends”. 26 According to Phelan, the specific interchange between performers and spectators (that is, what Fischer-Lichte calls the autopoetic feedback loop 27 ) cannot be preserved in any form of archiving, “there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in”. 28 This thinking subsequently excludes any form of technical reproduction and duplication. It is precisely through their freedom from mediatised forms that performances stand out, says Phelan: “Performance’s independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its greatest strength”. 29 She goes on to outline how it is their non-reproducibility that gives performances their cultural-critical impetus and how in turn, all performances that are bound to techniques of reproduction have only the character of post-sustainability. In fact, Phelan makes a strict distinction between live performances and mediatised events. Closely related to this is her assumption that performances are tied to living actors: “Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies”. 30 From Phelan’s perspective, Kennedy’s works are anything but live perform‐ ances. They are not exclusively bound to live acting bodies, but use excessive reproduction techniques such as pre-recording, voice over and video projec‐ 118 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 31 Cf. Doris Kolesch, “Liveness”, in: Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Matthias Warstat (eds.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, Stuttgart 2014, pp. 199-201. 32 Philip Auslander, Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture, New York 2008, p.-5. 33 Id., p.-8. 34 Id., p.-56. 35 Id., p.-57. tions. Indeed, Kennedy shows that the ontological difference between live and mediatized has become obsolete in the digital age at the latest. Phelan’s view not only fails to recognise the constitutive character that media and reproduction techniques have always had for performances. It also ignores the fact that arts are also characterised by hybridisation, border crossings, and intermedial exchange processes. 31 That the juxtaposition of live and mediated performance is problematic has already been shown by Philip Auslander. In his 1999 book Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Auslander considers live and media performance as two parallel forms that are part of the same cultural economy. 32 According to him, the experience of presence is not exclusively linked to the spatio-temporal co-presence of actors but can also be evoked in media contexts in which such bodily co-presence is not given. Drawing on Phelan’s propositions, he challenges the assumption that live and mediatized are two ontologically sepa‐ rable forms. Rather, he highlights the intertwining and reciprocal dependence of live and mediatized performance. In fact - and this was already apparent in the 1990s - theatre and performance today make use of media technologies almost without exception, whereby the live event itself is framed and shaped by techniques of reproduction. However, in Auslander’s view this specific intertwining between the live and the mediatized must “be understood as historical and contingent, rather than determined by immutable differences”. 33 From this starting point, Auslander suggests that “historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as ‘live’”. 34 Before the advent of sound recordings and motion pictures, he continues, there was no such thing as a live performance. The term “live” makes sense only in relation to an opposite possibility. As an example, Auslander draws on ancient Greek theatre, which he argues was not live because there was no way to record it. Live performance, he concludes with regard to his skepticism toward Phelan’s remarks, “cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since liveness was made visible only by the possibility of technical reproducation”. 35 Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 119 36 Id., p.-59. 37 Ibid. 38 Susanne Kennedy, Women in Trouble, video recording Datum? 39 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains. Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London/ New York 2011, p.-90 Following Auslander’s reflections, one comes to the conclusion that it was the gramophone, or rather the possibility of recording sound, that brought the very concept of “live” into being. Crucially, however, this happened under conditions that allowed a clear differentiation between the pre-existing and the new form of performance. 36 This differentiation was only blurred by the development of broadcast technology, when the “word ‘live’ was pressed into service as part of a vocabulary designed to contain this crisis by describing it and reinstating the former distinction discursively even if it could no longer be sustained experientially”. 37 Women in Trouble evokes this specific media change outlined by Auslander and the discursively transformed conception of live related to it. In quoting and overlaying the medium of the movie (Women in Trouble is the title of a 2009 American comedy film) and the medium of the telenovela, Kennedy and her team reflect on the changing conceptions of authenticity that our thoroughly mediatized present has brought into play: “Angelina Dreem’s life is a soap opera. But her life is also real”. 38 Real and artificial, live and mediatized - all these categories become fragile in Women in Trouble. The digital space overlaps the non-digital space, dichotomous conceptions collide and dissolve in doing so. However, it is precisely in the collision of the recorded and the live that Kennedy’s productions unfold their captivating fascination. Let’s keep in mind what Kennedy’s theatrical work is actually about. Kennedy records a text in advance and plays it back during the performance while the actors, who appear on stage wearing masks, move their lips in sync with the text. The live thus interacts with the recorded. Interestingly, with this clever play of voice over and playback Kennedy touches on a fundamental misunderstanding of performance theory which Rebecca Schneider has so convincingly brought to the fore: “The live act does not necessarily, or does not only, precede that which has been set down, recorded. In the dramatic theatre, the live is a troubling trace of a precedent text and so (herein lies the double trouble) comes afterward, even arguably remains afterward, as a record of the text set in play”. 39 Women in Trouble complicates this double trouble even further. The time of the pre-recorded text, which is enacted during the (live) performance, crashes with the acting time of the synchronously lip-moving perfomers. What is heard and 120 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 40 Ibid. 41 Cf. Friedemann Kreuder, “Maske/ Maskerade”, in: Fischer-Lichte, Kolesch, Warstat (eds.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 203-204, here p.-204. 42 Cf. Yoshinobu Inoura and Toshio Kawatake, The Traditional Theatre of Japan, New York 2006, p.-115. 43 Richard Weihe, Die Paradoxie der Maske. Geschichte einer Form, München 2004, p.-252. what is seen (in terms of the audience) corrupt each other. It is no longer quite clear what is live and what is mediatized. Against this background, let us look at the Oxford American Dictionary’s description of liveness, which Rebecca Schneider draws on. In terms of perform‐ ances, the OAD describes live antonymically, as “not recorded”. In general, “live” is defined here - also antonymically - as “not dead or inanimate; living”. 40 If we think of Women in Trouble in these terms, the time of the recorded - dead - meets the live of the playback performers. But what does this back of the playback text refer to? Is the pre-recorded text behind/ after the time of playback, i.e. the time of mimesis? These questions are further complicated when one adds the temporality of the mask which plays a main role in Women in Trouble and which is fundamentally one of transition. Indeed, in ritual, it establishes relationships between the living and the deceased of a community. In the explicit theatre context, too, the mask identifies the performer as the resurrected dead or as immortal. The play induced by the mask can be understood as a play of the dead, who show themselves as living through the mask. 41 Masks basically oscillate between the supposedly lifeless object and the living body of the performer. Beyond that, however, they also evoke a fundamental blurring or unsettling of the ontological difference between life and death. In Japanese Nō theatre, which according to Yoshinobu Inoura and Toshio Kawatake has over 450 types of masks, 42 one can distinguish between two main categories of masks, those with human facial features (ninsômen) and those with nonhuman expression (isômen). 43 The latter represent demons, vengeful spirits, ghosts and gods. In the ritual performance practice of the Okina, i.e. the prelude to the Nō-play, this inseparable relationship between the earthly and the supernatural is actually enacted. Here, the mask is first consecrated or initiated in a specific ceremony. For this purpose, the player (shite) puts on the so-called Hakushikijô mask, which is traditionally a white mask, and makes contact with it. He meditatively immerses himself in it. Interestingly, this contact happens in front of an audience, so it is integrated into a performance context. Even before the dancer leaves the stage, he returns the mask to its box. Consequently, the mask in this context does not induce the transition from player to role. Rather, it indicates the transition between everyday life, ritual and play on the one hand, Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 121 44 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, in: Signs 28, 3 (2003), pp. 187-215, here 202. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Id., p.-203. 48 Id., p.-212. and between the human sphere and the beyond on the other. So how does the specific agency of the millennia-old Nō-mask tradition relate to Kennedy’s aesthetics of the silicone mask? 3 On a parahuman theatre In Women in Trouble, the mask plays an essential role in producing a peculiar aesthetic of the durative. The phenomenon of that specific theatrical time, I argue, is produced through what Karen Barad has called agential intra-actions: “Agential intra-actions are specific causal material enactments that may or may not involve ‘humans’”. 44 It is through such practices, Barad maintains, that the differential boundaries between “human” and “non-human” and between “nature” and “culture” are constituted. Phenomena, in her view, are “constitutive of reality” 45 . Reality, in turn, “is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but ‘things’-in-phenomena. The world is intra-ac‐ tivity in its differential mattering” 46 . Indeed, it is through the intra-action of mask, bodily movement, recorded text assemblage, voice over and all the human and non-human resources involved in that very process, that the phenomenon of theatrical time comes to matter in Women in Trouble. In this context, the boundaries between human and non-human are simultaneously constituted and deconstructed. The agency that Kennedy’s production brings to light refers to “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world”. 47 In resisting the belief of nature being passive and unchanging, it appeals to a feminist thinking that actively combats the nature/ culture dualism. According to this thinking, matter is not a solid entity, but rather “substance in its intra-active becoming - not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” 48 . Following this observation but at the same time distancing myself from Barad’s notion of the posthuman, I argue for understanding Kennedy’s theatre as parahuman. As we have seen, Kennedy does not dismiss the human being at all. The performers’ bodies are central to her theatre in that they become material. At the same time, though, the performers’ bodies are not meant to embody someone or something. These bodies act beyond representation, identification and function, in a sense, as energetic absorption surfaces. They are nothing more 122 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 49 Cf. Günter Zobel, “Von Segen spendenden Alten, ruhelosen Geistern und zu bannenden Dämonen. Zur Herkunft und Charakteristik der Nō-Masken”, in: Ulrike Dembski and Alexandra Steiner (eds.), Nō-Theater. Kostüme und Masken, Vienna 2003, pp. 41-61, here p. 47. On the differences and similarities of the masque in No-theatre and in ancient Greek tragedy cf. David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge 2007. 50 Cf. Rebecca Schneider, “New Materialism and Performance Studies”. in: TDR 59, 4 (2015), pp. 7-17, here p.-10. and nothing less than (co-)playing matter within a broad structure of performing entities. Likewise, by drawing on masks and reproduction techniques such as playback and voice-over, Kennedy and her team foreground the agency of the non-human actors. By doing so, the performance brings into circulation a way of thinking about theatre that is still not common in performance studies. In current discourse, there is agreement that objects can be animated. Yet, the prevailing assumption is that it is always the human being who must breathe life into these things - for example, it is the puppeteer who moves the marionette. In Kennedy’s work, by contrast, it is the other way around. Here, the spoken text dictates the lip movements of the performers, while the mask influences the gestural play of the performers and guides their body language. By choreographing their human interactants, the technical equipment and the masks used in Women in trouble do actually act. In fact, they unfold an immense agency. The specific agency of that acting material in Kennedy’s productions becomes visible above all with a view to theatrical traditions that are located beyond the European cultural sphere. In the ritual prelude of the Nō theatre, the Okina, already outlined above, the player (shite) permits the mask to guide him; the mask becomes his play director, so to speak. This continues in the actual play. Unlike in the European context of personare, the player of the Nō play does not want to be heard through the mask or overcome it, but rather to be heard with it. 49 Something similar can be observed for the mask in the context of the Balinese topeng tradition. The US-American performance scholar John Emigh, who has trained in the Balinese technique himself, notes in this regard: 50 When a Balinese topeng performer picks up a mask being considered for purchase, he (or, rarely in this tradition, she) holds the mask in the right hand, fingers lightly over the carved hairline, the wrist forming an imaginary “neck”. As the perfomer gazes upon the mask, turning it this way and that, making it move to a silent music, he is assessing its potential life. He searches for a meeting-place between himself and whatever life is inherent in the mask’s otherness. If he is successful, then a bonding takes place that will allow him to let that potential life flow through his own body. If Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 123 51 John Emigh, “Mask and Body”, in: Lars Denicke, Peter Thaler and Bernd Scherer (eds.), Prepare for Pictopia, Berlin 2009, pp. 86-91, here p.-87-88. 52 Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, “Introduction: Object Lessons”, in: Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy (eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, London 2014, pp.1-17, here p.-6. 53 Cf. Schneider, op. cit., 2015, p.-9. 54 Benjamin Gillespie, “Que(e)ring Theatrical Objects”, in: Schweitzer and Zerdy (eds.), op. cit., 2014, pp.149-169, here p.-151. 55 Ibid. he finds that place of congruence between his physical and spiritual resources and the potential life of the mask, then a living amalgam is created: a character, a persona. 51 This description highlights the fact that the mask possesses potential life. Its agency, however, requires intra-action with its performer. Equally, the agency of the performer requires the object of the mask and the playing techniques associated with it. Such a perspective, I argue with Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, “refuses to consign props, costumes, set pieces, and other theatrical objects to their ‘traditional’ role as background or stage dressing and sees them instead as key players in all performances - as active agents performing alongside rather then behind or in service to human performers”. 52 In theatre and performance studies, however, such approaches have not yet fully taken hold. The majority of theatre scholars still assume that living actors are needed to bring a performance to life. Props, costumes, wigs, or lighting are ascribed a servant function. Taking the opposite perspective and acknowledging that things are capable of directing and choreographing human behavior is far less common. The majority of scholars still generally think of performance as a work made by living beings who are present in and at the time. As Rebecca Schneider asserts: “For most, if living humans are not present to a performance themselves, then living humans must hide somewhere in the wings of actions, or be the ones to ultimately bear agential responsibility for the actions of objects or animals or plants or even […] algorithms”. 53 The fact is, however, that people have never acted alone on stage. They have always been surrounded by props, cloths, technical devices, i.e. “things acting in an as themselves” 54 , as Benjamin Gillespie puts it. This kind of acting evokes a specific temporality. Props such as masks are usually used in different productions, they have a part in several performances. In between, they survive in prop warehouses, basements, i.e. somewhere beyond the spotlight. As “rematerialized immaterial” 55 , they provide the human audi‐ ence and actors with materialized memories of immaterial performances. At the same time, Gillespie goes on to say, they are existing outside “this all-too-human 124 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) 56 Ibid. 57 David B. Morris, “Gothic Sublimity”, in: New Literary History 16, 2 (1985), pp. 299-319, here p.-307. 58 Anthropologist Rebecca Bryant has proposed the notion of uncanny present for the temporality of crisis. Cf. Rebecca Bryant, “On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present”, in: History & Anthropology 29, 1 (2016), pp. 19-31. framework” 56 . Consequently, props are time travelers. They vagabond between theatrical time, the times of the (dramatic) stories they tell, the time of the archive and the time of memory. In doing so, they evoke something that is inaccessible but which paradoxically lives on in them. Yet, what is produced by the agential interplay of masks, technical means of reproduction and human play? What does Kennedy’s unmistakable aesthetic trigger in the viewers? Many theatre critics have associated Kennedy’s aesthetic with the uncanny. Christoph Leibold even used the term in the title of his laudation for Susanne Kennedy in the course of the awarding of the 3sat Prize in 2014. The uncanny, says David Morris referring to Freud’s notion of das Unheimliche, “derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but - on the contrary - from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it”. 57 Indeed, both the masks and the reproductive technologies employed in Kennedy’s productions refer to this paradoxical relationship between the uncanny and the familiar. Together, they arouse a specific distrust: What is human, what is machine? Are we dealing with “real” or virtual space? Where does the performer’s “natural” skin end and an artificial one begin? And yet there is something more that has an uncanny effect on the recipients of Women in Trouble, and that is presence itself. (Material) presence, here, becomes unfamiliar because of the aforementioned rejection of conventional Aristotelian dramaturgy. Instead, Kennedy’s signature aesthetic is guided by the principles of loop, repetition, and interruption. Her dramaturgy eludes the functional logic of our biographical memory, which locates events in time and space. This specific aesthetic makes it impossible for viewers to anticipate anything like the future. The present, then, appears uncanny precisely because the connections between past, present, and future (that normally allow us to anticipate) are severed or called into question. 58 4 Instead of a conclusion Theatrical objects like props, masks and technical equipment do not only act. As Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy have emphasised, these objects also transform the socio-cultural, economic, and theatrical conditions in which Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble 125 59 Cf. Schweitzer and Zerdy, op. cit., 2014, p.-4. 60 In fact, all theatre venues in the German-speaking world that were built or rebuilt between 1820 and 1970 have a significant need for energy optimisation. In 2019, the Technical University of Cologne conducted a study showing that the average electricity demand of a theatre venue is between 200 and 2.000 gigawatt hours per year, depending on its size. The most power is consumed by headlight illumination, followed by ven‐ tilation systems (Cf. the research project Energetische Querschnittserhebung deutscher Theaterspielstätten, which was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) under the funding program Research for Energy-Optimized Building (EnOB) and headed by Eva-Maria Pape. The following venues participated: Bonn Opera House, Krefeld Theatre, Detmold Theatre, Freiburg Theatre, Theatre des Westens Berlin, Nordhausen Theatre, Osnabrück Theatre, Nuremberg Opera House, Nuremberg Schauspielhaus, Mannheim Theatre, Schwerin Theatre, Chemnitz Opera House, Chemnitz Schauspielhaus and, for intensive monitoring, Scharoun Theatre Wolfsburg. For the concrete results, see the final project report: https: / / akoeln.de/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2019/ 11/ THKoeln_AbschlussberichtTheatrespi elstaetten.pdf (accessed 9 July 2021). they participate and change those who draw their (scientific) attention to them. 59 It is this specific agency of props that Susanne Kennedy exploits with her parahuman aesthetic of the interplay between actor, mask and playback. However, to call Kennedy’s theatre parahuman is not only to acknowledge props as agential. It also means to acknowledge the collaboration of resources such as synthetic material and electricity, which are massively consumed in the theatre field. 60 Recognising and valorising them as actors means adopting an ecocritical perspective on theatre. Kennedy’s theatre, which does not (exclusively) place the human actor at the center, invites us to recognise all these resources as co-players. It challenges us to problematise the exploitation of human and non-human resources in the arts and to search for new solutions in making theatre. 126 Silke Felber (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice On Recent Theatre Projects by Susanne Kennedy Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) Fig. 1: Oracle by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2020, © Judith Buss The human face is an empty power, a field of death… after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken and breathed, one still has the impression that it hasn’t even begun to say what it is and what it knows… - Antonin Artaud Infinite games: Exploring the fabrication of (visual) culture [Introduction] Playing with masks whilst using a wide variety of forms, materials and varia‐ tions has been one of the most striking features of Susanne Kennedy’s theatre for several years - starting with her 2012 production Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt 1 Hans Belting, Face and Mask. A Double History [2013], transl. Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansel, Princeton 2017. 2 Id., p.-1 and p.-32. 3 Cf. Richard Weihe, Die Paradoxie der Maskerade. Geschichte einer Form, Munich 2005; Christine Kruse (ed.), Maske, Maskerade und die Kunst der Verstellung. Vom Barock bis zur Moderne, Wiesbaden 2014; see also Manfred Brauneck, Masken - Theater, Kult und Brauchtum: Strategien des Verbergens und Zeigens, Bielefeld 2020. (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) and her 2014 theatrical adaptation of Fassbinder’s movie Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why does Mr. R. run Amok? ), with the make-up and silicone masks used therein, to the completely pupated manga figures in The Suicide Sisters (2017), to the synthetic, ‘faceless’ faces of the digital mask with which an artificial intelligence appears in her installation project Oracle (2020) - to name just a few examples. Beyond these individual productions, the veiling and masking of the actors involved as well as the examination of the aesthetics, mediality and the cultural technique of masks and masking is a recurring feature of this director’s work. Thus, a very old theatrical device, known both within the European as well as non-European theatrical traditions, is focused on and worked with. At the same time, as this chapter shows, Kennedy’s ‘mask plays’ refer to virulent image practices in contemporary culture which problematise the relationship between the human face, the ‘image of all images’, and masks (as its staging and media-facilitated representation) - as art historian Hans Belting has shown in his much noted anthropological study of images Face and Mask, this relationship having always been ambivalent throughout cultural history. 1 A face, according to Belting, is something that each of us has. Nevertheless, it only becomes a face when encountering others, a face which comes into contact, looks at and is looked at itself. One could say that it is both the figurehead as well as business card of one’s identity and, in a very complex way, it is part of the visualised cultural practice. In this respect, the cultural history of the face is first and foremost a “history of images”. 2 Theatre has also played a prominent role in this history of (visual) culture: from the ancient, ritualised mask theatre to the commedia dell’arte, or from the allegedly ‘maskless’ theatre in the wake of the European Enlightenment where the art of the actors was seen as being able to shape their own physiognomy, face and facial expression into a ‘character mask’ in accordance with a stage char‐ acter, all the way to the wide range of experimental and playful uses of masks in the theatre of the avant-garde. 3 And nowadays, different once again, a diverse practice of masking and masquerades is unfolding within contemporary theatre, media as well as performance art and popular culture, which, in playful-critical reflection of social power relations and their visual representations, aims to 128 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 4 See Deborah Bell (ed.), Masquerade. Essays on Tradition and Innovation Worldwide. Jefferson, North Carolina 2015. 5 Public talk between Susanne Kennedy and Ersan Mondtag within the framework of the exhibition I am a Problem, 23 Sept. 2017 - 18 Febr. 2018, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (15 Nov. 2017), www.youtube.com/ watch? v=DlwCfG4FQMg (accessed 1 Dec. 2020). show and performatively test alternative, gender-critical and polymorphous identities. 4 In my opinion, it is in these theatrical and image-theoretical contexts that Kennedy’s theatre needs to be discussed. In various interviews and artist talks, the director has, for her part, commented several times on her special interest regarding the subject of masks and masquerades. Her theatre work and the image of humans that she explores in it - or rather: adopts in order to artistically redesign it as a concept no longer committed to humanistic thinking - seems like a series of experiments that she continues using and developing from one production to the next. One could describe her approach as an effort to dissect the theatre into an aesthetic structure or art-producing ‘machine’, cut up into its individual elements, as it were, to be able to examine these, thereby changing the rules in the process. Aspects of her productions, which are always intermedial, are a quite basic confrontation with the spatial and temporal dimensions of theatre as well as with different forms of staging. Again and again, however, the question regarding the character on stage, of the relationship between body and voice and, in general, of the indicators of a character’s identity is raised: [T]here is a problem already when someone comes on stage and says ‘I’ […]. In theatre, this step is pretty much ignored and you go much further before you even start at the very beginning - at this zero point - where a person comes on stage and says ‘I’. […] That’s when I started asking myself questions: How am I supposed to do stage theatre at all if there is already this mega question at the very beginning: What is it that actually defines this ‘I’ at all: that someone speaks, that someone has a voice? 5 The question as to the identity markers of a character does of course not only concern speech and voice but also visual features, namely body imagery and, in particular, the face. Correspondingly, this also raises the question - posed by Belting within the terms of his anthropology-based theory of picture-making - of the relationship between face and mask. How, then, does an ‘I’ appear visually on or off the theatre stage and what function does the face assume - in the context of contemporary visual practice - as a medium of expression, identity, (self-)representation as well as communication? Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 129 6 Susanne Kennedy, “The infinite game of becoming”, in: Kaatje de Geest, Carmen Hornborstel and Milo Rau (eds.), Why Theatre? [NTGent, Golden Book V], Berlin 2020, pp. 132-134. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1972], transl. Robert Hurley, Marc Seem and Helen R. Lane (1977), Minneapolis, MN 2009. 8 Kennedy, op. cit., 2020, p.-132. 9 Id., pp. 133-134. 10 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double [1938], transl. Victor Corti, London 2013. 1 “Not needing a face to cry out tragic tears”. Transformations of the protagonist in Kennedy’s theatre In a text entitled “The infinite game of becoming”, published in the book Why Theatre? (2020) 6 , Kennedy sketches out her artistic view on the theatre as a manifesto. Using quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus  7 as well as references to Antonin Artaud, Kennedy outlines the philosophical, theatrical and theoretical discursive frame of reference of her thinking. In her design for a theatre of the future the “centre stage seems empty”, 8 whereas the protagonist and his/ her/ its body starts to transform itself into a ‘non-pro‐ tagonist’ and attempts to free itself from the binary gender code, the cultural hierarchy of order and, potentially, the anthropocentric cultural patters as well: But now! Suddenly in the middle of his performance, the face of our protagonist dis‐ torts, his words become slurry, unrecognizable, his movements that have been strong and decisive become weak and lifeless. […] he bursts into thousands of fragments! […] Our protagonist is ‘becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; becoming-molecular of all kinds, becoming-particles’. In the end he has become imperceptible. His becoming is never-ending and never finished. […] He is in the process of becoming and no longer a ‘he’, but a ‘she’ or an ‘it’. He or she or it has developed a body without organs. He no longer needs his voice to tell us how he killed his father and married his mother. He no longer needs a face to cry his tragic tears […] Our protagonist who stopped being a protagonist approaches the unknowable and the unpredictable […] [His/ her/ its] body can no longer be called human - it becomes a multiplicity of possible new connections and affects with other bodies and, more broadly, with the Earth itself. This is pure theatre-… 9 “This infinite play is not restricted by time and the rules change constantly”, Kennedy continues, “The play has no director, no script, no final outcome. It only has non-protagonists”. Now, after the tragic hero has left the stage, doesn’t have a face anymore, the question that is posed is with what type of countenance the non-protagonist will appear when he/ she/ it enters the stage. Here we should have a look at Artaud’s theory of a theatre of cruelty 10 that forms the basis for 130 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 11 Kennedy, op. cit., 2020, p. 132. Artaud wrote the text for a presentation of his portraits and drawings at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, 1947; for a full reprint see: “The human face” [“Le visage humain”], transl. Robert McKeon, in: Margit Rowell (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. Exhibition catalogue, MoMA New York 2017, pp. 99-102. 12 See also Belting, op. cit., 2017, p.-115. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of an organ-less body and that Kennedy quotes from at the end of her manifesto: “The human face is an empty power, a field of death” is what it says and it might “not even [have] begun to say what it is and what it knows”. 11 Artaud, who parallel to his theatre work worked on sketches and spent many years in psychiatric clinics due to his manifold illnesses, again and again examined and questioned his own face in the sketches and drawings that he produced. His words speak of the insight that a picture or portrait cannot depict the face and that it inevitably misses the complexity, incoherencies and inconsistencies of human identity that can be displayed in faces. 12 Seen in this way, images - especially since they are able to freeze faces and turn them into mere surfaces - create masks or even death masks and, to a certain extent, facial fictions as well. Taking this idea further, the face can in turn be understood as being a focal point of cultural, artistic, mythical and religious as well as official and intimate imaginaries, in which the present and the absent, the near and the far, the past and the future all intersect. The theatre, strictly speaking, gives a stage to the cultural work of the face, mask and identity of the person or figure and presents these in actu. Thus, the stage can be interpreted as a kind of ‘mask universe’ in which visual fictions, images of gods, ancestors, the dead, the human and the non-human as well as various practices of masking and masquerades are reflected. A seemingly endless array of playful possibilities opens up. Kennedy, who describes theatre-making as an ‘infinite game’, apparently seeks to make this a productive in her productions. As one can see in the following series of case studies, this is done as a kind of exploratory practice, using different approaches that are indeed constantly varying and changing. This is also valid for the rules being adhered to or implemented for the production. 2 Exploring faces and masks. Aesthetics, artistic production modes and collaboration [Three case studies] The following observations focus on Kennedy’s productions at the Münchner Kammerspiele where variform designs of masks as a medium and as a visual artefact have become quite conspicuous, especially since Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (2014). Equally worthy of a mention, however, are her productions at the Volksbühne Berlin, such as the performative installation Coming Society Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 131 13 Cf. Henk Slager, “Differential Iconology”, in: Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, London and New York 2011, pp. 333- 352. 14 Cf. “‘Bewusste Evolution’, Susanne Kennedy in discussion with Leif Randt”, in: Das Wetter. Magazin für Text & Musik; Sonderheft zum Ende der Intendanz Matthias Lilienthal an den Münchner Kammerspielen 5 (2020), pp. 50-57, here p. 55: “My team is a very, very important part of my work. […] I have a team of artists around me. I have had a very long relationship with my sound designer Richard Jansen. […] Then other people came along, like the video designer Rodrik Biersteker, the set designer Lena Newton - all very important people for me. And for a few years now I have been working with my partner Markus Selg, who comes from the visual arts. […] My team has become a kind of tribe, and it is still growing with the actors, performers and dancers who join and notice that there is an energy between us that they can dock onto”. (2019) where an ensemble of performers with rigidly distorted, alienated faces wandered around the stage space between the audience - as if they were the undead or avatars temporarily beamed into the material world. The use of masks and masquerades appears in all of these stagings as a cultural technique that does not really seem to conceal something (the face of a former protagonist? ). Rather, something is produced through them since they are capable of generating visual phenomena or also of calling up and medially transporting what was previously unseen or rejected. 13 In this sense, according to the thesis, their reflection and experimental applications of this cultural technique play a key function in Kennedy’s ‘theatre of non-protagonists’. Kennedy herself does not use the term ‘artistic research’ (or at least not explicitly) but it is suggested here as a description of the approach she takes, especially since it is not only idiosyncratic from an aesthetic point of view with regard to staging and above all scenography (i.e. space and costume concept, make-up design as well as lighting, video and also acoustics), but also deviates from the usual theatrical processes in terms of production methods. Kennedy herself emphasises all the more the importance of her artistic team which she describes as “a kind of tribe”, including set designer Lena Newton, costume designers Lotte Goos and Teresa Vergho as well as visual artist Markus Seel, who have all been working together for years: “You can’t just talk about my work anymore - it’s our work”. 14 Just as important as the team of artists for the process of staging theatrical productions are the staff in the workshops, who in turn contribute their knowledge regarding materials and design as well as their experience in craftsmanship. As Brigitte Frank, head of the make-up and masks department at the Münchner Kammerspiele, notes, Kennedy productions 132 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 15 The author of this chapter has had several conversations with Brigitte Frank on site in the workshops of the Kammerspiele and also by telephone about her collaboration with Susanne Kennedy. The following quotes are from this research and especially from the conversation on 12 Oct. 2020. are always particularly elaborate for her department and each time a different challenge is put forward that poses new questions. 15 In the following, three Kennedy productions will be presented with the question of the mask as a scenographic element playing a central role. As already mentioned, the chosen, special form of collaboration (“in the tribe” and a certain dialogical continuity from play to play) as well as the context (here: the Münchner Kammerspiele as an institution and subsidised municipal theatre, the workshops as well as the design and technical knowledge available there) decisively shape the productions with regard to aesthetics. Thus, the cases studies focus on the ‘making of ’ and the production side of these stagings. Everyday faces becoming surreal: Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? A prelude to a whole series of explorations of the mask and masking as a scenographic technique was Kennedy’s Munich production of “Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt” / “Purgatory in Ingolstadt” (2013) where the intended effect - a far-reaching rigidity and emphasised artificiality of the actors’ faces - was initially achieved with make-up masks. Another feature of this production that was to become characteristic of her work was the separation of body and voice: The playback of the pre-recorded text, which was lip-synced by the actors during the performance, became an ‘acoustic masquerade’. The follow-up project in Munich, “Why does Mr. R. run Amok? ”, based on the film of the same name by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, took up the formal means that had already been tried and tested in this manner, only to reinforce them even further. This film, when was shot in only 13 days in 1970, was based at the time on a very loose script and on improvisations. It relates the story of the private and professional frustrations of Mr R. and of the narrowness and monotony of his petty bourgeois existence, which leads to the aggressive outburst in the wake of which he kills a neighbour, his wife as well as his son and, finally, himself. For her version, Kennedy had the speech text of the film transcribed with all the half-sentences, empty phrases, slips of the tongue, “ohs” and “ehs” and this time around it was not spoken by her actors, but by amateurs (including theatre employees from stage technology, props, dramaturgy and even the parents of an assistant director). Concerning the acoustic level, a visual concept had to be designed, hand in hand with this setting. Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 133 16 See note 15. 17 Wearing’s series, entitled “Me as …” (2008-2018), is a fine art and photography project in which she portrays herself in a performative manner, for example, as Marcel Duchamp, Claude Cahun or Robert Mapplethorpe; see M. Kathryn Shields, “The Drama of Identity: Masking and Evolving Notions of Self in Contemporary Photography” [Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Kimiko Yoshida, Nikki S. Lee, Gillian Wearing, and Jillian Mayer], in: Bell, op. cit., 2015, pp. 196-214, especially pp. 205-206. See also: Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask. Exhibition Catalogue, National Portrait Gallery London, Princeton 2017. Fig. 2: Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? by Susanne Kennedy, rehearsal scene (with Çiğdem Teke, Christian Löber, Walter Hess), Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2014. © Julian Roeder “The figures have to somehow be surreal” was, as reported by Brigitte Frank, a guiding principle for the costume designer of the production, Lotte Goos. 16 During the design stage, a lot of research was undertaken in the neighbouring field of the visual arts. Amongst others, the disturbing portrait studies and collages of Marlene Dumas were among the impulses being used. In addition, the photographic (self-)portraits and video productions of the British artist Gillian Wearing, who very often works with silicone prosthetic masks in front of her camera, 17 was a further inspiration. During the dialogue with director and production team Goos designed a ‘moodboard’ and, from the very start, the 134 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 18 One supplier of masks - also outside of stage work - on occasions such as carnival, Halloween, festivals, theme parties and other widespread practices of masking is the commercially successful company Maskworld (www.maskworld.com), founded in 1999 in Berlin. Theatre and film productions also use their services; see note 15. 19 Kennedy once explained her thoughts on this, in conversation with a theatre critic, as follows: “[E]ven when the mask is off, even when the actor stands on stage with his own face, a mask still exists. Reality is then also just another shell covering the truth […]. What is the reality we believe in? Are the faces more truthful? ”, quoted in: Ekaterina Kel, “Im Reich der Gummigesichter und falschen Schnurrbärte. Die Maskenwerkstatt der Kammerspiele ist ein Archiv der sonderbarsten Dinge. Ein Besuch.”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung (26 April 2019). scenographic concept of the production intended that all of the figures wear skin-coloured, rubber-like masks. Buying ready-made masks - this also would have been an option - was quickly dispensed with. 18 The idea was much more to actually design the masks in accordance with the facial physiognomy of the actors so that these, as if they were copies, are basically ‘doubled’ (and the mask portrays the face as a ‘social mask’). 19 As far as the costumes were concerned, the players were to appear in everyday clothes. In terms of colour, Goos designed the costumes for a total of 26 characters, which were embodied by 11 actors, in muted shades of grey, blue and beige, with a few exceptions. Another aspect was that several actors, in an alternating manner, slipped into the part of Mr. R. and wore his black leather jacket, jeans and brown wig which could also be interpreted as a hint: everyone is potentially “Mr. R.”. At the same time, this splitting up of the main character was a game being played with the audience’s perception: In which reality does the catastrophe that is being exposed here really occur? For the setting and event location for Mr. R.’s story, Lena Newton, the set designer, designed a wood-panelled room, a kind of reception or waiting hall, with two small windows near the ceiling, some houseplants and a monitor at the top right (which doubled the space as if it were a ‘picture in a picture’, as well as creating refractions): An abstract of a dreary, hermetic everyday world in which the figures’ lives and their identities (here emphatically displayed in a cumbersome manner) visibly slip away. Frank describes the artistic realisation of the concept and also the crafting of the masks as a complex, exploratory process that required several steps which were undertaken in team work. One of the first steps, after the conceptual discussions between the director, costume designer and make-up artist, was to test various mask prototypes that were made of different materials (latex, silicone, warm foam) and had different colourings during the set rehearsal. Here the acting-out possibilities and aesthetic effects were examined together with the actors. How do the masks fit? Is the play actually changed through this and Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 135 how does it affect the acting? What facial expressions remain possible? How quickly can the masks be put on and taken off, if this is deemed necessary, during scene changes? After further specifications were defined in the second concept rehearsal (and here the decision was made in favour of silicone masks), the production process began in the workshop: An impression was taken of each actor’s face, plaster moulds were made in order to produce masks by pouring silicone into these moulds and a plaster head was made of each single one in order to model the masks. Further steps: Mask rehearsals and photo studies with the players in the workshop in order to further adapt and configure these, the colouring of these and, if required, combining them with hair and wig parts before all of the actors could actually rehearse on stage with the completed masks. A special feature in Kennedy’s productions is that the masks are consistently treated as an artistic artefact and a constituent part of the play. During the research, design and production stages they are optimised in terms of their theatrical qualities and the desired effects that the director is looking for. As such, they are therefore always integrated into the actual staging as well as production work. Fig. 3: Costume designer Teresa Vergho (left), Susanne Kennedy (middle) and Brigitte Frank (right), head of the make-up and mask department, during the preparations for Drei Schwestern, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2019. © Alessandra Schellnegger / Süd‐ deutsche Zeitung 136 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 20 Quoted in: Ekaterina Kel, “Gib Gummi. Susanne Kennedys Theater-Universum”, in Süddeutsche Zeitung (26 April 2019). 21 Ibid. 22 Cf. Laurie Simmons’ website, especially “Kigurumi, Dollers, and How We See” (2014), www.lauriesimmons.net/ photographs (accessed 4 December 2020). 23 Based on a phone conversation by the author with Teresa Vergho, 4 December 2020. “These are all masks in the furthest sense” is how Kennedy generally summar‐ ised the approach taken for her character concepts when discussing the subject with critic Ekaterina Kel. 20 “Everything that distorts the actor’s body, that puts back, shrouds, hides it is of interest to Kennedy” says Kel. Thereby she also distorts the actors’ speech through playback techniques and other sound effects, she sticks them into impressive costumes that distract one from the actual physical body. As a consequence, the acting process on stage has to be re-learned. “These are beings of their own”, says the director. 21 Kennedy and her team are dealing with the mask, which is one of the oldest elements known to theatre. At the same time, they obviously seek the visual field of reference for the design and staging of their masks outside the theatre and its traditions, namely - and also quite explicitly - in the visual arts as well as in contemporary, everyday popular culture as well as the image worlds of digital and social media. Staging absence: The Suicide Sisters During work on the production The Suicide Sisters (based on motifs of the 1993 book The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides), now with costume designer Teresa Vergho also having joined Kennedy’s team, sources of inspiration were, amongst others, the image motifs “Dollers” (with the huge painted, sightless eyes) of the American object artist, photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons. 22 There were also recognisable references to the visual language of Japanese cartoons, manga comics and mascot costumes (‘kigurumi’) and, more associatively, to the iconography of the customs surrounding ‘Día de los Muertos’, the Mexican day of remembrance for the dead. 23 Even when compared to the novel, the production was largely freely associa‐ tive. It is about a man’s memories of his youth in the 1970s and of five teenage girls, one of whom commits suicide; the others are then increasingly regimented by their parents and locked up at home. There they create a dream world for themselves but they also decide to commit suicide. All die in the same night by various means - hanging, poisoning by pills, suffocation and the inhalation of toxic gases. The story is told from the perspective of the neighbourhood boys who voyeuristically watched all of this happening from a distance. Later, they kept devotional objects (e.g. bras and hairbrushes), but the girls themselves Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 137 24 Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Der blaue Blick der Manga-Mädchen”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung (30 March 2017). remain a mystery. Accordingly, the production, which also uses texts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), is designed as a fantasy focussing on the secrets of these sisters who were on the threshold of life and death and, as one critic wrote, “as a drug trip, a journey and an evocation of spirits, presented on the broad ridge between art and theatre, installation and performance”. 24 Fig. 4: The Suicide Sisters by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2017. The photo shows three of the four ‘Suicide Sisters’ and, without mask, the amateur actor Ingmar Thilo. Costume design: Teresa Vergho. © Judith Buss The room, designed by Lena Newton, looked like a showcase or walk-in shrine, covered with brightly coloured pictures (of women’s faces and bodies, anatomic representations) and video projections (including make-up tutorials for young girls), neon lights as well as climbing plants. When the shrine opened, a female corpse under glass could be seen in the background as a waxen doll. Teresa Vergho dressed the figures of the sisters, as one review rightly put it, “like heavenly comic heroines (…); one thinks of Black Forest girls, Mexican women on the Day of the Dead, Ukrainian politicians, Hindu temple-goers on high 138 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 25 Ibid. 26 This, too, required a special process; here impressions were also taken of the actors’ faces, plaster heads were made and the masks were moulded, this time with plastic foam. This material had to be heated or, as Brigitte Frank says, “baked”, in order to harden it and be able to further work on it. Since Frank worked in film before she came to the theatre, she has a broad knowledge of design. Especially for Kennedy productions, this craftsmanship and application of different techniques is an indispensable part of the staging work: “Anyone who has worked once with the Kammerspiele’s make-up workshop is spoilt for choice”, says Kennedy, quoted in Kel, op. cit., 2019. 27 In addition to reviews that praised the eccentric visual conception of the production, Michael Skasa, for example, described it as a “pure magic show” that lacked a deeper examination of the material. Michael Skasa, “Tote in der Bonbonniere. Susanne Kennedy inszeniert ‘The Virgin Sisters’ an den Münchner Kammerspielen”, in: Die Zeit 15 (6 April 2017). 28 Belting, op. cit., 2017, p. 10. See also Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body [2001], transl. Thomas Dunlap, Princeton 2014. 29 Cf. Weihe, op. cit., 2005, pp. 97-152; also see Belting, op. cit., 2017, p.-6. holidays and much more”. 25 Under the masks (only with mouth openings but no eye openings), which covered the face and the entire head, as well as the costumes, the actors (an all-male cast, gender cross-dressed) disappeared completely, and here, too, playback and voiceover were used (spoken by an actress). And these masks were also made, this time of hard foam, in the make-up and mask department of the Kammerspiele. 26 The production was controversially received by both the audience and the critics. 27 With regard to the question being pursued here of the aesthetics and performative and referential functions of the mask in Kennedy’s productions, as well as their aim of deconstructing figures beyond cultural orders of gender, age or drawn boundaries between human/ non-human, this production is nev‐ ertheless particularly interesting. In particular, the use of the mask here refers to cultural-anthropological connections between image production and death as described by Hans Belting. According to Belting, the mask emerged from the cult of the dead in prehistoric times and was “invented to restore a lost face to the corpse”. 28 This most ancient of functions of the mask in cultural history, to give the dead or absent a face (i.e. a ‘loaned face’, which is admittedly an image) and thus to bring the memory back to mind, lived on in cult and ritual practices intended to bring ancestors and spirits to life. In the theatre of ancient Greece, which was associated with the god Dionysus (also called the ‘mask god’), face and mask formed a “prosopic unity”. 29 The ‘paradoxical’ relationship between mask and face or mask wearer, as a ‘dialectic of showing and concealing’ that also shapes our perceptions today, on the other hand, formed much later: “Not until the advent of European culture and the social history of the modern era was the mask first understood not as a substitute but rather as a facsimile, a disguise Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 139 30 Belting, op. cit., 2017, p.-3. and means of concealing the face”, 30 in other words: as a medium of disguising oneself. A (re)consideration of the mask, as Kennedy obviously undertakes, in turn offers an occasion to reflect on how we as humans actually interact today in relation with other ‘embodied’ images such as sculptures, paintings, photographs, films and more. If we add the question of non-European mask forms and practices as well as how masks are dealt with in today’s digital media era, the variety of phenomena and forms becomes almost inexhaustible. But it is always the face - whether as counterpart, model or only when one questions it - to which the mask is directed. One could say that Kennedy’s theatre artistically explores these aspects (discussed in research in terms of an anthropology-based theory of images) with the scenographic means described above. Masks as an enigma: Drei Schwestern Kennedy’s works seem to relate to each other almost as if in a series of experiments, and it is precisely in the examination of face and mask that, on closer inspection, various accentuations can be found which - in their search for a theatre of ‘non-protagonists’ - obviously follow their own artistic logic. For example, in the production of The Suicide Sisters just described, there were scenes in which the sisters, completely pupated with their masks and costumes and quasi staged as the ‘living dead’, met the former neighbour’s boy, who, now old, appeared without a mask. By contrasting the ‘naked’ human face (with its ageing skin and transience) and the mask (which belongs to the imagination and the supra-temporal) (Fig. 4), the dimension of time as well as different temporalities was also brought into play - mediated via the mask or the masklessness. It was precisely this aspect that was taken up again in the production Drei Schwestern, based on motifs from Anton Chekhov’s drama. The material or thematic reference point chosen in this case was a theatre classic that has been staged again and again, ever since its first performance more than a hundred years ago. The play focusses on three sisters who live in the province and dream of a better future in Moscow. However, they will never escape their dreary lives and the play is also about the passing of time and reflecting on this. In Kennedy’s production, the three figures that were standing in for the sisters had no faces: dressed in white hoop skirts and headscarves, where there would be a face there was only a dark piece of cloth: a black surface. Their abode (stage: Lena Newton, video: Rodrick Biersteker, lighting: Rainer Casper): a rectangular white box that seemed to float, framed by video images of billowing, pastel clouds. In other scenes and in the glaring light, one saw bald figures (nine players in total were involved) wearing uniform (in this case ready-bought) latex 140 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 31 This passage is translated differently in the various English versions of the play; cf. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, in: Anton Chekhov, Plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and four vaudevilles, transl. Michael Frayn [1978], reprint Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 2014, p. 208: “Many years from now, you tell us, life on earth will be astonishingly beautiful. True…”. masks, reminiscent of mannequins or dummy dolls from car accident crash tests. Towards the end of the performance there were short scenes of three older women - unmasked - sitting at a table eating apples and drinking water, and about halfway through there was a brief image of the other six actors without masks. Kennedy staged her meditation on Chekhov’s play in a total of 41 tableau-like images and mini-scenes, which - separated by abrupt light changes and cuts - merged into one another like a (visual) loop or a time loop without an actual beginning or end. The audience could hear, via recorded voices, text fragments, in particular from the first act of Chekhov’s play, as well as foreign texts (including Nietzsche’s aphorism on the ‘Eternal Recurrence’ from The Joyous Science) and, repeated several times, the sentence of Chekhov’s character Vershinin: “In two hundred, three hundred years life on earth will be beautiful, beyond our dreams, it will be marvellous”. 31 Fig. 5: Drei Schwestern by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2019. ©-Judith Buss Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 141 32 Kennedy in de Geest et al., op. cit., 2020, p.-132. 33 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], transl. Paul Patton, New York 1994; cf. also the chapter by Ulrike Haß in this volume. 34 Cited after a discussion by the author with Teresa Vergho, 4 December 2020. 35 James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, New York 1986, p.-3. “The infinite game of becoming”, as already stated at the beginning, is how Kennedy describes her way of staging theatre. “The play goes on and on”, she says. 32 Especially with regard to her version of Drei Schwestern, repetition as well as variation and difference are important keywords. In summary it can be stated that she turned the production not really into a staging of the Chekhov play, but rather into a commentary on its history of performance and reception. Apparently, inspired once again by the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, she saw it as a kind of ‘epistemological chessboard’ as well as a reflection on repetition and difference. 33 In this production, too, the examination of the masks was an integral part of the production work, emphasises costume designer Teresa Vergho. Very obviously, the aim here was not to tell the story and the fate of the individual characters. As if to suggest a journey through time and space, the use of numerous and quite different types of masks was discussed at the beginning of rehearsals. In the end, however, the team decided to “drastically reduce and strip it”; 34 covered with black cloths, where there are otherwise faces (or masks), only a blank space, a ‘negative image’ (or rather: an enigma) should be visible in order to suggest that highly complex temporality which nevertheless always does seem to elude depictability. 3 Susanne Kennedy’s masks and masquerades. Play and possibility: an outlook “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing a play”. 35 As has been shown, an artistic examination of masks and the cultural technique of their usage runs like a thread through Susanne Kennedy’s theatre works. The idea, as she says herself, is the search for a ‘theatre of non-protagonists’ which is playfully pursued through the staging concept, dramaturgy and scenography. The mask - as a tool for transformation and with the manifold theatre-historical, intercultural and intermedial aspects it transports - is a key element of this 142 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) 36 Cf. Belting, op. cit., 2017, particularly his chapter “Media and masks. The production of faces”, pp. 214-303. 37 Randt / Kennedy, op. cit., 2020, p.-55. ‘infinite game’. Two aspects are important here. On the one hand, as the case studies made clear, Kennedy’s theatre decidedly breaks with traditional protagonists as well as role figures and with 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. It is shown, in actu, how cultural codes and designs operate performatively with regard to the human face (which Belting calls the ‘image of all images’). In addition, Kennedy’s examination of the mask and the face deals with an art form that is usually described with the key term ‘living co-presence’. According to this, the encounter between the physically present actors and the audience, who is also gathered at the actual site of the event in face-to-face theatre, is constitutive for this art. Kennedy’s theatre - by using masks - however does tend to undermine the structure of performative co-presence and thereby somehow tentatively suspends it. This marks a paradox that is inherent in every theatre performance and which the debate on the ‘living co-presence’ obscures: the paradox of an absence that is always effective in the presence of stage actors. Actors and their characters always oscillate between presence and absence, real physicality and fiction. Nor do the glances that the audience direct at the stage have anything to do with lived reciprocity. Rather, the fascination of a performance lies in something else, namely in the transformation of the living and especially in its becoming an actual image. This in turn touches on the question of how the living, even beyond the stage, generally relate to the images as well as the assumption that the human face, for its part, always carries masks within it. This question, as has been explained earlier, is an ancient one. 36 However, today, in the age of digital media, the internet, facial recognition and artificial intelligence, it is once again a question of great urgency. Accordingly, Kennedy’s exploration of masks and masquerades apparently comes to no end. Productions such as Coming Society (Volksbühne Berlin, 2019) or Oracle (Münchner Kammerspiele, 2020), developed together with the visual artist Markus Selg, are attempts to short-circuit her search for the ‘non-human performer’, albeit rather heuristically, with current discourses on digitality, transhumanism and “questions about a conscious evolution of the human being”. 37 Such a perspective applied to the theatre has consequences, both on the level of performance aesthetics as well as on production aesthetics, Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 143 38 The premiere was on 15 June 2020; here the use of the face shields was also required by the rules for the containment of Covid-19; the number of visitors was greatly reduced and the visitors moved individually through the installation, at a great distance from one another and partly guided by the players. 39 Admittedly, with AI development as well as design, face-swap technology, dialogue flow and robot architecture (developed here together with the Brazilian university Centro Universitario Facens in Sorocaba), from a production-related as well as aesthetic point of view, some new tasks have been added, insofar as if one also interprets the examination of ‘digital masks’ in the theatre context as being ‘mask images’. 40 Belting, op. cit., 2017, p.-240. i.e. the creative and exploratory work with or on the mask. “Oracle”, for example, was designed as a walk-in installation in which the visitors were led individually through an immersive, psychedelic-looking scenario by brightly coloured performers wearing plastic face visors and displaying dismissive, absent facial expressions. 38 First, in the entrance area, the face of each visitor was scanned, before he or she finally encountered a total of four monitors in the last and innermost room. On them: a digital face, synthesised from morphed facial features of all visitors who visited the oracle, and at the same time the face of an AI, which - similar to the schematic-friendly voices of an online customer service - answered the visitors’ questions. 39 With such ‘digital masks’, the question of presence or absence arises - and, in general, the questions Who’s speaking? and Who is saying ‘I’ here? - are, of course, posed in a different manner: Wherever a face can be compiled from multiple facial quotations, a digital face is the result. This face defies any reference to an actual bearer or to any particular face. (…) They [these images] have been released into an eternal present, whereas analog images always carry with them the traces of past time (as well as the traces of death in a representation of life). Nowadays faces can be produced that no longer correspond to the physical world (…). They replace the memory of presence with a passage of time without any past or future. One could also say: faces can be produced that belong to no one but exist only as images (…). 40 Especially when Kennedy’s works refer to future issues such as AI, post-hu‐ manism and trans-humanism in this way, I think they are particularly relevant under the aspects of theatre and image theory as well as identity politics that were outlined in this paper. The merit of their “infinite games” and artistic-research approach to the theatrical as well as cultural-historical and intermedial aspects of masks and masquerades points far beyond theatre and is, as already mentioned, at the same time an examination of one of the oldest elements of theatre. In reflecting on today’s image phenomena and possibilities (and without evaluating them), she is obviously concerned with the theatrical 144 Birgit Wiens (LMU Munich) framing and exhibition of the search for the human face (and its always already threatening loss) in a technologically complex world that is only supposedly aesthetically familiar and increasingly alien. Indeed, this game can go on and on, for the possibilities and open questions here are, in fact, almost infinite. Translation: Marc Heinitz Re-interpreting the Mask: Masking and Masquerades as an Artistic Research Practice 145 1 See David Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Cambridge 2013, pp. 403-405: “If they continue to be hostile towards us, the white people will finally kill our few remaining shaman elders. For us these men who have known how to become spirits for so long have a very high value. […] They push back the evil beings, prevent the forest from being torn apart, and consolidate the sky as soon as it threatens to fall […] if the shamans’ songs stop being heard in the forest, white people will not be spared any more than we will […] The sky, which is as sick from Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) As soon as we enter the main hall of the Münchner Kammerspiele, the audience is confronted with a paradoxical situation: the stage on which Drei Schwestern will unfold over the next eighty-five minutes offers, at first, an insurmountable barrier; the view is completely obstructed by a white wall made of a strictly stretched fabric, and it is not possible to see anything that is behind this barricade, which also contains a rectangular frame suspended in its centre. Over that same opaque and immense surface, however, an astonishing landscape is projected: a myriad of lysergic coloured vapours and colours of digital hue, revolving around shades of lavender, pink, cyan, yellow and ochre, which could evoke the emergence of an atomic explosion - and whose combustion still expels a dense fog coming from the ground towards the sky thus making it impossible to see the slightest trace of earth (and human life) below the smoke - but which here seem to suggest the presence of an immense and bewildering sky; a horizon of mystical elevation and illumination as rare in its excess and trauma as it is harmonious and sublime, supersaturated with more clouds than any horizon would seem to have the strength to bear, to the point of resembling a surface over which it is possible not only to fly, but also to dive, or walk, or even slide. Faced with such a visual impact, we find ourselves unable to decide whether what we observe is the effect of an explosion from the ground, or if it is rather the very collapse of the sky, imminent or already consolidated - as in the Yanomami prophecy. 1 white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart” [emphasis added]. Indeed, we do not know initially what to do with so many contradictory meanings affirmed at the same time. Are we invited to stay radically separated from the “scenic cavity”, now completely walled and sealed, or is this a seductive invitation to explore with courage and detachment this space-time of virtual elevation/ collapse? When the stage folds itself in this way, as if closing the eyelids to stare at its own internal images, what, in contrast, opens up? What are we, the spectators, allowed to see from this spectacular introspection? In light of these questions what I try to develop here is the hypothesis that Drei Schwestern is 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. 1 A spectacle that suffers from its own temporal nature The faint sound of winds howling in the distance, perceived since the opening of the room, begins to give way to a more indefinite sound compound made up of the whimpers of tortured voices, the groans of sexual pleasure and the hum of countless insects. When this noisy interference establishes itself in the audience’s attention, the screen that covers the rectangular cut-out suspended in the middle of the wall is raised, and we see a small scenic box, a reduced “cavity” with mirrored side walls, equipped with a ceiling and a floor similar to a corporate office. There is a new screen in the background on which the same unsustainable sky is projected and, to the right side of the beholder, a phone hangs at a half height that could very well be on an office desk. Confined to this small ark are three female figures in a state of rest. While they are dressed in light-coloured clothes that imply a peasant life lived in some past era they are arranged as if they were on display in the windows of the same luxurious designer shops that populate the opulent blocks of Munich’s historical centre where the Kammerspiele is located. It is not possible to see any of their faces, 148 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 2 Rolling Stones, Something happened to me yesterday (1967). Available at: <https: / / www .youtube.com/ watch? v=9yxJiuWJmE4> (accessed 29 July 2020). each being covered with a black veil; their faces remain unknown, although they stare at us impassively. Despite being veiled, these faces flicker and pulsate in colours similar to those of the nebulous celestial mass, whose continuous explosions are also projected on the bodies of the three women. (Fig.1) Fig. 1: Drei Schwestern by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2019: mystical enlightenment or the ultimate ecological catastrophe? ©-Judith Buss The confrontation between our gaze and this first tableau is enriched by a tension due to the accumulation of elements at play: the serene explosion of clouds; the blinking stillness of eyeless faces staring at us; the pain and delight of the murmuring-moaning-whistling that both calls out for and disturbs us. Constructed in this way, the materiality of time gains significant weight and density, mixed with the persistent murmuring, moaning and whistling, a sound is heard that suggests the operation of an airplane engine in mid-flight, but already starting to cool down in search of an airstrip. Once landed, the murmurs-moans-whistles fall silent. A voice-over, distorted to the point of resounding with slightly monstrous gravity, serenely intonates a verse from a Rolling Stones’ song: 2 “Something happened to me yesterday / Something I Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 149 3 Bradley Fest J., “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the legacies of post‐ modern metafiction”, in: Wide Screen 6, 1 (2016), p. 1. The Stanley Parable is considered “an ironic game about games” and “a videogame about videogames”. See: <http: / / www. stanleyparable.com/ >, and: <https: / / hcommons.org/ deposits/ item/ mla: 981/ > (accessed 12 Aug. 2020). 4 Fest, op. cit., 2016, p. 9: “And then one day, something very peculiar happened, something that would forever change Stanley, something he would never quite forget. […] No one had shown up to give him instructions, call a meeting or even say hi. Never in all these years at the company had this happened, this complete isolation. Something was very clearly wrong. Shocked, frozen solid, Stanley found himself unable to move […] but as he came to his wits and regained his senses, he got up from his desk and stepped out of his office” [emphasis added]. 5 Peter Pál Pelbart, O tempo n-o-reconciliado, S-o Paulo 2007, p. 13. Original quotation: “[…] o tempo que dependia do movimento e do seu eixo ‘sai dos eixos’. A fórmula de Hamlet […]”. Translation: […] the time that depended on the movement and its axis “is out of joint”. Hamlet’s formula […]”. All translations into English are my own if not otherwise stated. 6 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, London 1990, p.-165 [emphasis in the original]. can’t speak of right away / Something happened to me yesterday / Something also groovy”. There is something about the tone and cadence of this utterance that resonates with a key scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the astronaut Dave Bowman, patiently, “shuts down” the supercomputer HAL 9000. The intonation also brings to mind the initial moments of the “metagame” The Stanley Parable  3 (2013), when its omniscient and omnipotent narrator informs those who wish to take control of Stanley’s actions about what happened 4 to the protagonist/ avatar. Something happened. Something happens. As if, upon entering the room, we have been exposed to a meditative exercise that the spectacle undertakes to probe. We witness the existence of an Hamletian “out of joint” 5 temporality, a time that seems to erupt in all directions, ignoring any human measure, and whose unlimited nature overwhelms the most ingrained notion of identity. At this point some ideas from Gilles Deleuze come to mind: “Aion is unlimited, the way that future and past are unlimited, but finite like instant”; “Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content […] which occurs neither up above nor down below, nor in a circular fashion, but only at the surface”. 6 As though we were struck by such immoderation and, incapable of sustaining the demonic bliss of a vision of this magnitude - is it mystical enlightenment or the ultimate ecological catastrophe? -, we began to hear the call of a familiar human condition - a karmic attraction as painful as it is pleasurable - and, although lacking a defined identity, we were descending from something similar to annihilation and eternity and we fell, like 150 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 7 Id., pp.165-166. 8 Deee-Lite, Groove is in the Heart (1990). Available at: <https: / / www.youtube.com/ watc h? v=etviGf1uWlg> (accessed 29 July 2020). 9 Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, trans. Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London 2014, p.-60. 10 In the sense of hitting a “stumbling-stone” (skandalon). 11 See Kathleen Riordan Speeth, O Trabalho de Gurdjieff, S-o Paulo 1989, pp.117-119: “Os movimentos de ginástica rítmica e as danças que Gurdjieff adaptou de fontes asiáticas this, until we saw the possibility of having a face again. Drei Schwestern raises its eyelids over us, and shares with us its own suffering: although we have a certain reminder of the taste of eternity, the spectacle and the spectators are each in our own way beings that exist in time, and time, indifferent, will continue to exist even when we are no longer here, gathered and confronted on the same theatrical occasion. “Aion is the locus of incorporeal events […]”. 7 The problem is that, at all times, we are the ones who forget this. The good news is that, in every moment, we can be the ones who remember. “Groove is in the heart”, as the song says, 8 not exactly a new one, but certainly not as old as the Rolling Stones’. On stage, the phone rings. One of the women answers the call. On the other end of the line, the same extra-human voice that just recently hummed gravely - evoking an effort similar to Olga’s, when she realises the anniversary of her father’s death in the first scene of Three Sisters - now emits a speech from Chekhov’s play, an excerpt from the first act, in which Lieutenant Colonel Verchinin dedicates one of his customary digressions to Masha: “In two or three hundred years’ time, life on this earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astonishing.” 9 The connection goes down. The woman replaces the phone on the hook. Straight and violent cut. Darkness. Silence. 2 The scene as an impossible object A low, magnetic sound starts. We are drawn to a black hole magnetized by deep oscillations that resemble a heartbeat. When the pitch suddenly dissipates we see a stunning image, a very unusual scenic conformation, a new, impactful and, to a certain extent “scandalous” 10 perceptual destabilization, which violently displaces the viewer, demanding that they reconfigure the categories normally used to decode the phenomena that present themselves as a theatrical scene. Within the three-dimensional “cavity-showcase” suspended in the centre of the white wall the same three faceless women who made up the previous tableau dance, engaging with the pulsating magnetism of the soundtrack in a choreography similar to the “Movements” of the Greek-Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. 11 While one of these “peasants”, positioned in Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 151 […] têm o duplo propósito de transmitir certo tipo de conhecimento e oferecer os meios para a conquista de um estado harmonioso. S-o uma espécie de meditaç-o em estado de aç-o […] Na prática […] a pessoa faz um esforço para dividir a atenç-o e lembrar-se de si mesma, pois, frequentemente, a cabeça, os braços, as m-os e os pés devem acompanhar ritmos diferentes, e, sem um certo nível de percepç-o é absolutamente impossível executá-los […]” (“The movements of rhythmic gymnastics and the dances that Gurdjieff adapted from Asian sources […] have the double purpose of transmitting a certain type of knowledge and offering the means to achieve a harmonious state. They are a kind of meditation in a state of action […] In practice, the person makes an effort to divide the attention and remember him/ herself, because often the head, arms, hands and feet must follow different rhythms, and, without a certain level of perception it is absolutely impossible to execute them […]”). See also: <http: / / gurdjieff-movements.net/ movements/ european-art/ > (accessed 2 Feb. 2020). 12 See: P. D. Ouspensky, Fragmentos de um ensinamento desconhecido, S-o Paulo 2003, pp. 73-74: “centro intelectual”, “centro emocional” and “centro motor” (“intellectual centre”, “emotional centre” and “moving centre”). the centre of the tableau, rotates in a similar way to the dervishes, and the other two, on the sides, make rectilinear movements with their arms, turning the wrists and hands in an inscrutable count of time, a strict tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality is established, perhaps the most disturbing coexistence of these instances ever seen in Kennedy’s works. On the huge screen-wall that “frames” the central cavity-showcase, a three-dimensional corridor is projected; a very realistic location that, though digitally generated, could very well figure as one of the corporate settings of The Stanley Parable. The same virtual location appears on the screen positioned at the backdrop of the cavity-showcase, thus creating, between the two screens, a continuous depth, whose vanishing point is placed in the exact position hidden by the “Dervish” swirls of the centralized woman. The mirrored walls on both sides of this space triple the virtual landscape, establishing a kind of crossroads. The three sisters dancing indicate three possible paths to take. Three “centers” 12 in search of harmonization, with reference to Gurdjieff ’s esoteric language. Three basic time settings: past, present and future. We are drawn to all the corridors simultaneously because the “floors” move incessantly forward, just as airport walkways do. From this intercommunication between actual surfaces (screens and mirrors), transfigured in virtual depths (digital corridors), arises the impression that we are confronting a perceptual paradox, similar to the effect of certain paintings by M. C. Escher: those who depict, on the drawing plane, impossible objects, that is, phenomena that can be traced in two dimensions, but unrealizable in the third dimension. Hands that draw each other, stairs 152 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 13 Video-designer Rodrik Biersteker, who worked with Kennedy on several productions. that descend only to lead upwards, suspended watermills rotated by the same watercourse that just passed through them. Our discernment would not be so shaken, though, if it were not for the relentless cruelty - in the Artaudian sense of the term - of an “astonishing” detail. Below the cavity-window, the video-designer 13 who conceived the triple virtual corridor on the various surfaces, also programmed a shadow that would supposedly have been produced by the cavity-showcase if it actually belonged to the virtual reality of the video, and if it had interposed itself, in this exclusively digital dimension, between the ceiling lamps and the floor-treadmill. (Fig.2). Whoever lives in the details - God or Devil - something supernatural is expressed there. Fig. 2: Drei Schwestern by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2019: the stage now rises and floats in space-time, however, without moving from its “place”. ©-Judith Buss The art of the theatre and its full manifestation in the scene, the identities of which have traditionally been ascertained through the actual character of the bodies and objects present, in addition to the spatial stability of the stage, are here reconfigured in a fragile rectangular corpuscle, not simply framed, but Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 153 snapped, phagocyted even, by a robust virtual universe. Evoking the monolith that Stanley Kubrick suspends in front of the bed in which the aged and convalescent astronaut Dave Bowman lies, in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the cavity-stage-showcase hangs in front of the spectator, surrounded by the incorporeal three-dimensionality of the concrete screen. However, what happens in Drei Schwestern is slightly more surprising: it is the monolith (the two-dimensionality of the screen-wall) which holds the room (the three-dimensionality of the cavity-stage-showcase). As a result of a world governed by digital technologies or possible even because it has always been so, Susanne Kennedy’s theatre seems to suggest that the concrete, face-to-face and spatial status of the scene is a smaller and weaker sphere, inserted in an immaterial, durational, temporal environment, in short, virtual, much larger and more powerful, capable of mocking the scenic concreteness, even daring to grant it an indication of the simulated three-dimensionality that it always assumed it possessed. By attributing to the concreteness and actuality of the stage qualities of a virtual nature, Drei Schwestern makes the scene an impossible object: the stage now rises and floats in space-time, albeit without moving from its “place”. Thus, what suspends it, what makes it levitate, is the lifting power of its own virtual dimension, conceived and sustained by two-dimensional surfaces. From the perspective of what I term the poetics of surfaces employed by Kennedy in her previous productions - the work on the materiality of time and the consequent emanation of an abstract membrane interposed between the stage and the audience (what I call the überscreen) - what appears to be happening, here, is a radical reconceptualization of this primeval strategy. The movement of densification of scenic time - its spatialisation - is maintained, as in her previous works, but in this new configuration, it is limited to the cavity-stage-showcase. Within the limits of this area, the effect of two-dimensionality is preserved, promoted by an instance, a priori, three-dimensional. While all this is not so unusual, something at once similar and opposite occurs on the large screen-wall that encapsulates the small central cavity. In this other dimension - monolithically two-dimensional in origin - the effect produced is of profound three-dimensionality; in this way, what happens is the rarefied movement of the screen surface (once opaque, it becomes transparent). It is the space, then, that is temporalized. To an extent this already occurred in the pre-Drei Schwestern reenactments. In these cases, however, the stage cavity surrounded the screens: whether larger or smaller, projection surfaces or televisions, all were restricted to a wider three-dimensional field that encompassed them. Now it feels like the game has been turned on its head. 154 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 14 Deleuze, op. cit., 1990, p.-10. 15 Id., p.-8 [emphasis in the original]. 16 Id., p.-7. Moreover, the score has expanded considerably. In addition to surrounding the stage, the virtual dimension of the scene gives new meaning to the actual one, without exerting a predatory action, without annihilating it. By making the scene capable of pretending (virtually) that it is a shadow, the shadow that it casts itself (actually), the scenic strategy Kennedy and her collaborators install in front of us, manifests a remarkable poetic event. Without any actor making a single comment, the scene reveals itself as an entity endowed with the ability to refer to its own “person”. A true “pretender”, then. A poet. By using its own spatio-temporal means the scene itself thus becomes capable of self-meaning, at the precise moment when it generates, before the spectator, its usual “meanings”. Almost as if it were possible to create a stratagem - a kind of algorithm - that would allow our material and bodily life to rise to an immaterial and spiritual dimension, and to inhabit the two spheres simultaneously - without interrupting the step or leaving the field of play - we come to understand how when seen from another perspective, the actions taken or suffered in this world have a much broader meaning than is immediately presented. This is the trick poetically materialized in Drei Schwestern. 3 A self-perceptual shaking Putting it in Deleuzian terms, one can consider the überscreen in its abstract form - also present in Kennedy’s previous works - as being the “incorporeal double” released by the scene that thickens and sculpts the materiality of time: “a faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies, a film without volume which envelops them (the events), a mirror which reflects them, a chess board on which they are organized according to plan”. 14 Deleuze proposes that, when the moment is lived in a paradoxical way, without, that is, drawing on the common sense that makes the chronological present the only “present” thing, it surprises us with a past and a future simultaneously presented and affirmed. Thus, it is experienced as an event: “always both at once. It is eternally that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening”. 15 The überscreen, as the scenic flower blooming out of the materiality of time, is the “surface effect”, the “incorporeal limit” 16 of the scene that promotes a counter-presentation of time at the very moment it manifests itself. No longer a chronological present time as that which passes, but another configuration as that which does not pass, i.e. that which is impassive. This elaboration of an impassibility that disorganizes Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 155 17 Ouspensky, op. cit., 2003, p.-218: “Sensaç-o de nós mesmos”. 18 Deleuze, op. cit., 1990, p.-101. and displaces the “human” identity framework, (re)opening the theatre to extra-human intensities, was already established in Kennedy’s previous works. In Drei Schwestern, though, the überscreen itself, once incorporeal, takes shape. Shifting from an old “incorporeal double” emanating from the scene, it gains a concrete corporeality, and dares to abandon a creaturely condition to become the creator itself; it starts to emanate its own incorporeal double: the virtual reality. In this way, virtual/ digital scenarios are thus a “surface effect” emanating from a surface that, in effect, has become a cause. This is what has happened and continues to happen: the incorporeal double of the theatre releases another incorporeal double that takes up and gives new meaning to the theatre’s body. An abyss of causes; a vertigo of effects. Self-perceptual shaking. Gurdjieff used to call his “Movements” “Sacred Dances”, since they were aimed at producing in the “dancer” a change in the state of presence and consciousness through the harmonization of intellect, emotions and body: the three “centers” in which the “Human Machine” functioned. Gurdjieff used to call this state of expanding pres‐ ence “self-remembering”: a rare and subtle self-perception - mental, emotional, corporal - of being where one is (here), doing what one does (writing/ reading those words), feeling what one feels, thinking what one thinks. Thus, the play asks, what would it mean to be consciously staging/ witnessing what is being staged/ witnessed, in other words, having the “sensation of ourselves”? 17 How would it be to stage/ witness what is staged/ witnessed “staying there where the scenic happening happens”, watching everything “from the height of the eternal truth of the event”? 18 The voice-over emits an extra-human: “Cut”. Straight cut. Darkness. The sound mass of murmurs-moans-whistles and airplanes in full flight is heard in a loud, clear and bewildering sound. The notes of a symphony repeated on loop are added to it. 4 An autopoietic potential between the stage and the audience The stage suddenly lights up. The uncomfortable mass of noise gives way to softer sound: another symphonic loop. In the cavity-window the three masked “peasant women” with unknown faces are seated on chairs around a table. The one positioned in the extreme right of those who observe the tableau holds a tablet and lingers looking at its screen, hidden from the audience view. On the large screen-frame, there is a new digital scene, an empty room poorly lit, with 156 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) the same corporate impersonality that appears in the three-dimensional scenery. To the left of the viewer, suspended in the same way as the cavity-showcase that is projecting its own shadow, there is an intriguing figure: an overlarge digital mask in a purple-bluish hue, presenting malformed - not to say deformed - features that delineate a face to which one cannot attribute a provenance that is exclusively human, animal, or bestial. (Fig.3) Fig. 3: Drei Schwestern by Susanne Kennedy, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich 2019: Are we witnessing a process in which surface effects become the cause of new surface effects in an endless spin? ©-Judith Buss If it had a face, would the extra-human and majestic voice-over, heard intermit‐ tently, have similar features to that of this mask? A bodiless face that thus accompanies a cavity-showcase-stage that rises without having a support base. Each sharing the unusual task of floating, like the Cheshire cat’s smile in Alice’s Adventures. After a brief silence, a female voice emerges from the tablet. It is a monologue; a digression in which the speaking subject tries to give shape to a fleeting memory, striving to rescue the climatic conditions of the remembered event. The woman who speaks “from inside” the tablet seems to be engaged in the same mnemonic effort to which the voice-over was dedicated at the beginning of the play, when it evoked Olga and emulated Mick Jagger’s vocals. Something happened. Something happens. A delusional thought is outlined: would this floating mask be the incorporeal double emanated by the virtual reality? Are we witnessing a process in which surface effects become the Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 157 19 Peter Szondi, Teoria do drama moderno [1880-1950], trans. Luiz Sérgio Repa, S-o Paulo 2001, p.-48: “orientaç-o utópica”. cause of new surface effects in an endless spin, in a whirlwind of conceptions conceived from other conceptions? Would the poetics of surfaces have discovered its potential for autopoiesis? A straight and violent cut. Darkness. The same symphonic loop persists. A magnetic sound is heard in a rapid crescendo until the scene is suddenly lit up. The huge, shapeless floating mask is no longer seen. Amongst the three women within the tableau, there is the sudden appearance of a male figure dressed in contemporary clothes - jeans, sports jacket, and a turtleneck shirt. The figure is literally dressed from head to toe: a generalized mask, superimposed even on his neck and scalp, covers not only his face, but also his entire skull, displaying the complete absence of hair. The smooth and glabrous aspect of this face - without eyelashes, without beard, without eyebrows - suggests a mutation of the human species by drawing on the popular imagery of extra-terrestrial beings. The man carefully observes what is happening on the tablet screen. The female voice says that God is everywhere, but she regrets the fact that she has lost weight and aged. A male voice makes a reply, rejoicing that he can finally introduce himself to the consorts. Another female voice confirms the joy of the occasion. The male character then emits speeches very similar to those heard through the tablet: “I am glad. Very glad. Very glad. But there are three sisters, surely. I remember. Three little girls. How time does fly. Oh, dear. How it flies. Oh, dear. How it flies! ” What is said now is what has been heard in the past, and what will be repeated in the future. It is a much simplified version of the first appearance of Lieutenant Colonel Verchinin, the visitor from Moscow, in the first act of Chekhov’s play, when he announces his arrival to the three sisters, recalling Masha’s face and being remembered by her. Here Moscow - which was the sister’s home before they were exiled and left alone by their father’s recent death, and which occupies an equidistant point between remembrance and forgetfulness, between a return whose occurrence is prevented by the thick fog of nostalgia, and a blissful future whose conquest is thwarted by existential lethargy - sends a legitimate representative - the bearer of the dimension of utopia 19 - to spin the Chekhovian loop, in which what could have been always flows into what will never be. When we realize that time flies, from where do we take off ? Where do we land? To go to Moscow, one must first remember. Remember… A straight and violent cut. Darkness. Disorienting sound mass: murmurs-moans-whistles-motors-symphonies. 158 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 20 Agenor de Oliveira, Cartola (Rio de Janeiro, 1908 - 1980), was a Brazilian composer, singer and co-founder of Estaç-o Primeira de Mangueira, one of the most traditional “samba schools” (“escolas de samba”), the associations that parade competitively during Carnival in Brazil. See: <http: / / enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/ pessoa11957/ cartola> (accessed 11 Jan. 2021). 21 Cartola, Acontece. (1974): “Porque tudo no mundo acontece” [emphasis added]. Available at: <https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=7yVIH7VV0do> (accessed 29 July 2020). With the sudden turning on of the lights, the same audio and spatial coordi‐ nates of the previous scene return. This time, however, the three faceless women share the tableau with three glabrous, masked men. Alongside the one who in‐ troduced himself earlier, are two companions of the same “species”. One of them occupies the chair in which one of the “peasant women” previously sat, and in the same way holds the tablet, showing the device’s screen to the man who was already on stage. Both of them listen carefully to the tablet, which is repeating the male figure’s dialogue from the previous scene. Yes, time flies, and there were three little girls here, three sisters… As Cartola 20 would sing: “Everything in the world happens” 21 … After this recording, the sextet initiates a “dialogue” in the usual way of Kennedy’s plays: the playback launching untied sentences without dramatic coherence, the actors’ bodies supporting this uprooted sound content without disturbing the tableau’s composition. The speeches wander through the closing moments of the first act of Chekhov’s work, a synthetic and non-linear version of innocuous conversation about the weather, the upcoming dinner menu, the liquor made from cockroaches… For about three minutes, the Kennedy-style tableau creates a postmodern playground for itself, in which it enjoys playing with the Chekhovian modern drama in crisis, supersaturating it with dramatic ineffectiveness and epic infertility. The holder of the tablet takes a picture of his two companions. The voice-over enunciates a majestic “Repeat”. Obediently, the photo is taken again. It is the repetition that makes us realize that what is happening now, in fact, has already happened and will continue to happen. The banality of these juxtaposed monologues accumulates for a few more minutes, until the voice-over, as if putting an end to the ongoing recreation in the playground, quotes in German the Aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, The Greatest Weight, in which Nietzsche announces, for the first time, his idea of the eternal return. The materiality of time, then, is sculpted by the tension that emanates from the attention that is shared between the spectators and the sextet distributed on stage and dedicated to a placid, austere and slow declamation, surrounded by the sound landscape of a sluggish and unstoppable fall. Without disrupting the composition of the tableau, the actors embody the collective ac‐ Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 159 22 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London 1983, p.-68. 23 The similarities of Drei Schwestern’s virtual settings with the corporate environments of The Stanley Parable corroborate this assumption. The correspondences between Kennedy’s work and a video game that falls under the category of “self-reflexive game” are not fortuitous. It is “a clear example of a game that is about its own processes”; and that “has something to say about how an experience of videogames feels, about how videogames work”. Also taking into account that the game too is structured through repetitions - when reaching the “end”, the player is immediately launched back to the same starting point - it is possible to speculate on Drei Schwestern as being the theatrical double of The Stanley Parable. See Fest, op. cit, 2016, p.-1. Id., p.-9. Id., p.-15. tion of listening. We are surprised by an unexpected circumstance: the formation of an audience that returns the image of another audience; two acoustic cavities - the stage and the audience - resonate with each other. Audio-feedback-loop. The demon who whispers in Nietzsche’s ear murmurs the same thought in ours: a philosophical feedback system disturbs the labyrinths that amplify and mirror themselves. In philosophy as in theatre, the materiality of time weighs. Especially when there is, behind, above, below, or who knows in what dimension of the scene, a whispering demon. It is up to us as actors-spectators-listeners to decide if we allow ourselves to be crushed, like cockroaches, by this painful materiality, or if we are willing to transform an unsustainable sky, pregnant with clouds, into a rink on which we can slide with lightness. “The eternal return says: whatever you want, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return”. 22 What do we want, then? A straight cut. Pitch dark. The violence of the sound mass: murmurs-moans-whistles-motors-symphonies. 5 A pattern of differentiation raised to the “nth” power That is how the first fifteen minutes of Drei Schwestern fly. They close a cycle that seems to condense the main axes around which revolve the reflections staged by this work. As is customary in Kennedy’s plays, viewers are introduced from the very beginning to the rules of the game in which they must take part. At the end of these initial fifteen minutes, we are fully prepared, ready to play. Drei Schwestern radicalises a trend that is also fundamental in Kennedy’s previous works: self-reflexive theatre, that is, theatre that meditates on its own ontology. 23 It is a kind of theatre that does not take for granted the nature of its own being, and therefore decides to meticulously investigate it. A theatre that installs itself in its own structure, that accommodates within itself the weight of its (in)corporeal mass in order to risk observing the uncomfortable and riotous flow of its consciousness (or in a broader way: of its unconscious). In the confrontation with Chekhov’s text, Kennedy’s work seems to extract 160 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 24 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London 2013, p.-48. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York 1995, p. 1: “This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power.” an Artaudian “dreamlike eye” 24 and then rediscover itself as being the stuff the dreams dreamed in the contemporary world are made of: digital, temporal, virtual; and thus, inseparable from the technologies without which life in large cities would be impracticable. Therefore, what the viewer who enters the Münchner Kammerspiele has before them barely resembles another, typical staging of the Chekhovian classic; rather, it more closely resembles a singular strategic movement that draws on a philosophical axis inherent in the original work, recognises and isolates it, and, in an almost game-designer behaviour, extracts a very simplified pattern of meaning, which can be repeated indefinitely, and, in this case, raised to the “nth” power. To repeat is to raise the first time to the “nth” power. 25 It is the genius of Kennedy’s scene, therefore, that uses Chekhov’s, and not the other way around. This pattern consists of a paradoxical structure: the manifestation of the theatrical spectacle takes place in time; the spectacle only exists because and when it is repeated (before the spectator); spectacle and spectators are trapped in a time loop created by themselves; in each repetition of this loop, spectacle and spectators become different from themselves. Perhaps this is just a more abstract way of saying: the theatre is a rite of passage - which, like any rite, must be seasonally repeated - and it carries, within itself, a germ - an abstract pattern (an algorithm? ) - of differentiation, or of metamorphosis, available to anyone and everyone who, in the frenzy of the initiation ceremony, gets involved. We repeat, in short, to become others. By making this pattern of differentiation go wild as if in a centrifuge, Drei Schwestern creates for itself its body without organs: it establishes its meditative exercise, its psychedelic trip, its lucid dream, taking from Chekhov what is best for it. In addition, the manner in which it makes this self-reflexive practice last and involves us in its continuity is by conceiving, on the stage, surfaces and paradoxes. Based on these surfaces and these paradoxes, the spectacle engenders itself and observes itself. Then, it is shaken by what it sees; it overcomes itself and transforms itself internally. A similar exercise is offered to the spectator. The Chekhovian text is the perfect alibi to celebrate this self-transformation; it also contains characters trapped in a loop created by themselves: every (re)presentation of The Three Sisters was and will be an opportunity that opens up, so that they once again do not dare to leave the province towards the metropolis. In this way, a deep question resonates in Kennedy’s performance: knowing that neither we nor the three sisters will go to Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 161 26 Susanne Kennedy, Drei Schwestern booklet, Munich 2019, p.-14. Moscow, but being aware that we are going to the theatre - we, to see them, and they, to be seen by us - what would we contemplate if we could take Moscow’s point of view? Positioned there, what could we observe about ourselves, about the three sisters, and about the nature of the theatrical spectacle? 6 A centrifuge that goes wild In an interview published in the play’s programme, Kennedy exposes the primordial poetic gesture of her fifth work at the Munich Kammerspiele: the creation of a correspondence between the impossibility/ incapacity of the Chekhovian sisters to come back to their hometown, and the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return. What would return when the three sisters are unable to “return”? The point of intersection between these terms would be the idea of a temporal loop. By establishing, as the heart of the performance, a circular structure that folds over itself - just like the mythical snake that bites its own tail - Kennedy opens up another correspondence as well, perhaps the most important one: the spectacular phenomenon - in the same way both for Olga, Masha and Irina, and the “demonised” Nietzsche - is condemned to repeat itself forever, since it only manifests its nature when a circuit closes between the scene and the spectators. As if the repetitive nature of the conflicts of the Prozorov sisters is justified only by the repetition of the rehearsals, which are motivated simply by the recurrence of the presentations (only legitimised by the spectators’ remembrance (which can merely be explained by a reflection that the spectators possibly develop regarding the scenes they remember etc.)). It is fascinating to me that in theatre we have classics that are performed again and again. We have figures that constantly have to go through the same thing. […] figures caught in an endless loop. And we create this loop as an audience by going and watching again and again. 26 Here is a vision of staging (and a director’s vision) that, before focusing on the show, is enchanted by the situation that produces it: the establishment of a loop - between the stage and the audience - that, once established, activates the functioning of other loops. Although it sounds like a hopeless prediction at first, identifying one’s own existence in a supposedly vicious Nietzschean-Chekhovian circle brings up the possibility of a radical affirmation of life subjected to this condition, as if it is possible to make a direct descent to the roots of the moment that it is presented to us and, simultaneously, to 162 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Pelbart, op. cit., 2007, p. 133: “O que se vê contestado em Deleuze é precisamente a identidade da natureza daquilo que volta […] é o devir que ‘volta’ […]”. 30 Id., p.-110: “Zona de indiscernibilidade”. rise to the heights of eternity lodged at that very moment. Despite decoding the repetitive structure of the spectacular phenomenon - making theatre becomes, under this prism, synonymous with producing loops, and making human life, in a wider sphere, reiterates this principle - in Drei Schwestern, Kennedy seeks to celebrate the possibility of an “inner transformation” being unleashed within this closed circuit: While working with Nietzsche, I discovered his idea of the eternal return. […] With a “yes” to this life, how can you live and hug it here and now? The will to face this question leads to an inner transformation. By asking the three sisters this question, I also put it to my audience. It is a question we all have to face. 27 In the director’s view, we transform ourselves internally as we find ourselves able to say “a full yes to everything”, and when, in doing so, we “jump fully into the game”. 28 Instead of falling into despair and protesting dramatically, trying to change the rules of the game to which we are subjected, or even worrying about winning it at any cost, the most opportune thing would be to forget that there is a score and just play, not to create a new subterfuge in search of a redemptive victory, but to simply be able to continue playing. Kennedy, however, seems to aim at a single affirmation that unfolds in three layers: affirming repetition, affirming the theatre, and affirming life - although not necessarily in that order. Her vision resonates with that of Deleuze, when the philosopher rejects the cyclical interpretation of the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return as - for him, erroneously - promoting a recurrence of the same. There would then be a fourth and fundamental affirmation: that of difference. Deleuze questions the identity of what returns in repetition; for him, what resurfaces is becoming itself. 29 Under the action of becoming, a “zone of indiscernibility” 30 opens up, in which no identity remains. Upon returning, it is becoming itself that produces the novelty, or rather, the difference. Therefore, we only differ - we only change internally - because we repeat. The dynamics of eternal recurrence operate, according to a Deleuzian analogy, in a similar way to the centrifugal movement of a wheel that expels what is too weak to withstand the impact of repetition. At the centre of the wheel, there would be Difference; on the edges, driven by repulsion, would be the Same: “If the eternal return is a circle, it is the Difference in the centre, the Same being only in the periphery - a decentralised circle, constantly Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 163 31 Deleuze, op. cit., 1995, p.-55. 32 David Lapoujade, Deleuze, os movimentos aberrantes, trans. Laymert Garcia dos Santos, S-o Paulo 2015, p.-68: “A repetiç-o é a prova da diferença”. 33 Kennedy, op. cit., 2019, p.-14. 34 Kennedy, op. cit., 2019, pp. 17-18. tortuous, which turns only around the unequal”. 31 If the game mentioned by Kennedy were a hurricane, her invitation would be to dive into its epicentre to contemplate ourselves through the placid gaze that resides there. What, in us, is strong enough to withstand such a test? What of us vanishes in the violence of the maelstrom? What, on the other hand, is able to assert itself in its own centre of gravity? Here is another Deleuzian theme: “repetition is the test of difference”. 32 Repetition imposes a test that has been prepared and that will be evaluated by difference. To put it in theatrical terms: the rite is celebrated so that there is a passage; death is established in order for rebirth to take place. In the eye of the hurricane of the rite/ death lies the impassive eye of the passage/ resurrection. However, what would be the strategy adopted by the director to translate her wishes into purely theatrical terms? In the same interview, she points out the an‐ swer. Regarding the construction of the script, the plan consists of the following: choosing a few scenes from the original text; comparing different translations; extracting very simplified versions of them; and repeating, in different ways, the multiple versions of the same scenes. “I put different translations side by side”, Kennedy explains, “and then took a very simplified scene as a basis. This scene is repeated in small variations in an endless loop. […] Only a few original texts of Chekhov are left over”. 33 The plan is put into practice through a performance that presents sequences of tableaux, but that, paradoxically, repels the notions of development and causality between them. We would have, on the stage, a single scene, a sole instant - a great and pregnant moment that (re)presents itself - unfolding in its multiple versions/ dimensions/ possibilities. What would make such a paradox feasible - different scenes that are at once the same - would be the shape of the fold: Since the play does not develop linearly, but is played with time and space, we rather seek the form of a fold. Namely, those moments take place side by side. Therefore, there is a scene - and different variations of it - that unfolds itself at the moment. We try to create a sense of the great now, in which many parallel universes exist side by side. A feeling that everything is the same moment. Then the question of “development” is a paradox. 34 164 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 35 Lapoujade, op. cit., 2015, p. 137: “Repetir consiste em duplicar, reduplicar e deslocar, como uma espécie de gigantesco método de dobragem”. 36 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London 1993, p. 3. The “centrifuge” to which Kennedy gives scenic conformation is put into oper‐ ation according to four basic commands: the establishment of a hyper-simplified pattern of differentiation, the unfolding of this pattern, the straight cut, the repetition of the process. With each cut, a noisy darkness settles over the pre‐ sentation room, and the centrifuge is thus reprogrammed to show the audience a new fold. “Repetition consists in doubling, redoubling, and displacing, like a gigantic folding mechanism”. 35 The same, but another, again. “The multiple is not only what has many parts, but also what is folded in many ways”. 36 In each newly created darkness populated by murmurs-moans-whistles-motors-symphonies, the old, yet renewed, test is applied; yet another (in)opportune confrontation with the possibility of a passage breaks out; the possibility of overcoming the current state of affairs is reborn (in the sake of an unconditional virtuality). 7 A fractal opening of the instant We need to be attentive and strong as a spectator of Susanne Kennedy’s theatre. We are not given the time to fear death, but to embrace it. We are not allowed to become so weak as to understand dying as something that puts an end to birth, but have to be fearless to the point of experiencing every fade out - every turning off of the lights - as happening simultaneously with every moment of ignition- every reopening of the stage. Though exposed to Hamletian temporality, we no longer wait for the grandiose “to be or not to be” scene. Each instant painfully is and delightfully is not, at the same time. One dies and is reborn, indefinitely. The sense of a “great present” to which Kennedy refers, even though it bears the term “present” in its definition, seems to have much more to do with a portal that opens up - something to which we are given - and through which one can experience the unrestrained concomitance of the past and the future, than that of a gift that is offered to us to unwrap, enjoy and keep, when already bored, in a closet. The toy Kennedy gives us comes already “unpacked” and “broken”; we do not need to unwrap it or open it to see what it brings. In fact, the playground is made of the fractal opening of the instant; we are the rope that the past and the future toy with, fighting an endless tug of war. The fun is to be entertained by the game that makes us its plaything; is to dive into it, and extract from it what is most intense about being an endless straight line, uninterruptedly pulled. It is not a present inflexibly instituted, but an instant whose plasticity and multiple inflections baffle us. Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 165 37 Lapoujade, op. cit., 2015, p.-89: “Redistribuiç-o permanente das potências”. 38 Id., p. 68: “Através do acontecimento, tudo recomeça, mas de outro modo: somos redistribuídos, às vezes reengendrados até de modo irreconhecível”. 39 Deleuze, op. cit., 1983, p.-193. 40 Lapoujade, op. cit., 2015, p. 83: “Ponto de vista do acontecimento”, “forma vazia do tempo […]”. 41 Id., p.-86: “O tempo do pensamento puro” [emphasis in the original]. Another sense related to the Deleuzian reading of the eternal return is that the test imposed operates a “permanent redistribution of powers” 37 involved in each returning moment. This is because what emerges at that moment of recidivism is what is most impersonal, unconditioned and anonymous: the event. “Through the event, everything starts again, but in a different way; we are redistributed, sometimes re-engineered to the point of becoming unrecognizable”. 38 What each cut and reopening of the scenes in Drei Schwestern does is the constant promotion of the redistribution of the powers at play in the closed circuit between the stage and the audience. First, the powers relating to the spectacle itself are rearranged. When witnessed, this test that the work obstinately applies to itself, unfolds, then, in a reorganisation of the powers of the spectator. A spectacle that rejects the idea of development and stipulates recurrence for itself is a spectacle that decides to suffer from its own nature, thus affirming it. It totally immerses itself in its own internal game. It decides to exercise, spectacularly, the philosophy of an eternal return. “The return is not the passion of one moment pushed by others, but the activity of the moment which determined the others by determining itself from what it affirms”. 39 Drei Schwestern manages to conceive Moscow’s point of view by conquering that passionately reenacted moment, and, not stopping there, it risks taking the unusual position that Moscow occupies: both past and future. From the heights of the “eternal truth of the event”, it is not only possible to see each rehearsal and each presentation of each staging that is both already done and yet still to be done, but also the actresses preparing to enter the stage and already being applauded, the spectators who enter and escape the countless presentation rooms of countless past and future performances, the stage technicians working behind the scenes, and even Chekhov writing and finishing the text… Here is the “point of view of the event”, “the empty form of time […]”, 40 a time that is detached from bodies and objects, which is unsubstantiated, and becomes “time of pure thought”. 41 To be able to meditate on its own ontology, it is not enough to use the poetics of surfaces that sculpts the materiality of time until it forms an abstract überscreen; this poetics must shape a second and concrete überscreen, which refers to the first one on a more subtle plane, resizing it, encompassing it 166 Maurício Perussi (ECA-USP, S-o Paulo) 42 Deleuze, op. cit., 1990, p.-124. 43 Deleuze, op. cit., 1983, p.-69. 44 Deleuze, op. cit., 1990, p.-149 [emphasis in the original]. 45 Szondi, op. cit., 2001, p.-46: “Seu presente é pressionado pelo passado e pelo futuro”. and giving it new meaning. However, just shaping a virtual reality is not enough; from the subtlety of this plane, virtuality must release its own surface, as if it were capable to undertake a self-survey and, “remembering itself ”, perceived itself as a womb that carries a new being; a new membrane to come: a birth mask; an embryonic avatar. “It is characteristic of the surface that it skims over its own field, impassible…”. 42 Neither do the three sisters go to Moscow, nor does Moscow go to them, but Moscow virtually comes to the spectacle and the spectator. In Drei Schwestern, Kennedy transforms the procrastination of the Chekhovian characters (a condition intrinsic to the text) in an opportunity to make, from the “here and now” of the performance, a playground in which the unconditioned is rehearsed: the future. It causes an internal change in the desire that projects the things to come at an unreachable point - and that resents the self-inflicted impotence -, transmuting it into a sudden enjoyment of that same procrastinated future. “Laziness, stupidity, baseness, cowardice or spitefulness that would will its own eternal return would no longer be the same laziness, stupidity etc.”. 43 What for the drama means crisis, for the scene always means good fortune. More than that: it is joy. Getting to Moscow, thus, is no longer a matter of geographic displacement (which never happened, nor will ever happen), and becomes a question of temporal displacement (which is the event itself). In fact, going to Moscow has never been the real issue, what matters is finding a way to position ourselves in the moment, and knowing how to inhabit the dizzying abundance that breaks out in it: “[…] a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs […]” 44 . Instead of the weight that falls on a “present crushed between the past and the future” 45 , the freshness of a breeze invades the fractal opening of an instant never coinciding with itself, although always affirmed: the lightness of a “present” (a gift) unwrapped by the past and the future. Contemplating themselves from the position of Moscow, the spectacle - and the spectator - are touched by what is perceived, thus they overcome themselves, and conceive a provisional face among the many possible ones. Something happens in their hearts. It is there that the groove never stopped being. Drei Schwestern: How to Build Moscow’s Point Of View 167 1 Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Bevrijd van het eigen ‘ik’. Het buitenaarde oeuvre van Susanne Kennedy”, in: e-tcetera 158 (12.09.2019), https: / / e-tcetera.be/ bevrijd-van-het-eigen-ik/ (accessed 4 January 2021). 2 “Diese wahrhaft unverwüstlichen Schwestern, die buchstäblich hängen bleiben, scheinen wie gemacht für das Theater von Susanne Kennedy, die den Loop und die Wiederholung souverän zu nutzen versteht - als Stilmittel und als Sinnbild für das Leben.” (Shirin Sojitrawalla, “Was ist der Mensch? Porträt der Theaterregisseurin Susanne Kennedy”, in: Neue Gesellschaft - Frankfurter Hefte 6 (2019), https: / / www.fran kfurter-hefte.de/ artikel/ was-ist-der-mensch-2759/ ; accessed 4 January 2021). 3 Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Harmondsworth, 1980, p.-20. The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Susanne Kennedy is known for her intermedial stage works which have been both hailed and criticised for their posthumanist retreats from dramatic realism. Ever since her adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic Three Sisters, critics have observed the important role that loops play in her work. 1 According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, for instance, Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern is exemplary for the “circular world view” reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence” that her theatre puts forward by using repetition as both “stylistic device and symbol of life”. 2 Indeed, the ending of the performance bears a striking resemblance to its beginning and, by joining the two, spectators may “unexpectedly find [them]selves right back where [they] started”. 3 Kennedy’s work also features loops beyond the repetition within the dramatic text itself. Looping structures including video projections and decor also inform the very beginning of Drei Schwestern. The production’s set design features a stage on the stage - a white box, with a white, shiny, plated, modular floor, a similarly white but matt, tiled, industrial ceiling, with mirrors for side walls and a white retro telephone with a turntable placed against the wall stage left. This “stage within” sits above the floor of the “stage without”, framed by a white border that protrudes from the surrounding projection cloth, which in turn seals off the actual stage space, and has a projection screen as a back wall (see figure 1). Surrounding this stage within is a cloth or wall which blocks the depth of the stage without and serves as a huge projection screen. At the start of the performance, the stage within is closed by a roll curtain, which only opens after a ninety second opening sequence and on which a loop of dramatically coloured moving clouds are projected, accompanied by a combination of increasingly angry buzzing, sighing, and humming sounds, similarly looped and reminiscent of flies captured in a glass. Fig. 1: Susanne Kennedy, Drei Schwestern, Münchner Kammerspiele, 2019 (© Judith Buss) However, looping structures do not just inform the decor, video projections and soundscapes (video: Rodrik Biersteker; sound: Richard Janssen) in Kennedy’s work but also shape her use of plot and speech. Despite this their cultural and cognitive reflexivity has rarely been discussed so far. As this chapter will dem‐ onstrate through the use of musicological research, the repetitive subjectivities of Kennedy’s theatre - embodied in an exemplary way by the eponymous three sisters of her 2019 production - reflect the manner in which repetition functions as a cultural practice in the medial and mediatised consumer societies of our time. Moreover, drawing on Douglas R. Hofstadter’s notion of the “strange loop”, this chapter will throw into relief how this notion affords Kennedy’s “radical 170 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 4 Sojitrawalla, “Was ist der Mensch? ”, op. cit., 2019. 5 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Wiederholungszwang”, in: Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse, transl. Emma Moersch, Frankfurt/ M., 1996, pp. 627-631, here p. 627. 6 Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, Ber‐ keley/ Los Angeles/ London, 2005, p.-5. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. signature” 4 through and against the self-tangled worlds that her Drei Schestern and other works create on stage. This chapter’s exploration of the loop as a transmedial principle in Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern starts by distinguishing the loop from the related principles of repetition and cyclicity and discusses its transmedial potentiality. It then explores the interaction of sound, speech, video, and live action that the loop as a compositional principle facilitates. By attending to the potential impact of looping structures on theatre audiences this chapter elucidates the cultural and cognitive reflexivity of Kennedy’s theatre. 1 Repetition as Cultural Practice In drawing on musicological research, the loop can be both compared and distinguished from the related principles of repetition and cyclicity, which altogether share a transmedial potentiality. In his 2005 monograph Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, Robert Fink traces early theorisations of repetition back to Sigmund Freud and his Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). As the founder of psychoanalysis claims, the tendency - or, rather, the compulsion - to repeat is essential to the human psyche and serves to veil a suppressed past conflict that has not been understood and worked through or resolved and now tries to re-enter the present. 5 While, sometimes, repetition is considered as part of a healing strategy that enables the subject to act out and master excessive tension by way of the repeated fragments, it is also often seen in a negative light. 6 To explain why shell-shocked veterans of World War I were seized by “the compulsion to repeat traumatic events […] in direct defiance of what had seemed an unvarying principle, that organisms always act to avoid unpleasure”, Freud linked their affliction to “the death instinct”. 7 Contemporary definitions of repetition in the field of musicology are largely informed by such psychoanalytical theorising. Denouncing it as “regressive and infantile” 8 , Theodor W. Adorno related repetitive music to the death instinct. Similarly, Jacques Attali, in his 1977 essay Bruits: sur l’économie politique de la musique, associates what he calls the “repetitive economy of music” with death, referring to the replacement of live music and the existence-affirming The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 171 9 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis/ London, 1985, p. 127. 10 Id., p.-128. 11 Fink, op. cit., 2005, p.-6. 12 Id., p.-5. 13 Id., p.-8. 14 Id., p.-4. 15 Id., p.-8. live exchange it enables with musical recordings, which turn music into a commodity to be sold and consumed. From this angle, the notion of music as a commodity is symptomatic of the fully “repetitive society” 9 that technological advances in mass production and reproduction have engendered. Mass production […] signifies the repetition of all consumption, individual or collec‐ tive, the replacement of the restaurant by precooked meals, of custom-made clothes by ready-wear, of the individual house built from personal designs by tract houses based on stereotyped designs, of the politician by the anonymous bureaucrat, of skilled labor by standardized tasks, of the spectacle by recordings of it. 10 Other psychoanalytical theorisations of repetitive music, inspired by Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze, by contrast, value repetitive music precisely “for its self-negating regression to a pre-subjective space that Lacanian psychoanalysis calls ‘the Real’”. 11 Based on the premise that, as Fluxus composer Dick Higgins claimed, “implicit within extreme boredom is extreme danger, and thus extreme excitement”, their theories explain how repetitive music is capable of “unleashing strange and unpredictable surges of intensity”. 12 Fink, however, cautions against both these psychoanalytical readings of repetitive music because of their tendency to narrowly map form to function. Instead, he ascribes various functions to repetition, ranging from “liberation, self-gratification, [to] even subliminal resistance to authority”. 13 Moreover, premised on the emergence of consumerism in post-war Western societies of the 1950s and 1960s, whose “rationalized techno-world […] created for the first time the theoretical possibility of a strange feedback loop” 14 and marked the emergence of advertising and its repetitive marketing strategies, Fink promotes a materialist reading of the phenomenon. Re-visioning repetitive music through the context of post-industrial consumer society enables Fink to conceptualise repetition as “a technique of desire creation, a more-or-less elab‐ orately structured repetitive entrainment of human subjects toward culturally adaptive goals and behaviors”. 15 According to Fink, “control of/ by repetition has become a familiar yet unacknowledged aesthetic effect of late modernity, sometimes experienced as pleasurable and erotic, but more often as painfully 172 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 16 Id., p.-4. 17 Id., p.-9. 18 Ibid. 19 Id., p. xi. 20 Id., pp. 3-4. 21 The so-called liar or Epimenides’ paradox is derived from the statement “all Cretans are liars” that has been attributed to the Cretan philosopher (ca. 600 BCE). 22 Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-63. 23 Id., pp. 685, 18. excessive, alienating, and (thus) sublime”. 16 Consequently, Fink goes against established countercultural readings of 1960s minimal music as “resistant to commercialization by virtue of its very opacity” 17 and, on the contrary, regards it as drama of consumer subjectivity, serving both desire creation and libidinal liberation from it. Concretely, Fink attributes “the pulse-pattern minimalism” of rhythmic and tonal structures in works by minimal music icons Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass to “the incessant pulsed repetition of mass-media advertising campaigns” 18 , arguing that, “as a cultural practice, repetitive music implicated creators, performers, and auditors in repetitive com‐ mercial culture like advertising and television”. 19 As “both the sonic analogue and, at times, a sonorous constituent of a characteristic repetitive experience of self in mass-media consumer society”, minimalist music points to Western contemporary cultures of repetition at large, which “aris[e] when the extremely high level of repetitive structuring necessary to sustain capitalist modernity becomes salient in its own right, [and is] experienced directly as constituent of subjectivity”. 20 In the following, the article will draw on Fink’s theorisation of repetition as cultural practice and, in defining the loop as a specific iterative structure, it focusses primarily on Douglas R. Hofstadter’s notion of the “Strange Loop”. 2 The Transmedial Principle of the ‘Strange Loop’ In the 1979 publication, in which he first developed his notion of the “strange loop”, Hofstadter argues - drawing on the example of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel and Cretan philosopher Epimenides 21 - as well as on self-referring sentences such as “[t]his sentence is false” 22 - that strange loops operate within a “tangled hierarchy” and occur whenever “there are still different levels, but the distinction between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ has been wiped out” so that “we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started”. 23 As Hofstadter’s range of examples already indicates, iterative structures come in different The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 173 24 Irina Rajewksy, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspec‐ tive on Intermediality”, in: Intermédialités, 6 (2005), pp. 43-64, here p.-46, note 6. 25 Thomas Conrad, Poétique des cycles romanesques de Balzac à Volodine, Paris, 2016, pp. 79-80. 26 Anne Besson, D’Asimov à Tolkien: Cycles et séries dans la littérature de genre, Paris, 2004, pp. 22-56. 27 Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-686. forms and shapes. When drawn or painted, a loop, for instance, consists of a cycle-shaped line, curving back towards itself so that the beginning and end of the line are joint. In the case of a filmic or musical loop, images, scenes and/ or sounds, melodies, rhythms are continuously repeated. The concrete realisation of looping structures in each case is necessarily medium-specific but their occurrence across a variety of different media (drawing, painting, film, music) reveals that they are not bound to a specific or single medium only. Rather, the fact that they are “available and realizable across media borders” proves strange loops to be a transmedial phenomenon in the sense of Irina Rajewsky. 24 As a specific type of repetition, looping structures must be distinguished from cycles as well as series. In contrast to the identical repetition of parts suggesting infinity that characterises the loop, both cycles and series form distinct part-whole-relationships. Cycles are composed of related events that (potentially) happen again and again in the same conceptual and often chrono‐ logical order. They consist of individual parts, in which specific patterns recur (e.g., characters, settings, or themes) and form a greater whole, resulting in the cycle-specific dynamic of layered closure. In addition, building on expectations of continuity, recurrence, and totalization, cycles operate with a sense of closure that is stronger than that of both loop and series. 25 Series, in turn, stress discontinuity, repetition, and open-endedness, which is why the order of reading/ viewing different instalments of a series is of little importance. 26 Nevertheless, both cycle and series can be described as cumulative structures, involving multiple units and relating to a gradual or incremental development, while looping structures instead result in surges of intensity or excessive thrills. As Escher’s famous “Drawing Hands” (1948) (see figure 2) illustrates, with its left and right hand that draw and are drawn at the same time, many strange loops have their origin in paradox. They are also intricately linked to the elements of surprise and hierarchy-violation. A Tangled Hierarchy occurs when what you presume are clean hierarchical levels take you by surprise and fold back in a hierarchy-violating way. The surprise element is important; it is the reason I call Strange Loops “strange”. A simple tangle, like feedback, doesn’t involve violations of presumed level distinctions. 27 174 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 28 Id., pp. 685-686. 29 Id., p.-686. 30 The term is used by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll to refer to the various, often rule-based, instructive texts, unwritten agreements etc. that have replaced the classical playscript (“Skript-basiertes Theater”, in: TogetherText: Prozessual erzeugte Texte im Gegenwarts‐ theater, ed. Karin Nissen-Ritzvani and Martin Jörg Schäfer, Berlin, 2021. pp. 77-107, here pp. 85-86). Fig. 2: M. C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands” (1948) © 2023 The M.C. Escher Company-The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com However, despite having its origin in paradox, a tangled hierarchy still evokes a higher “protected” level, which in the example of Escher’s lithograph is the “undrawn but drawing hand of M. C. Escher”, i.e., the creator of both hands. 28 Situated on an “(invisible) Inviolate Level”, it is the author as “prime mover” who enables “the (visible) Strange Loop, Or Tangled Hierarch[y] to come into being”. 29 Looping structures’ gesturing towards the author could explain why - despite the processual origin and collective authorship of the texts that she uses in her “script-based theatre” 30 - critics tend to attribute to The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 175 31 Sojitrawalla, “Was ist der Mensch? ”, op. cit., 2019. 32 This self-reflexive reference to a circle is prefigured in an earlier projected scene when one of the sisters draws a red circle on the transparent “fourth wall” facing the audience (1: 09: 28). It may be important to clarify that, even though affinities between cycles and circles are undeniable, only a circle implies full closure whereas the cycle’s key feature is the dynamics of partial and layered closure, with its parts offering partial closure Kennedy a strong “Formwille” (‘willingness to form’). Exploring the loop as a compositional principle in the convergence of sound, speech, video, and live action in Kennedy’s theatre, the next section concentrates on the interpretative affordances of the strange loop as authorial gesture by focussing on the case of Drei Schwestern. 3 Repetition and Looping Structures in Drei Schwestern: Interpretative Affordances In Kennedy’s adaptation of Drei Schwestern (2019), looping structures on the microlevel of video projections and sound are already prominent in the perform‐ ance’s opening section (see introduction), and, throughout the performance, they also inform the use of speech, decor and scenes. They even shape the macrolevel in the sense that the production as a whole forms a strange loop, so that the eponymous three sisters “are literally locked up in a sort of loop, an infinite repetition”. 31 The following analysis concentrates primarily on the performance’s final section and analyses how Kennedy’s use of repetition, self-reflexivity and metalepsis in the interaction of sound, speech, video, and live action results in a “strange loop”. Three elements make it possible to argue that audio-visual and linguistic repetitions transform the performance (as a whole) into a potentially infinite loop. Firstly, several repetitive features in the performance’s final section create the impression that the production curves back to its beginning: the final section starts with the initial loop of clouds being projected on the surrounding cloth again (1: 21: 06-22: 17), albeit darkened, and, later, the looped melody, which already earlier accompanied characters’ ghostly projections, repeats (1: 23: 06-24: 21). Secondly, the production also self-reflexively alludes to the circular character of looping structures on the linguistic level. As the video-loop of darkened clouds surrounds the illuminated empty white stage within, spectators can hear a male voice saying “Wir haben den Kreis vollendet, im Innern wie im Äußeren” (1: 21: 20; [We have completed the circle, as within as without.]). This phrase creates a sense of closure since audiences are likely to regard the projection of clouds as a visualisation of the very completion of the circle that the male voice refers to 32 and, thus, 176 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) while final closure is only achieved on a global level (think, for instance, of the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter which together form the cycle of seasons). The infinite and paradoxical repetition of the same that characterises the loop therefore takes more after the circle than the cycle, which is why this chapter describes references to circles in Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern as self-reflexive. are prompted to expect the performance to end. Such expectations, however, are paradoxically both fulfilled and thwarted, once the male voice is looped saying “the end is never the end is never…” (1: 21: 57). Forming a visual loop in circular counterclockwise motion, the exact same text is also projected onto the protruding frame of the stage within (see figure 3). Fig. 3: The secondary stage within, framed by the text loop “the end is never the end is never” and inhabited by ‘ghostly’ projections of the titular characters in Drei Schwestern (© Judith Buss) This phrase is highly self-reflexive as the performance does not end with the first utterance of “the end” but continues with the potentially endless identical repetition of “is never the end”. In addition, its self-reflexivity also lies in the fact that this scene - just as the male voice says - does not mark the end but continues in and through the subsequent loop. Remaining visible until the performance’s abrupt ending (“cut”), the projected loop of text exudes a “strong The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 177 33 Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-23. 34 Id., p.-685. sense of paradox” by connecting the finite (the end) to the infinite (the negation of the end). Representing “an endless process in a finite way” clearly causes a strange loop in the sense of Hofstadter. 33 - Fig. 4 & 5: Text loop “A simulation of ” & roll curtain and the “further stage within” in Drei Schwestern (© Judith Buss) Thirdly, the self-reflexive interaction of sound, speech, video, and live action violates the distinction of different (fictional) levels, resulting in a “tangled hierarchy”. 34 Kennedy’s production even explicitly refers to this blurring of levels in a section that uses the exact same device of audio-visually looping as the ending. In that section, a male voice is stating “[w]e are in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation” (33: 07-11), while an identical repetition of parts of this utterance (“a simulation of ”) also features as a running text on the frame of the primary stage within (see figure 4; 33: 03-34: 13). Projection and utterance are preceded by a change of scene that is variously repeated throughout the production: a white roll curtain which functions as a projection screen is lowered (see figure 5), closing off the white box of the primary stage within. The projected video shows a “further stage within” - a white box, like the one that is hidden, but without telephone and with white walls on both sides instead of mirrors. Heavily pixelated characters enter this further stage within through the side walls while the various virtual worlds displayed on the framing projection cloth dissolve into colourful pixel noise (see figure 6; 27: 40). Hence, the video projection that replaces the live action is characterised by a striking metalepsis that blurs fictional levels and makes video and live action point to each other in a way that “there are still different levels [i.e., the stage within and the further stage within, inhabited by, respectively, live actors or their pixelated 178 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 35 Ibid. 36 The section ends with an empty white space being projected on the roll curtain on which a text is typed that further heightens the production’s self-reflexivity. Ending with a blinking cursor, the text reads: “Past, present and future are mixed into a confusing simultaneity, the difference between projection of stored data and real-time transmission is also blurred”. projections], but the distinction between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ has been wiped out”. 35 A second metalepsis occurs shortly after this scene when the heavily pixelated characters - metaleptically transgressing stage boundaries again - also enter the stage without (see figure 7; 38: 40) and potentially make audiences become aware of the fictionality of Chekhov’s characters and their eternal ghostly return. - Fig. 6 & 7: Metaleptic transgressions of stage boundaries in Drei Schwestern (©-Judith Buss) The agreement of those scenes with the verbal and visual utterance concerning simulation lends a paradoxical, self-reflexive quality to this section that chimes with, and prefigures, the strange loopines of the final section. 36 Notably, both Kennedy’s use of mise en abyme structures and the metaleptic transgressions of stage boundaries anticipate the strange loop at the production’s end, when on the back wall of the stage within another, secondary stage within is projected (see figure 3) and similarly heavily pixelated but even more blurry characters enter this stage through the side walls. The design of this stage, a white box, continues that of the primary one. Just like the secondary stage itself, the characters of the three sisters that appear on it are mere projections, blurry and flickering, ghostly appearances that are entering the secondary stage within through its side walls. This metaleptic way of entering is in stark contrast to the live scenes, in which characters, before or after a longer or shorter black-out, can never be seen entering or leaving the stage space but are invariably already on stage. The projected characters’ positions in space resemble those of the live The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 179 37 Making use of the rhetorical device of anaphora, the lyrics are in themselves repetitive. However, not just the word “something” is repeated at the beginning of all five lines but also is the first line uttered thrice (with slight variation): “Something happened to me yesterday / Something I can’t speak of right away / Something happened to me / Something oh so groovy / Something happened to me yesterday”. 38 Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-18. 39 See, by way of example, Stefan Bock, “Drei Schwestern in der Zeitschleife”, in: kultura extra - das online magazin (13.07.2019) https: / / www.kultura-extra.de/ theater/ veransta ltung/ repertoire_3schwestern_Mkammerspiele.php (accessed 4 February 2022). 40 Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, New York, 2007. 41 The photograph by Judith Buss does not show this chair (because it has presumably been taken in rehearsal) but was preferred over a screenshot here for its better quality. scene at the very beginning (see figure 1) but are inverted, as the projected sister on the stage-right is sitting and the other two are standing. The scene repeats and variegates the beginning of the performance not just visually but also sonically. The first time that speech occurs is when, at four minutes into the performance, a recorded low male voice can be heard speaking the first stanza of the 1967 Rolling Stones song Something Happened to Me Yesterday. 37 The exact same recording is repeated at the production’s close (1: 24: 26-52), thus connecting the ending to the beginning and prompting spectators to “unexpectedly find [them]selves right back where [they] started”. 38 The sound quality of the repetition, however, matches the secondary stage within in that it is equally blurry and distorted, creating the impression of the male voice being technically filtered and removed (in contrast to the intimate quality of its original occurrence). The repetition cues the three ghostly sisters to leave the secondary stage within and, once all three have exited the white box, the song stanza is literally cut short by another male voice, whose high sound quality creates the impression of proximity. As this voice exclaims “cut”, the performance ends in a black-out (1: 24: 53). Drei Schwestern, however, does not just create a strange loopiness but also explicitly refers to it, and critics have regularly remarked upon this. 39 Roughly half an hour into the performance, the low male voice can be heard quoting Nietzsche, “Ein Kontinuum steht in Wahrheit vor uns. Die Welt ist in sich selber verschlungen” (0: 32: 24-32), thus referring to the continuum of a self-entangled world, and, half an hour later, the title of Hofstadter’s 2007 publication 40 , “I am a strange loop”, in which he revisits the notion he already developed in 1979, is displayed for five minutes as a text running around the primary stage, which is empty except for a sole chair (see figure 8 41 ; 1: 00: 30-1: 05: 30). 180 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 42 Even though spectators may be tempted to attribute a directorial function to the low male voice that intervenes into the performance of Drei Schwestern at regular intervals by calling “cut”, it soon becomes apparent that that voice belongs to the world of television created in scenes that critics believe Kennedy took from a telenovela or soap opera (Bock, op. cit., 2019; “Kennedys ‘Drei Schwestern’ als Zeitschleife im Volkstheater”, in: Salzburger Nachrichten (23.09.2021), https: / / www.sn.at/ kultur/ allgem ein/ kennedys-drei-schwestern-als-zeitschleife-im-volkstheater-109883092, accessed 4 February 2022) and that a running title identifies as “reality”. The male voice therefore rather exposes than conceals Kennedy and her creative team as the performance’s “prime mover” (Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-686). Fig. 8: “I am a strange loop” in Drei Schwestern (© Judith Buss) The fact that Kennedy does not just create a strange loop in her adaptation of Drei Schwestern but also explicitly refers to it, makes it possible to argue that she deliberately draws the audience’s attention to the device and thereby foregrounds its functionality as an “authorial gesture”. In other words, just as in Escher’s lithograph (see figure 2), the strange loop in Drei Schwestern, by becoming meaningful despite its paradoxical nature, gestures towards the author. 42 Based on his cognitive conceptualisation of the strange loop, Hofstadter holds that: The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 181 43 Id., p.-704. 44 Werner Wolf, “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions”, in: Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, ed. Werner Wolf, Amsterdam/ New York, 2009, pp. 1-85, here p.-41. 45 Id., p.-43. 46 Bock, op. cit., 2019; “Kennedys”, op. cit., 2021. 47 Tintti Klapuri, Chronotopes of Modernity in Chekhov, Berlin et al., 2019, pp. 20-21, here p.-23. the explanation of ‘emergent’ phenomena in our brains - for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will - are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back to the bottom level. In other words, […] [t]he self comes into being at the moment is has the power to reflect itself. 43 According to Werner Wolf, the “truthor fiction-centred metareference” 44 of Escher’s metapainting, “while implicitly celebrating the bravura of [its] author, may also be said to contain critical implications concerning, for instance, the truth value of pictorial representations”. 45 The strange loopiness of Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern, in turn, gestures towards its author, and it also becomes meaningful in critically reflecting on repetitive structuring as constituent of subjectivity. The dramatisation of stasis, repetition, and the inability to act, of course, already informs Chekhov’s original play, yet Kennedy’s staging incongruously mixes anachronistic elements taken from different moments in the past (e.g., the 19 th -century crinolines of the three sisters, their Sufi-inspired whirling - a meditative Islamic practice dating back to the 13 th century - or the 20 th -century analogue telephone) with features representative of our times, including the characters’ various 21 st -century-fashion costumes and the virtual environments they act in or the performance’s televisual intertexts. First and foremost, however, Kennedy’s partial update of Chekhov’s original becomes palpable through the fragmentary, game-like structure of the adaptation which suspends the original plot by placing the characters in a “time warp” instead. 46 The production’s game-like aesthetic, the characters’ use of an iPad for digital self-portraiture and the intermedial references to the television formats of soap and telenovela which inform the variously repeated scenes are instrumental in relating Chekhov’s play to Kennedy’s exploration of, and reflection on, subjectivity and/ in our highly mediatised consumer society. In teasing out the repetitive structuring of the “chronotopes of modernity” that characterise Chekhov’s Drei Schwestern’s provincial stasis, 47 Kennedy’s triangulation of modernity, repetition, and subjectivity emphasises the very connection that en‐ abled Fink to conceptualise repetition as “a more-or-less elaborately structured 182 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 48 Fink, op. cit., 2005, p.-8. 49 “Kennedy is geboeid door de eindeloze cirkelbeweging en de verwante thema’s van geboorte, dood en reïncarnatie”. (Sojitrawalla, “Bevrijd”, op. cit., 2019) 50 “Ook hier [in Drei Schwestern] klinkt Nietzsche door, met zijn leer van de ‘eeuwige terugkeer’, net als in haar [Kennedy’s] eerste werk voor de Volksbühne, Women in Trouble uit 2017, waarvoor ze tweeënhalfuur lang een ronddraaiend decor op de scène plaatste, met kamers waarin ze verschillende stadia van het ziekteverloop van kankerpatiënte Angela Dreem uitbeeldde” (ibid.). The article also quotes Matthias Lilienthal, then artistic director of the Volksbühne, who claims: “Voor een circulair wereldbeeld is Drie zusters een buitenkans” (ibid.). repetitive entrainment of human subjects toward culturally adaptive goals and behaviors” 48 , which can serve both desire creation and libidinal liberation from it. While Fink already claimed that a continuum exists between 1960s minimal music and 21 st -century electronic dance music, “elevator music” or “muzak”, thus pointing to society’s continuous and undiminished repetitive entrainment through music to date, Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern could be said to expand his argument to other media. Her ways of including, for instance, serial formats of television, video games and digital self-portraiture into this production suggest that the equally repetitive structures characterising the uses and consumption of these media further increase society’s repetitive entrainment and, ultimately, contribute to the emergence of repetitive subjectivities. In so doing, Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern offers a two-fold reading of Chekhov’s play: as an illustration of the drama of subjectivity in contemporary Western cultures of repetition, and as the self-reflexive assertion of (authorial) consciousness against repetitive entrainment. 4 Concluding Remarks: The Cultural and Cognitive Reflexivity of Kennedy’s Theatre While this chapter’s focus was exclusively on Drei Schwestern, similar uses of looping structures can be observed across Kennedy’s work. Another work in which strange loops and circular plot structures prevail is Ultraworld (2020). In this production, these devices are closely linked to the negotiation of birth, death, and reincarnation - i.e. themes that, according to Sojitrawalla, fascinate Kennedy. 49 Sojitrawalla also sees Women in Trouble (2017), with its revolving stage turning around for the entire two and a half hours of performance time, as evocative of a Nietzschean world view. 50 Taking this article’s argument further, it would be possible to show that Ultraworld, indeed, continues Kennedy’s exploration of, and reflection on, repetitive subjectivities in the sense of Fink and their entrainment in, and through, our highly mediatised consumer society, The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern 183 51 Hofstadter, op. cit., 1980, p.-18. 52 Fink, op. cit., 2005, p.-4. while Women in Trouble could be said to prefigure them. All three productions have endings which bear a striking resemblance to their beginnings and, by joining each performance’s ending to its beginning, spectators “unexpectedly find [them]selves right back where [they] started”. 51 All three works attest to the prevalence of looping structures in Kennedy’s oeuvre as well as of subjectivities which demonstrate and reflect that “we are constantly ‘repeating ourselves’, fashioning and regulating our lived selves through manifold experiences of repetition”. 52 Functioning as authorial gestures, Kennedy’s strange loops confirm her own artistic subjectivity through and against the self-tangled worlds of her theatre productions and the repetitive subjectivities of the characters inhabiting them. At the same time, the cognitive reflexivity of her worlds and characters are likely to elicit a meta-awareness in her audiences that potentially enables them to better understand how repetitive structuring operates as a constituent of subjectivity in our highly mediatised consumer society. 184 Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) 1 Susanne Kennedy, statement in response to the question “Was kann das 2.500 Jahre alte Theaterritual gerade jetzt bewirken? ”, program Volksbühne Berlin, season 2017-2018, nr. 2 (30 January 2018), p.-87 and p.-89. https: / / issuu.com/ volksbuhneberlin/ docs/ vb_spielzeit_buch_2_web_neu (accessed 24 Jan. 2021). Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) “What can the 2,500-year-old theatre ritual bring about now of all times? ” Susanne Kennedy answers this question, that inspired the Berlin Volksbühne program of 2017-2018, with an entreaty: “Let our bodies burst into a thousand fragments and then create themselves anew. Let us become something else, let us become woman, animal, plant, machine, molecular. […] I envisage a theatre where there are no more protagonists and the stage that they formerly occupied is filled with other beings - human and non-human. They speak with voices and faces that are not their own. They communicate in languages we have yet to learn.” 1 Kennedy describes a theatre filled with all kinds of beings. As to the question of how these beings will make their way to the stage, we can rule out the modes of invasion or conquest. There is simply no conceivable outer realm from which other creatures could emerge to appear at this place. They are neither intruders nor extraterrestrials. Just different beings - albeit ones who astonishingly harbour the power to transform the stage into unknown territory with their mere presence. For theatre will inevitably seem wholly unfamiliar to us once other beings have replaced protagonists on stage, thus asserting that this stage never really belonged to the protagonists at all. Even though protagonists have been posing as its stars for the past 2,500 years, the stage was never their property in the first place. Protagonists have merely forgotten that they were simply granted temporary usage rights - a loan for a limited time. Now, that time has come to an end. 2 Ibid. Kennedy describes the theatre of these other beings as a place of voices and bodies without facial agency. Voices and bodies have been relieved of their duty to the integrity of a self on stage. No longer a conveyer of emotion or expression, the face becomes just another body part. The voice and the body break away from one another and function separately, though not entirely independently, as they move through a series of virtual, computer-generated settings, textures and patterns superimposed onto the theatre space so as to dynamically intertwine the two systems, the spatially unrestricted world of virtual reality and the only moderately adaptable, physically limited theatre space. “In the end, the actors become imperceptible”, Kennedy writes before adding her hope that: “Perhaps theatre can be a space for us to attempt our own transition into imperceptibility through the beings on stage.” 2 Indubitably, this abundance of other beings emanates from the choral pole of theatre. They come as a chorus, notated in the fourth person singular with the indefinite article “a”. A chorus which, however, is not a unified whole, as it is capable of dispersing and reconfiguring itself at will. Polymorphic, polyphonic and transitory as it is, a chorus can never be shut down or reduced to a common denominator. It is therefore unsurprising that we should encounter it in Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg’s dynamic simulations. Though it is here in theatre that we come upon it, the chorus is not a theatrical invention and does not belong here entirely. It thus leads us beyond theatre as we know it. If there is anything within the theatre ritual that has earned the name of ritual, it is the legacy of the chorus, whose vestiges bear tatters of the same cultic ceremonies that it imports onto the protagonists’ platform. The chorus enables us to touch upon questions of the archaeology of European theatre while at the same time exploring its future possibilities. Theatre lends itself to any kind of new beginning because it itself is not a single unit, but rather a composite of many things. Asymmetrically affixed to one another, the older chorus and the younger protagonist continually generate friction and conflict. Should the protagonist weaken in some way, the choral counterpart successively becomes more prominent. Should it no longer be possible to contrive a protagonist who gives rise to a scene, the choral aspect of the scene itself emerges. It is rooted in the physicality as well as the in situ of the scenic situation: situated bodies that collectively constitute the purely incompressible essence of any given scene. In place of protagonists - with their faciality, their tangibility and their representationalism - a dynamic abundance of other beings materialises who cannot be easily charted, have no framework and cannot be pinpointed. 186 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) They have come to challenge us. They lure us into unfamiliar territory whose unstable ground no longer lends itself to a merely human “we”. Evidently, this is a jumping-off point. It touches upon the beginnings of European theatre, which precede its onset, and has come to once again pose our starting point today. In a theatre that is no longer protagonistic, we leave identity and selfhood behind us and see before us the spheres of a more intrinsic yet unheeded knowledge as well as of a mode of cosmic communication. In the following, I would like to trace manifestations of these other beings based on examples of Kennedy’s recent works after first highlighting some recurring aspects of her productions. For one thing, this pertains to the notion that digital virtual realities in Kennedy’s theatre are fundamentally considered possible worlds that do not imply alternative spaces but instead play with another dimension of time. For another thing, this concerns the technique of looping, the utilisation of overt repetitions that allude to the theatre ritual as such. Kennedy’s loops confirm its ritualised temporality while, at the same time, modulating it into such an extreme state of distension and deceleration that the time stagnated in them begins to become alien to us. Thirdly, I shall address her use of gates and the architecture of digital portals that amalgamate in and out and make their distinction obsolete: they are boundless gateways that emit time and set off a process of attunement that is not explicitly intended, but which brings about effects that alter our perception. Finally, I shall take up and concretise these aspects through a closer examination of the production Ultraworld (2020). 1 The virtual and VR Without actually appearing on stage, an abundance of other beings wanders through the playhouse like ghosts. They represent a state of indefinite life and constitute its virtual spectres that never materialise in the present. An impersonal, or depersonalised, life alters our perception of time. It does not manifest in the recognisable form from which it has detached itself, but instead comes to pass in a different, temporal mode. It has thus always already transpired and yet always lies ahead. From moment to moment, it is the in-between. An impersonal life cannot be individualised nor does it amass indications of subjective characteristics. Nevertheless, this does not mean it is generic or unrecognisable. It is immanent in the slight bend of a young, slender body, in a blank stare, a mysterious smile, an incomplete or unexecuted gesture, a whimper, a disembodied voice, a sound, a light. An impersonal life always transpires singularly, stresses Gilles Deleuze, who first applied the indefinite article to this type of life in order to distinguish it from individual life. A life in Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 187 3 Gilles Deleuze, “Die Immanenz, ein Leben”, in: Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft. Texte und Gespräche von 1975 bis 1995, trans. Eva Moldenhauer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 365-370, here p.-369. 4 Thomas Metzinger, “Philosophische Perspektiven auf das Selbstbewusstsein: Die Selbstmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität”, in: Werner Greve (ed.), Psychologie des Selbst, Weinheim 2000, p.-243. 5 Ultraworld. Program booklet of the world premiere on 16 Jan. 2020 at Volksbühne Berlin. and of itself is nothing, it solely consists of the virtual. 3 The virtual component can be perceived as the actualisation of individual life. It does not diminish the amount of reality such a life is exposed to, but rather imbues it with a reality all its own. The virtuality at work in the apparatus of virtual reality is of a completely different nature than the virtual component which Deleuze is addressing. Nevertheless, there is a correlation between the two, as VR reduces our desire to identify with the mask of personal life at every moment, and to that extent one can assert that the mechanics of VR aid the explication of an indeterminate life. Very simply put, VR technology duplicates our experience of reality as filtered through our senses, which is actually akin to a mental simulation. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Thomas Metzinger writes: “Contemporary enthusiasm for human penetration into artificial virtual worlds overlooks the fact that we have always been in a biologically generated phenospace: within a virtual reality created by mental simulation”. 4 The workings of VR technology imitate our filtering mode. They hyper-elevate what has always been an indirect form of contact with reality to a technically implemented, apparatus-based level of contact. Cathedrals, panoramic images and planetariums all belong to the history of VR just as theatres have since the end of the Renaissance. VR draws on these fantastic, vivid and breath-taking optical caverns whose illusions, however, are never all-encompassing, as every being that sees them must partake of the physical experience and every stage must be accessible, even if only avatars are ultimately able to romp about on it. This circumstance means that our way of perceiving the world and ourselves is constantly shaped by at least two realities at the same time, one physical and one virtual. Together, they constitute an ineluctable hybrid imprint on our perception, which is commonly reflected in the anxious beginner’s question of whether we can even distinguish between the virtual and the real world. At the beginning of Ultraworld, a girl asks the avatar Frank this question: “If the virtual reality apparatus, as you call it, was wired to all your senses and controlled them completely, would you be able to tell the difference between the virtual world and the real world? ” 5 188 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 6 Kennedy, op. cit, 2018. 7 Deleuze, op. cit., 2005, p.-368. 8 Kennedy, op. cit., 2018. The question of indefinite life ties in with this hybrid nature of our percep‐ tions and relations with the outside world and goes beyond their dualism. For this hybridity tends to cause us to lose ourselves by distancing us from the recognisable contours of an individual life. It undermines the belief that we have both feet firmly planted in life. It eases our need to cling to the identity of subjective characteristics and has the effect that we do not immediately perish with fear when various things come to pass simultaneously, when we are confronted with ambiguous systems of shapes and symbols or when we encounter the non-identical. Gradually, our compulsion to permanently orient ourselves receptively and productively towards the ideal of recognisability wanes. The less we allow ourselves to be determined by this compulsion, the more we will become imperceptible. “Perhaps”, says Kennedy, “this state of imperceptibility is its own kind of blessing, which ultimately comes down to casting off our old self.” 6 No longer sinking an anchor of identity into the self, no longer asserting an essence of self and exposing selfhood to that ontological uncertainty from which it has always come: this is how self-determined life loses out to the dimension of an indefinite life, which is everywhere and traversed by all living beings, human and non-human. Kennedy’s plea for a theatre that she sees filled with other beings aims at this connection to an impersonal life. To the kind of singular life, as Deleuze puts it, “that is immanent in a man who no longer has a name and yet cannot be confused with anyone else. A singular essence, a life-…”. 7 When individuality is extinguished in a state of imperceptibility, it is not so much a loss as a unique opportunity. “Perhaps”, says Kennedy, “this offers us the chance to break through to the core of the creative force of life itself. Which seems like the ultimate paradox: losing oneself in order to (re)connect with life. This is not an easy concept for us to grasp. In fact, it is not a concept at all, and it does not purport to be understandable. You have to do it, experience it, practice it and experiment with it.” 8 2 Theatre ritual as a loop For Kennedy, occidental theatre - with protagonists at its centre - can largely be perceived as a loop. Generally speaking, this loop results from the same foundational logic which, in the same period, gave rise to the ancient polis, theatre and its protagonists all at once. Through the infrastructures of polis Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 189 and oikos as well as through ancestral lines, filiations and bequests, ancient establishments defied the transient material of which they as social institutions were made. They closed their minds to the prospect of a cosmic horizon, which from then on would solely be remembered through the archives of older mythologies and the remnants of ritualistic and totemic practices. Every such foundation requires constant work to maintain and secure - it requires a loop. This foundational aporia thus results in a Chronos temporality that is solely focused on a limited present. Peppered with creation myths, yesterday consequently becomes prehistory. The past is utterly distinct from the future which shall come tomorrow and from which one expects great and better things. From the perspective of founders, time merely poses a time limit, a race against expiry. Time as they know it has turned its back on them: it is slipping away. With infrastructures, institutions and genealogies, founders attempt to hinder its flight. They do so in the belief that time will eventually turn back around to face them and that even their children’s children will, in the course of time, come to them from the future, refined into the great collective form of humanity. The perception of protagonists as exemplary characters enthroned at thea‐ tre’s core is owed to the ideology of self-empowerment and the feasibility of the future. Protagonists say: I will take matters into my own hands; I will make a difference in the world. The future is going to take some work, but it will come. Tomorrow, as the songs of proletarian movements proclaim, or in two or three hundred years, as Chekhov’s Three Sisters puts it, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful. They who fight for a better tomorrow will, in a sense, look at the world from an outside view in order to make decisions based on a menu of political or personal preferences. Such a person firmly believes in his or her ability to make history on both a large and a small scale. They are incessantly focused on progress, growth, movement and speed. Instigators of a better future behave exactly like managers who start a machine and calculate its usefulness based on the expected benefits. It must be worthwhile. Tireless work shall preclude any eventuality. Attempts at stabilisation, fantasies of security and a need for control determine their commitment to a better tomorrow, which must be carried out in a present limited by both past and future. Thus, just as we get up every morning anew, this effort is marked by endless repetition. In Chronos time, evening and morning become day. This constitutes its inexorable temporality as a loop: the better tomorrow can never be today. In the middle of his Fatzer fragment, Bertolt 190 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 9 Bertolt Brecht, Fatzer fragment, in: Günter Glaeser (ed.), Bertolt Brecht. Große kom‐ mentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (BFA), vol. 10.1, Frankfurt am Main 1998, fragment B22, line 22. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Logik des Sinns, trans. Bernhard Diekmann, Frankfurt am Main 1993, especially pp. 86-90, here p.-87. 11 Ibid. Brecht seems dedicated to decrying this eternal promise of a new day with the distinctive exclamation: “The idea of tomorrow paralyses me”. 9 However, the infinite loop of Chronos time does not mean that that which recurs must necessarily be familiar to us. We can just as easily lose ourselves in the mode of recurrence: “we are in the simulation of a simulation of a simulation…”. I am a strange loop was the title of a scene in Kennedy’s production of Three Sisters. For this strange loop, we must consider a different model of temporality. Deleuze, whom I implicitly referred to in my portrait of Chronos time above, distinguishes between two readings of time, which he derives from the Stoic conceptions of physics and logic that he so admires. With its cycle of exhaustion and regeneration, Chronos time belongs to the physics of a world of bodies and forces. Stoic logic, on the other hand, corresponds to a temporality that Deleuze assigns the name of Aion. Aionic time can never come back upon itself and, like a becoming without beginning and end, can be imagined as a “pure straight line, the two extremities of which endlessly distance themselves from each other into the past and the future”. 10 In the planetary time of Aion, that which is considered the present in Chronos time is depicted as perpetual contact between the unlimited past and future. The present does not pose an expanse of time in and of itself (present tense). It is nothing more a fleeting exchange between two trains - named past and future - that are eternally passing each other right now. A constant state of has-just-been and not-yet: in this way, one can “subdivide each present, ad infinitum, however small it may be, stretching it out over their empty line”. 11 That is, it can be extended to any length we choose. Its condition as a never current, empty form of time corresponds to the infinitive form of verbs. “To go” is the infinitive, which does not indicate any physical or material subordination and essentially bears all other tenses along with it. The present tense acts quite differently, as it is always contingent on an “I” to bestow it with purpose and a sense of present assertion. The very moment that the protagonistic phrase “I am going” is uttered, it sets itself apart from all other presents of the past and future, rendering them inaccessible. Both of these temporal constructs are complete, as Deleuze points out, and each one excludes the other. They constitute two poles which play with one another, sometimes in alternation and other times through Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 191 12 Ultraworld, op. cit., 2020. 13 See e.g. the test sequence in Ultraworld portrayed in detail in this essay. 14 For a discussion of the already-there (schon-da) as a key aspect of the chorus, cf. Ulrike Haß, Kraftfeld Chor, Berlin 2021, esp. p.-119-121. intimate contact. Interplay between these two poles facilitates the emergence of vast webs of primal entities, among them a plethora of other beings. The key to this planetary temporality is understanding that the future is already there, or more precisely, has always been there. It is everywhere, in every moment of imperceptible movement: eternally yet to come though it has already occurred. In this dimension of future-past, nothing other than the elapsing future is conceivable. It is what gives the loop its entire substance in the first place and not only determines the temporality of past-(present)-future in works such as Three Sisters. The loop defines the entire theatre ritual, which since antiquity has come to be considered an “exercise in transience” in the jargon of its merely-human devotees. Kennedy’s productions denaturalise this theatrical loop by detaching it from associations with protagonistic self-assertion. Thus, instead of the cycle of evening and morning resulting in day, it marks a test that soon goes serial. In Ultraworld, this was announced as: “And It Became Evening and Morning - Test 1”, 12 etc. Free from being anchored in protagonists, loops in Kennedy’s theatre multiply unceasingly. Through repetition and variation, they are stretched into series and gradually enable us to develop a feeling of solidarity with the given situation. It would be utterly pointless to hope for some kind of radical change to take place or to wait for an error in the replication process to subvert the whole system. The act of waiting is evidently pointless in itself, as replication errors (which are actually plentiful) 13 do not lead to interruption, but only give rise to the next mutation. What this elicits is a sense of solidarity with the already-there  14 , with a multifarious substrate foundation that becomes an expanding surface through constant repetition. This marks a specific temporal construct in which futurity is not obscured by the fog of history, but rather emerges from that very history, loop by loop. Instead of functioning like a receptacle that cannot be opened until tomorrow, the future stems directly from the already-there of the things and beings we interact with. Our dealings, however, are merely the gateway; beyond that, things and beings are endowed with an unconditional future, their own format of temporality, an unpredictability that we do not know, but can only come to recognise. In a reflection on the relationship between ecology and art, Timothy Morton labels this process of recognition “attunement”. The already-there - or “alreadiness”, as he calls it - of beings that are not oneself “hints at our tuning to something else, which is a dance in which that something 192 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 15 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, Cambridge, MA 2018, p.-70 (emphasis in original). 16 Bernd Scherer and Jürgen Renn, Das Anthropozän. Zum Stand der Dinge, Berlin 2015. 17 Bernd Scherer, “Wir müssen lernen, die Welt neu zu sehen”, FAZ (4 January 2020), p. 9. else is also, already, tuning to us”. This dance, this genuinely choral mode of movement, has to do with “experiences in which it simply can’t be said which attunement takes priority; which comes first, logically and chronologically”. 15 In exactly this way, I believe, Kennedy’s theatre tunes us - loop by loop - to something else that is already tuning to us. This is not a matter of pleasant or not so pleasant reciprocal effects or questions of taste and atmospheric concepts as in Romanticism. Rather, this attunement presupposes a departure from the anthropocentric point of view. It aims to achieve recognition of other beings who never appear unformatted, who are never calibrated to our standards of good taste, who are coded differently - phenotypes for whom beauty and ugliness are simply the wrong categories. 3 Attunement Kennedy’s theatre is often categorized under headings such as “digitality and theatre” or “theatre for a digital age”. But those labels fall short. On the one hand, because it is not as if digitality and theatre have yet to become acquainted, as they have long been imbued with one another. There is hardly a sound, a light or a projection used in theatre that is not digitally generated and controlled as well as no aspect of stagecraft that is not prepared using the internet or digital networks. On the other hand, because although the epic transformations we now face are based on important aspects of digitisation, they cannot be adequately described by it. At the very least, in addition to the technosphere - in which we communicate around the globe in so-called real time - we would have to add the biosphere, where we are all connected to Earth’s geological pasts through our consumption of fossil fuels. Considerably far-reaching processes (spheres) incessantly entangle themselves further and further into the past and the future: such is the case with traces of our irreversible consumption in the atmosphere, as damage to the chemical composition of our planet’s gas envelope passes into space. It is through interplay between these spheres that developments in the Anthropocene  16 unfold their devastating, deadly effects and require us to “learn to see the world anew”. 17 When it comes to seeing something in a new way or “becom[ing] something else”, as Kennedy puts it, “theatre is, perhaps, the ideal place for this new beginning. On stage, we watch as people transition into different states and beings. Theatre - like all art - offers us a playground for experimentation.” 18 Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 193 18 Kennedy, op. cit., 2018. 19 Cf. Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror. Reflections on self-delusion, New York 2019. 20 Morton, op. cit., 2018, p.-115. On this playground, experiments are conducted on art as a being that is not an “I”. This often leads into unfamiliar territory and generates conditions that detach the “I” from its sense of self-assurance. In this state, we are taken along into an unfamiliar design - something “other” that we do not know. In this way, Kennedy’s digitally simulated spaces and visual worlds aim at something completely different than the digital age and its cyberculture, in which everything always looks like our own mirror image. The internet merely serves to perpetuate our mad obsession with asserting personal identity as the centre of the universe, enabling us to stage and hawk the image of ourselves accordingly. 19 Kennedy’s artistic playground is about tuning to a design we do not know. For despite all of the factors that distinguish her work from the “digital age” as a whole, it is not as if her work were intended as a critique of it, which always presupposes a view from the outside. This outside, however, has been suspended. By realising that our surroundings do not confine us like a shell, but instead that we ourselves constantly give rise to agile new environments - just as we are constantly permeated by them, both materially and technologically - we become attuned to both artificial and natural non-human beings. We can attune ourselves to something else entirely. We can peruse environments contrived as spaces akin to an ocean full of currents. We do not loom above such settings as distant observers, but are right in the middle of things, engaged in a constant push-and-pull, moving along with the current, pushing back against it. Unmistakably, our process of attunement is part of an “orchestral performance” 20 in which the directions change, turn or bend as other beings tune to us. The “performance” itself does not behave autonomously, but is dependent upon all of the participants and worlds that engage in it. Nor does it act universally, but rather as a self-substantiating entity. As far as we can see (and that is always less than everything), right now the future is oozing out of the environments we design and which have implicitly designed us. Kennedy’s art is a kind of portal through which we enter a future state that is already there. However, that in no way diminishes the coming of that future and its irreducible unpredictability. So, should we protest, break the loop, counteract the algorithm? Come in and find out, Kennedy’s theatre calls to us. 194 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 4 Portals: gates and spaces There is a gateway in Women in Trouble (Volksbühne Berlin, 2017). Two angled screens frame the space, which fills our field of vision with a width corresponding to the dimensions of the revolving stage (a massive mechanical construction 18 metres in diameter) and whose height is limited by the structural elements installed atop the turntable. The scenes resultingly pictured within the frame of this gate drift past us very slowly yet ceaselessly from right to left. This stretches time and space to such a degree that we can only see part of the picture at any given time. For two minutes at the beginning, we look at this gate, watching as scenery passes by with each turn of the spinning mechanism, while conventional funfair music blares from the speakers in accompaniment along with a mashup of music from low-budget revue films. It is reminiscent of the loops of olden times - carousels, roller coasters and Ferris wheels - and thus of the kindred nature that the oddity of the revolving stage shares not only with abrupt cinematic scene changes, but, above all, with the circus. There is a gateway in Coming Society (Volksbühne Berlin, 2019). It looks like a huge temple gate, centred in front of the stage and accompanied by a very beautiful, large plastic baobab tree on the right. From the auditorium, we are able to peer through the gate into a metaphorical space where we catch sight of various enigmatic installations on the revolving stage, sheltered by a large, free-hanging disc as if it were a roof. Then we all go up a few steps and enter the scenic space through this gate. The text asserts: There is no outside. We are only inside. Impossible to say how many partial worlds we find ourselves in. We find ourselves in an unfamiliar design that we do not know. For the next 90 minutes, we have nowhere to sit down. Yet, ultimately, we do. We become attuned. The theme of attunement is broadened with the remarkable question: it’s about celebration, isn’t it? It’s about more than just acknowledgement. It’s about celebrating and commemorating, perhaps a ceremonial adornment or festivities in recognition of what we cannot know. Inconspicuous objects, totems, fetishes and enigmatic shrines reveal themselves. In front of a pyramidal structure, a woman lies motionless on a (sacrificial) table. She is guarded by two older women in dark, floor-length nylon coats who later carry her away with ritualistic care. The word incubation on the “pyramid” refers to processes of maturing and becoming, as do the numerous codified gestures of care in Coming Society. For example, a foot washing performed on a smiling, timeless-looking old man who seems anything but decrepit - as if the concept of age has been based on false premises from the start. Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 195 21 Cf. Ulrike Haß, “Vom Wahnsinn des Sehens in geschlossenen Räumen. Raumdebatten und Szenographie im 17. Jahrhundert”, in: Nicola Gess et al (eds.), Barocktheater als Spektakel. Maschine, Blick und Bewegung auf der Opernbühne des Ancien Régime, Paderborn 2015, pp. 139-161. There is also a gateway in Kennedy’s adaptation of Drei Schwestern, based on the play by Anton Chekhov (Münchner Kammerspiele, 2019). In a complex way, this production dissects the hybridity of the theatre stage, which is neither a room nor an image. Through use of a gauze curtain in place of the fourth wall, the hybrid known as the black box becomes a projection surface for the simulation of an interactive white cube emblazoned with projections of its own. It floats in the middle of a stereographic image of the stage, visually doubling the space of the actual black box. A white cube in a black box. The simulations in the white cube can be superimposed on the projection surface of the gauze curtain almost congruently over the projections of the black box. Physical bodies, performers and other things enter the stage by coming and going (horizontally). The Baroque-esque mechanisms of imagery 21 open up this space vertically and virtualise it. The white cube defines this virtualised space as a neutral art space without a fixed location, thus able to appear hither and yon. It first emerges at the same time as the film and, like the latter, is a moving, moveable image-capturing receptacle that does not remain in place, even if it is outwardly effectively stationary. The enormous appeal of the white cube goes hand in hand with the promise of behaving neutrally like a blank sheet of paper or like an as yet unformatted surface that is seemingly just waiting to be formatted by would-be owners. Kennedy’s production of Drei Schwestern denaturalises the ideological self-as‐ sertions of the cube and the box by nesting the two within one another, thereby potentiating them. What previously asserted itself as an image or a neutral receptacle becomes a hybrid projection of a projection. The three figures on display are motionless, depicted in folkloric costumes with bulging ankle-length skirts, their faces hidden by black fabric. Animated backgrounds, reminiscent of billowing spring clouds, rush across the projection screen in place of the fourth wall. They seize the “skirts” of the three “women” and render them transparent. In the projected white cube, the figures are broken down into coarse-grained pixels and compressed into abstract silhouettes, above which dark spots float like balloons in place of faces. An offstage voice proclaims: something happened to me yesterday. Cuts-to-black, both in the film as well as in the theatre itself, rhythmise the sequence of 41 scenes, which, over and over again, depict the figures nearly motionless and grouped in various arrangements: picking up a telephone 196 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 22 As quoted in the program booklet of Drie Schwestern, premiered on 27 April 2019 at the Münchner Kammerspiele, p.-8 and p.-34. receiver, watching a humming top, holding an empty picture frame in their hands, taking a photo with a mobile. As Chekhov put it, a present that merely waits for tomorrow is a “loathsome” thing. Yet, at the same time, it also poses an in-between moment and a life in the Aionic temporality, for which Chekhov gives us the image of migratory birds: “cranes, for example, fly on and on, and no matter what thoughts, great or small, stray through their heads, they will still go on flying, not knowing where or why. They fly and will go on flying no matter what philosophers spring up among them; and let them philosophise as much as they like, so long as they go on flying…”. 22 The gate through which Kennedy tunes us to her Three Sisters resembles a curtain. For several minutes, dense cumulous clouds move relatively quickly towards us, continually changing colours and playing off of complementary colour contrasts in the psychedelic spectrum: warm and cold purple, gleamingly bright and warm yellow, electric and yellowish green, blue-tinged and orangey red. This is not a sky, but an alien apparition that has no reason except itself. An attunement. 5 Ultraworld. A life Ultraworld marks the third collaboration between Susanne Kennedy and visual artist Markus Selg (Volksbühne Berlin, January 2020). The proscenium arch is encased in a projection featuring a large rectangular gateway covered in tiles, each adored with a labyrinthian pattern. It is embedded in a large screen that is aglow with colours shifting from blue to red as if from a recording of the ocean taken from a great height. It is a fluctuating, magically animated field of colour: it tunes to us. In the audience, someone behind me asks in a voice so slow and neutral that it could have come straight out of a Kennedy production: “How are you both? ” Another voice answers: “Fine! Thank you! ” The blue in the middle of the structure opens up to reveal a film, a journey into a dark tunnel. A voice from offstage, perhaps the voice of the game designer, declares: “Nothing was connected. Only sky and sea. Solitary and silent. No sound. Nothing upright.” Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 197 Fig. 1: Ultraworld by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Volksbühne Berlin 2020. In this scene: Kate Strong, Suzan Boogaerdt, Frank Willens, Bianca van der Schoot, Malick Bauer, Vanessa Loibl Photo © Julian Röder The projection illuminates the portal, simulating a kind of digitally tiled interior of an ancient Mayan palace, perhaps. The “real-life actor” (Frank Willens) who plays the “blond male avatar”, Frank, is just waking up. A girl (Zoë Willens) asks him to say something about the distinction between the virtual and the real world. This instigates a journey through Ultraworld to discover its script, which Frank does not know, unlike his fellow players Cassandra and Metis, who seem to be privy to it. Frank is left to ascertain the rules of the game - “come in and find out” - and follow a narrative that resembles a Sanskrit parable on the world of appearances. All dualities are rolled up into it and unfurl in a series of tests that Frank undergoes. As if distorted by some kind of deep dream filter, the tests unfold in a scenario where Earth is overheated. Figures/ avatars in heat-tech shirts or khaki overalls move about in slow motion, their voices come from a tape. Time stretches into a loop. Everything that happens here gets caught in the fold, rendering it a non-occurrence. The desert fans out over the space. The radio declares that there is a water shortage. Frank’s wife and daughter, named April 1 and April 2, are dying of thirst. Test I: two neighbours come by with water canisters, but 198 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 23 This rendition of text and events is based on my own recollection and notes taken during the performance. Any inaccuracies - or even questions as to why I chose to write down this or that particular quote ad hoc in English or German and whether I quoted them exactly - cannot be verified at this point more than two years after the performance. refuse to give any to Frank, who begs for some, primarily for his daughter. Their response: “We need every drop for ourselves.” 23 The tableau comes to a close, the palace appears walled up. His wife and daughter lie down and die. Test II: The water shortage has stretched into its third week. Frank vomits: I want to get out of here, let me out. Cassandra, who accompanies him, says, “The only way out is in.” In a kind of dream sequence, they manage to cross over to the “other side of the screen” and suddenly find themselves in a parlour, with snakes everywhere. Screens in the side walls serve as TV windows that display pictures of animal faces: a lion, a fox, a cat - kitschy, colourful and grotesque. They speak: “The human face has not even begun to say what it is.” Frank and Cassandra ask if there is a script to follow here. Frank vomits. The script is superb, simply “amazing”, in Cassandra’s opinion. Frank declares that he is breaking open like a cocoon. (I am leaving out a few performance notes here on the intensity, spectrum and divine nature of the colours). The doctor asks: How do you feel? Have you been dreaming, Frank? Frank replies: It’s over. I’m all right. On the other side of the screen, I could no longer see the future. Frank’s search for the rules of the game ultimately leads him to confront himself: “Why are you here? ” Cassandra thinks Frank should break the loop. Metis, who is wise, asserts: We know our future, it is just like the past. Test III varies the first test slightly: Frank snatches the canister of water from his neighbours and drinks it himself. His wife and daughter die. Test IV provides a further variation of the first test: Frank’s wife and daughter are weak from thirst, especially the daughter. The neighbours come by. They give their canisters to Frank, who divides up the water and lets his daughter drink. His wife and daughter lie down and die. There is no salvation. Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 199 Fig. 2: Ultraworld by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, Volksbühne Berlin 2020. In this scene: Malick Bauer and Bianca van der Schoot as Neighbour 1 and Neighbour 2, Frank Willens as Real-Life Actor. Photo © Julian Röder In Test V, Frank entreats the girl who found him at the beginning: Tell me how my end will be! The girl replies by asking if he has found the beginning yet. Beginning and end are one and the same. The end is our beginning. The girl starts singing a few notes. The back wall opens up to reveal this theatre’s vast circular stage in a flood of bright pink, which appears to be more of a non-representational light than a colour itself. Frank walks towards it and encounters a kind of world pillar (a colourful remnant from the production Coming Society), which says in a dark voice that the end is always the beginning. Frank stares in wonder as he touches the huge panels of paisley-patterned fabric hanging diagonally into the room from the fly loft. The girl from the beginning walks towards him, humming single notes. An epiphanic moment. A voice from offstage asserts: “All we have is this moment to set love into motion.” We should listen carefully. It does not say that we actually have love, but that we only have this moment to mobilise the love that is already there. “All is Full of Love” is the title of a famous music video by Björk, in which her ethereal voice accompanies a scene that features machines building robots that then engage in a sex act. 200 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 24 Norbert Bischof, Das Kraftfeld der Mythen, Munich/ Zurich 1986, pp. 191-221. The narrative patterns in this production (text by Susanne Kennedy) do not draw from any kind of esoteric, enigmatic or incomprehensible mythology, but instead reflect the ease of fairy tales and the suspense of well-made plots that are simple to follow because one “and” leads to the next. However, this does not mean that they are light and easy to read. They just don’t affect us in the mode of “either/ or” alternatives (real or virtual, man or woman), but in the mode of “both/ and” - in the mode of (virtual) possibility, because beginning and end are the same. Various archaic symbols are conceivable for this, including the ouroboros mentioned in the programme booklet, that tail-biting snake from ancient Egypt that has become a hit tattoo today. It is not “feminine” in the sense of our gender codifications, but rather chthonic and hermaphroditic, a figure from the time of “cosmogonic incest”. 24 Mythological mashups and trash culture mix in the trivial, but trivial culture has its own unique understanding of the inexplicable result, making things complicated after all. The result is implicit knowledge that is practised rather than “known”. And so it comes to pass: Frank wants to break out of the loop, learn about his own future and become a self. “You are the one”, Frank says to himself. “The one - what? ” Metis, in mythology a daughter of Oceanus and a counsellor in matters of a more primal, implicit knowledge completely different from that of science, technology and reason, says, “If a man wants to know his own future, he must first know himself. Sometimes it might be better not to know.” Ultraworld explores the thresholds of theatre, which are conceived as screens that can assume any pattern whatsoever. Taken from the Baroque, a screen is a surface that can accommodate any design, any colouration, any cut, any optical illusion, any eye candy, any animation. In a theatre world that presents itself by and large as a loop, a screen is not an image but instead represents implicit, trivial knowledge and a temporal wall. It separates us from a theatre we do not know as from (a) life. The avatars, seemingly automated movements and telepathic, a-physical touches in Kennedy’s theatre do not aim to illustrate a hypermodern future. They do not borrow from cyber aesthetics or the gaming culture to guide us through a transition from one world (yesterday) to another (tomorrow). The temporality of Chronos has been suspended. It is less than that, yet at the same time so much more. Suspended in time, we cast off our old selves. By making our way through this state of suspension - come in and find out - and establishing a connection with a nondescript life. Not (the) life marked by its definite article, but (a) life in the fourth person singular. A vital spark, bestowed unsolicited Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 201 25 Inge Arteel, “Einzelne und ihre Umgebung. Susanne Kennedys und Markus Selgs Installation Medea.Matrix”, in: Silke Felber, Wera Hippesroither (eds.), Spuren des Tragischen im Theater der Gegenwart, Tübingen 2020, pp. 83-97, here p.-92. and lost in the same manner, connected to an ocean of dynamic currents and swells that we do not know. A life ends. As the test sequence in Ultraworld shows, it cannot be saved under any circumstances if life has decided otherwise. Intensive care doctors, who always employ their gadgets, skills and knowledge with an utterly open-ended outcome, understand how much a life is capable of. But a life as such has no intentions and is not in the least particular to a certain species. “I” is not an other (person), “I” is the other (being). At that moment, the “I” breaks open “like a cocoon”, as stated in Susanne Kennedy’s narrative. When the cocoon - that supposedly equalising eggshell - bursts, it sets off a contextual explosion that cannot be stopped. “Let us become something else, let us become woman, animal, plant, machine, molecular. The theatre is, perhaps, the ideal place for this new beginning.” 6 An exhibition of play For the hybrid imprint on our perception, for our attunement and the perform‐ ers’ transition into imperceptibility, the superimposition of the virtual onto physical reality plays a decisive role in scenic designs such as those by Markus Selg. Selg constructs spaces and bodies in cinematic 4D and equips them with textures, images and patterns - a wide variety of visual materials that he amasses on his hard drives. In this kind of scenography for the physical stage, acting, videos, objects from the workshops, sound tracks and lighting all communicate with each other. However, they do not “strive for an overall picture of perfection”. Instead, “individual components are reproduced, each of which suggests authenticity (one could also say: precision) while at the same time dividing, multiplying and interlinking - and thus obscuring themselves”. 25 Fluctuating image fragments that spring from a worldwide net archive that we know and at the same time do not know and which take us along for a peculiar ride in pursuit of impossible figures (in the sense of M. C. Escher). In his work, Selg utilises garish fluorescent colours in the psychedelic spec‐ trum in combination with highly stylised figures, fractals, labyrinths and paisley patterns - playfully arranged in endlessly regenerative, kaleidoscopically evoc‐ ative pictorial impressions. An overemphasis on geometrically generated 3D structures is balanced out by alternating with painterly-looking textures that blend into one another and continually bring about new quasi-organic forms, such as bubbles, drops or waves. Sharp contours and contrasts unremittingly 202 Ulrike Haß (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) 26 Thomas Oberender, “Im Glitch den Vorhang öffnen. Die Regisseurin Susanne Kennedy macht das Betriebssystem unseres digitalen Zeitalters erfahrbar”, in: Theater der Zeit 12 (2019), pp. 22-25. 27 Arteel, op. cit., 2020, p.-92. 28 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Herme‐ neutik, in: Gesammelte Werke vol. 1, Tübingen 1990, p 112. 29 Arteel, op cit., p.-97. 30 Theater in Trance is the title of a documentary film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the festival Theater der Welt 1981 in Cologne, which featured over 100 performances by more than 30 groups from 15 countries. give way to flowing, billowing figures and blurred veils. The binary of yes and no is suspended, decisions are played out to the nth - though never to a final - variation. Selg’s installations of VR spaces do not signify anything in themselves. They do not set out to prove some grand hypothesis or attempt to make “the operating system of our digital age tangible”, much less reflect the “true state of the world”. 26 Yet neither do they make us prisoners of total simulations. Rather, Kennedy/ Selg’s immersive spaces are of the kind that “cannot be confused with either immediacy or participation”. 27 Selg’s installations of VR spaces are an exhibition of play and thus fulfil the definition of any multimedia game in Gadamer’s sense: “All playing is a being-played.” 28 Gadamer emphasises that no game belongs to those who play it. Rather, it uses the players to present itself on its own. The game’s self-representation takes a “complete turn” (Gadamer) with the introduction of spectators for whom and in front of whom it plays. It thus evolves into a game world which achieves completeness with its spectators. These spectators are not opposite the game/ play, they non-individually attune to it as an environment. They are, not unlike the players, thus played. The game itself is a whole, an entity made of players and spectators. Such a system of play resembles a matrix for amateurs and advanced players who themselves then form the beginning of a new landscape. This resembles the matrix that Inge Arteel perceives in Kennedy’s production of Medea.Matrix, which according to Arteel constitutes the “beginning of a new landscape for the inconceivable and unrepresentable nature of non-integrable life, without origin, without representation”. 29 Because it is based on so many forces other than merely its own, such a matrix can always be tuned differently and tune others differently, so as to put “theatre in [a] trance”. 30 Translation: Lynnette J. Polcyn Becoming Something Else - Susanne Kennedy’s Theatre of Attunement 203 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy Brussels, RITCS, 24 January 2020 Inge Arteel: Susanne Kennedy, thank you very much for having made the trip from Berlin to Brussels to talk with us. As an introduction to our talk, let me briefly outline some of the stages in your career as a director so far. You attended the Amsterdam based Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, a famous directing school, where you graduated in 2005 with a production of Schiller’s Maria Stuart. Then, you have worked for several years in the Netherlands, both with the Nationale Toneel in Den Haag and with more independent artists like Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, who are still working with you today. In Den Haag you directed classics from Ibsen to Lessing but also newer texts such as Elfriede Jelinek’s Über Tiere, and, as a co-production with the Ghent theatre NTGent, Fassbinder’s Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant. Since 2011 you have been working at renowned German city theatres, such as the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Berliner Volksbühne, and for theatre festivals such as the Ruhrtriennale. My first question wants to address this move from the Netherlands to Germany. How different are these theatre cultures and did you integrate aspects of your practice in the Netherlands in the German tradition? Susanne Kennedy: For me it was very good to start in the Netherlands because it is much less hierarchical than Germany. In Germany, you often start as an assistant for a director. In Amsterdam, I could just start working. There was money, that was also the time before the whole cuts were being made, so I got the opportunity to work immediately and just produce, so I could just work and learn by working. There is also the possibility of learning to work by watching other people work, other directors, but you have to do it yourself to really learn it. I got into that quite fast. I noticed a big difference between the Netherlands, and I think also Belgium - because of course there’s a connection there - and Germany. The first time I worked with German actors was very difficult for me, especially regarding the acting and the talking on stage. I guess in school they learn that talking has a kind of gesture. It is very big, very loud, very prominent, I guess to reach the last rows. In the Netherlands, you work also in small black boxes, and you have very direct contact with the audience, so the acting is much more down-to-earth, in a sense, and direct, directly talking to the audience. Also, there is no real hierarchy; we talk to each other on the same level. So, for instance when working at the Kammerspiele, I felt I did not have the language to communicate with the actors. It was very difficult for me to tell them “don’t do this! ”, “don’t do that! ”, “stop doing that! ” in a way that was not frustrating. I had to find a positive way of talking to them and I felt that I didn’t have the tools then. The first production I did at the Münchner Kammerspiele, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? , I had the feeling that there was so much air when the actors started talking and moving, it was filled with pumped-up air, in a way. I was actually also very much influenced by Belgian theatre. When I was studying in Amsterdam, I often went to Frascati theatre to see productions from the Belgian groups that came there. These influenced me a great deal. So, this was something that I wanted to take with me to Germany, and I didn’t know how because at the same time what I missed in the, let’s say Dutch-Flemish theatre, but especially in the Dutch, was a specific kind of form that could be bigger than life itself. The Dutch way often was a very direct way of talking, down-to-earth. So, in a sense, I guess I wanted to combine both… That’s also the reason I left Holland because I felt it got too small for me, they had this “don’t go too crazy, stay within the group” kind of thing, and I wanted to go bigger and experience much more. In the Dutch scene it was also as if people were not really interested in theatre. They say “I kinda liked it”, or “it wasn’t for me”, and that is that. I had the feeling that you make something and then it falls into a black hole, and it is gone. In Germany, people can get really worked up about theatre. Of course, I came to the Volksbühne, so I really got into a situation where people got worked up, so I got from one extreme into the next. So, I think Holland was very good for me for the beginning, to get started and do my experiments and try out stuff, but then to find a discourse that does not just stop two days after the premiere, I had to go to Germany. Arteel: Still, you have quite some compagnons de route who went with you from the very beginning until now. Kennedy: Yes, my team is very Dutch! They are working as a team and are quite independent within that team, so they are doing their own thing and I can completely trust them, because we know where we are going. For instance, the sound designer Richard Janssen is a kind of composer of the play; he makes a composition based on the recorded text. Of course, I create the text beforehand, but then he also does variations on it. And it is actually quite annoying that this sound design never gets picked up by critics and reviewers. People tend to block it out, so that is also a symptom of the hierarchy of the theatre: you have the director, and all the rest falls away, but they are so important to the 206 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy whole process. For the stage design I have now been working together for a few years with Markus Selg, who is also my partner, and the work has changed by working with him because as a visual artist, he brings his own universe to the work. And that is much more than the classical stage design because we develop the concept together and talk about everything that we want to create. Arteel: How do you define your role as a director within this teamwork? Kennedy: I see myself more as an artist within a group of artists, but we are not a collective. I do not sit down with them and say, “Okay, what could we do next? ”. It is my vision, and in the end, I make all the decisions and I choose. Except with Markus: there we have this sense that we really do it together, but not with the rest of the team. But once they get in, they find their own way within the path I chose, and often the text that I prepare is a starting point for everyone. But we keep in very close contact, so everything has consequences for everything else: the video is linked to the sound, the sound to the text, the text to the actors, to every movement. With ULTRAWORLD, even the light comes through the video. Usually, when you have video and you put light on it, it does not work together, so we created something so that they are being lit by the video; you have video background and then you have silhouettes around the actors that come from the video. This is quite new. So, our work has also changed with how the video equipment has developed. The beamers are so good! We could not have done that a few years ago, or it was so expensive that theatres could not afford them. And this has consequences for the actors and how they move, because video cannot just move with them. It is crazy! It really was crazy this time how we got the technical basics of everything together. You have to work on nearly every second of the play, so if we have a play of two hours, like ULTRAWORLD, every second is composed, in sound and light and video and movement… So, we must really repeat it over and over and over again, in what happens here and what happens there and how this is connected to that and so on. It is like the montage of the film and creating and putting the sound in every second of the film in a way that you deliberately choose. This is very detailed work, sometimes painstakingly detailed. In Germany I do not think there is any other theatre that works like this. Arteel: It is very demanding of the actors as well. Kennedy: Yes! They have to have endless patience! Arteel: How do you choose the actors? Or how do you decide on who to work with? Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy 207 Kennedy: Well, when I did that play in Munich about a dance marathon, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? , I worked with actors that were assigned to me. I knew hardly anybody, and it was very very difficult because I was a young director, and I didn’t have the language yet and I couldn’t quite bring across what I wanted. And as they could not do what they usually did there was a lot of tension. If someone has difficulties to surrender to something that is not clear from the beginning, it gets difficult. So, for the next production I thought, okay, I will look for people from the ensemble that I have the feeling are open to it and I will talk with them and see if they are okay with this kind of work. And it does not matter so much if I have seen them on stage and thought, wow, they are amazing. That is how I chose them and that was really good because then I could feel free in exploring what I wanted. I did not choose the big egos of the ensemble but those with whom I felt I could experiment. Arteel: The way you work with actors is also like a lesson in modesty for them. They do not shine as actors in the conventional sense. Kennedy: Yes. In the beginning, people who have not worked with me, and especially actors in a classical sense, have the feeling they are not allowed to do anything. It feels like everything you have learned in acting school is being taken away from you, that you cannot use the tools you have, and then you feel kind of stripped. I now work much more with dancers and performers and there it is not an issue. They must discover their own freedom within that detailed work and usually, they start to discover it at the latest once the audience comes in. They discover how everything plays together and they very much have their own power within it. But you need to do this journey on your own. I cannot do it for you. So, I need people who are willing to do this and be responsible for it by themselves. I cannot take somebody by the hand. That is something I discovered. Before I worked with playback, I did a lot of work with the actors on how they had to talk, how they had to say the sentences, and I could hardly focus on anything else. This is not what interests me most. What interests me most is that I can zoom out and that everything from video to light to sound starts to play, makes a composition. But classical actors demand from you that you focus on them all the time, and you have to do this if you are searching for a certain kind of sound. That is how I worked with them in Holland, very detailed on how they should say the sentences, as if they would carry the language in front of them. It is not that they have an emotion and express it just like this on stage and throw it into the audience, but that they create a kind of space where the audience is being invited into and we can both meet, so that as an audience I do not get told how I am supposed to feel about something. That was difficult 208 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy to research because it meant finding a way of talking that was going against certain traditions of the theatre, even in Holland. Claire Swyzen: I am quite surprised about what you are saying now, as we have the style of “citerend spelen” [“citational playing”] in the Dutch-speaking countries. I do not mean speaking ironically or cynically, but just putting between quotation marks what you say. Kennedy: I was definitely influenced by that, but I even wanted something else. I did not want the actors themselves as a kind of private persons being on stage and doing this kind of citational talk. I wanted them to be figures, getting into a kind of feeling, a big feeling, and yet talk like this. Arteel: It is not the actors stepping out of the role and looking at it from a distance. Kennedy: No, no. In the beginning, we worked very much with a kind of non-plays where characters go through a certain stage, and I also wanted the characters to play with the audience as audience. We very much worked on them looking the audience straight into the eyes, saying the text as if they are provoking them, saying, “Is this how you want me to do this? Then I’m gonna do this and show you how far I can go.” This provocative eye contact also only works in the small setting of the black box, as we did with Jelinek’s Über Tiere. Arteel: The black box is indeed very important for this piece. Do you always conceive of your production, the concept of it, in relation to the space where it will take place? Be it a city theatre or the site specificity of a festival like the Ruhrtriennale, or… Kennedy: Yes, absolutely. For the Ruhrtriennale, we also did an installation where you could walk through and then go and sit and something is happening to you. I am not only interested in how the audience moves through the spaces but also in how do I get the audience into these spaces even if they are sitting in their chair. How can I get them in, even in a sort of normal stage setup. I always talk about sucking them in. So, you do something to the audience that they get transported into these spaces. We use all kinds of different tools to do that. Usually, theatre works the other way around. It is putting something from the stage to out there. The way the actors talk or shout, the music, the emotions, the content, it is all being put out there. And we try to do it the other way around, so getting the audience inside this space. Jeroen Coppens: This morning, we were talking about Women in Trouble and how there are a lot of tools and strategies that also keep a distance, such as the Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy 209 voice-over and the laughter track. For me, these tools create more distance than the effect of being sucked into what is happening on stage. Kennedy: What I explore is a different way of getting sucked in, not through the usual modes of creating emotions, so I’m setting this up to get there in a different way but getting there is still the goal. It is not about keeping the audience out but actually getting them in. We do get reactions of people, and in reviews, where they have the feeling of staying completely outside, saying “It is all posthuman and alien and strange and alienating and has nothing to do with me.” I have also been thinking about how can you make it more universal and that is really difficult. ULTRAWORLD is probably the most accessible piece so far. I think in a sense it is like a Hollywood movie. I am looking for these openings, but it is difficult indeed. For me, masks—people say masks is something that keeps them outside— but for me, because I am fascinated by masks, they draw me in because there is a secret there, so I want to get in, I want to get inside, I see the eyes from afar, I think who is this person behind this mask, what is going on there. I come from the South of Germany, where they have the Fastnacht, carnival, every year and they have these carnivals, these Umzüge, processions, where they have the most outrageous, different masks, and I remember as a child being so fascinated by it, and sometimes, they would take the mask off and the fascination would stop! So, there is something there that is not easily accessible, that has this draw. Karen Jürs-Munby: It seems to me that you describe that as a kind of trajectory in your work, the development from being confrontational at the beginning to now wanting to draw people in. So, my question is, does that mode, that relationship you establish with the audience each time, does that differ from project to project, also according to the project, or do you see it more as a development in your way of working? Kennedy: I guess there is a bigger development that you can see like this, but still, within the different projects…, for instance Drei Schwestern is very much like this tableau vivant with the masks, I mean just black faces with a sort of BAM! BAM! BAM! So, it’s not clear-cut in that sense. But I do have to watch out with this system of mine, with the playback and the masks, that I don’t get trapped within it because everybody says, “Ah! Okay! This is again what the sort of Kennedy theatre is! ” and that is okay, but then also for myself I still have to explore it and experiment with it, not just having it as a system. With Drei Schwestern, my team and me used things that we had explored in the past, like the blackouts with Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt, masks, the loops and everything. And 210 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy I could really feel during rehearsals that we did it so well we had to watch out. I do not know if I can do this much more often. Jürs-Munby: Does that not also have to do with the power of the Feuilleton, the culture pages of the national press in Germany, that they want to fix you? Kennedy: Yes, sure. First, they say, “Okay, this is a new thing”, and then, “Oh, she’s repeating it again! ” No, it is about what interests me. With Coming Society, in the first two weeks I thought, how am I even rehearsing this? I came home with headaches every day from rehearsals because I did not know how to rehearse it! And then I feel, okay, I am onto something that I can just basically grasp, I am able to do it, but I am not yet sure. With Drei Schwestern on the other hand, I knew how to do it. With ULTRAWORLD, it was the first time that I wrote a script like this, with this kind of story, that is why I say it could be, in a way, a Hollywood story, a film. That was new for me. But then to make theatre out of it again! I wrote the script, and I had these Netflix images in my head, which I liked very much because I was quite inspired by a few Netflix series I saw and I thought, okay, I feel like I want to do something like that. So, I wrote it and then I had to translate it back into theatre; really, how do you do this in theatre that someone dies? And that you get a feeling out of it? That someone goes into the desert and speaks to the sun and there is a feeling to it. It is really hard in theatre to find a form that really transports that. There are these basic storytelling devices that I used not to be interested in, and now I am going back to them. To the effect that with ULTRAWORLD people laugh when the characters die, a few people always laugh. And of course, it is also part of it but then I also want people to feel it, that they die. How do you do that on stage? How do you do that? It really is difficult. Ulrike Haß: Yes, I also wondered about the laughs. There is a moment when Frank says, “Oh, they are dead now! ”, and I think the audience laughed because they are used to those forms of pictures in the series, in the Netflix series, or something similar. They laughed because they recognize such situations from series, but they did not realise that they were in the theatre. I think that the laughter came from a sort of tautology effect, repeating the filmic scene but also contradicting it within the theatre setting. Kennedy: Yes, but how do you show that someone dies in the theatre? Film, of course, can do it and then people are not laughing because you are in it, you are in this reality. How do you make this possible on stage? How to get to this feeling? Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy 211 Janine Hauthal: I was wondering how and on which basis you choose your text. You said you wrote the script for Ultraworld, so there was a text in the beginning or something you already created? Kennedy: It is terribly difficult for me to read theatre texts. I really find that the worst. So, like with-Drei Schwestern, I just go through it and see what jumps at me. Then, I sort of mark sentences and copy paste them into a document. I can only do that so many hours, and then I have to stop because I find it so difficult to go through a play. But I also have a document with texts I have gathered from everywhere, from books I am reading, blogs, Youtube videos, the comments underneath the Youtube videos, Twitter, things someone wrote etc. I just copy paste it and put it all into a document. So, in the end, I have the document of Drei Schwestern and all the texts that swirl around me every day, and I start to put them together and see very intuitively how a new text appears. Hauthal: You do this first all by yourself, before you go into the rehearsal? Kennedy: Yes! Hauthal: So, it is like a new play. Kennedy: It is like a new play and of course, at the same time, we think about the stage already because that always has to be prepared quite long beforehand and then we record the text, so the text of course has to be ready once we go into the studio. In Coming Society, it was just texts, where I thought, okay, I have different stations, maybe I can put this text there and this there, but it was no script in that sense. With ULTRAWORLD, I really sat down with a theme in my head that I also discussed with Markus, we already had the title, ULTRAWORLD, and it was the idea of how a world comes into existence, a world building idea, and how a human being is being born into this world and makes a journey through it. That was the idea. And in the beginning, I wanted it to be a woman or a man, a woman like Eve or a man like Adam, and I knew that Frank [Willens] would be in it - I had talked a lot with Frank during the making of Coming Society -, so, I just wrote down Frank, and then Frank stayed. He became a kind of main character, and I thought Frank is a good name, let’s call him Frank! And it was the first time that I made a devised script like this, so it was really new. And I loved writing the script like that. So, it is really something I will explore further, for sure. Arteel: During the workshop we have also been discussing the ritualistic aspect of theatre, and you going back to archaic forms of theatre. How do you yourself see this link with the ritualistic? 212 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy Kennedy: For me, it is as if we do not have many places anymore where we meet in the here and now, and in theatre we are together with these live bodies on stage. You can be quiet for two hours in the dark and experience something together. This already is a kind of ritual. For me, the question was also, why do I still make theatre, why not move into movies or something else? And that was very central, that theatre comes out of this ritualistic, ancient form and I want to go into that again and rediscover it as it were to make it relevant for me and answer my own question: why theatre? And also, the things that are explored on stage with these live bodies, with these people, are about life and death and all the questions in between. For me also the idea of linear time was questionable, and I wanted to research different ways of dealing with time and create a kind of atmosphere where people forget whether they have been watching for twenty minutes or two hours or two minutes. There were people who told me that they fell asleep because I used long pauses and stillness, and then they woke up and they were in it, they were able to connect to it. There was also a guy who, after Women in Trouble, which I think he did not really like very much, said that everything felt strange afterwards, reality itself felt strange. He said, “I walked to my car and my car suddenly was a strange object that I sat inside, and it started to drive, and all the people around me suddenly looked very strange! ” So, there is just this short moment where you suddenly have a different perception of your usual reality, which does not happen very often because we seem to know everything. It is a shift in perception. And that can also happen through repetition and time experience and sounds and… Arteel: And this is of course a way of being sucked in. If that person says afterwards “I looked at reality in another way”, they were drawn into it, even if there was distance on other levels. Eva Döhne: This brings us back to a point that you already talked about when you said that behind the masks is the thing you are interested in. I would like to hear a little bit more about that “something behind”. Yesterday, we talked about the relation between what we see and not see on stage, the thing behind the mask. It is perhaps connected to your endeavour to touch the audience not in the conventional inward sense but through the very artificial elements of theatre. Kennedy: Well, it is a secret, I guess! The thing you see is not always what is there. It is something you cannot grasp at first sight, which is very difficult for us because that is what we always want: we want to get it and we want to get it right away; we want all the signs to be readable, we want to be able to interpret them. For me, this never worked, I always was fascinated by the inbetweenness of things, and often artworks or theatre fascinated me where I Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy 213 did not immediately know if I liked it or not, or how to deal with it, things or human beings that I could not grasp in the moment itself. So, it is about secrets. When I create something as a director, I do not fully know it; I cannot tell you exactly what the things “behind” are. The work comes into being through me, but it is not that I know everything about it. I can only facilitate it… But when you say being touched, there is no other way of being touched than inside. It has to be inside; it cannot be outside. And there is a difference between people who say that it is artificial and there is a distance and they cannot ever get to it because there is no flesh and blood and there are no real human beings etcetera, people who stay outside, and other ones who somehow travel through the eyeholes of the masks to the inside. I mean, what happens in the end is that you experience it yourself. In the end, I think it is a big mirror, where all you do is read yourself into it. I can make something, but, in the end, you only see yourself reflected. Döhne: I was thinking about the masks and whether that could be a solution to how you could make people feel death and not laugh. In ancient theatre, death was reported on stage, not shown. You have to imagine it and maybe you do not tend to laugh at something you yourself imagine. Kennedy: I do not want to avoid the laughs because the laughs are part of it. I do not say, “Oh, people should not laugh! It’s not appropriate! ” I guess we also play with it, so we are not completely innocent. I want, in a sense, that you laugh about it and still feel it, have conflicting emotions at the same time, if that is possible. Haß: We have the word Gefühlsgedanken, a mixture of you being touched and thinking at the same moment. When I saw this gesture, where they lie down, I thought, yes, dying is leicht, easy. You lie down, that is how we are dying. That is an easy gesture. It was very serious for me, this moment. And I think when Frank says, “Oh, they’re dead! ”, people laugh because they think he has not really understood that they are dead now. Kennedy: Yes, he also says, “Oh no! They’re dead! ” We also played with this moment. He does not get it yet. He is standing there like, “Oh, this is happening, how do I even connect to that. I don’t know! ” He is also like the audience in a sense. And then, with every test, he gradually can get into it and feel it and relate to it, and then he has to let go. It is also his journey, and in a sense maybe ours too. Arteel: I would like to talk a bit more about Coming Society. Every member of the audience was invited to be part of it and at the same time, every single 214 Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy member could to a certain extent decide on how to be part of it, could do it in another way. They could literally step out or get involved only partly and so on. There was a whole range of possibilities within the restrictions of the setting. Kennedy: Yes, it seemed as if people who normally go to the theatre had more problems with its open dramaturgy, and we got a whole new audience with this, more people from the art world, who very easily can go into something like this and connect to it. Some people just got in and started meditating right away. They sat down and went “ommm”! (She chants the om sound.) It was very funny how the audience made it their own piece. People came to be with each other in this space for some time, look at each other, flirt with each other, it was like going out to a club or taking part in a fashion show. The audience was in a sense really the coming society itself. Sometimes it became unclear who was a performer and people were wondering, ‘Is this part of it? Is she part of the performance? ’ and so on. Performance and audience started to merge in a very interesting way. You got into something that we made for you exactly like this, but you also made it yourself. I do not think I have ever had so many people writing and reaching out to me as after Coming Society. It was quite unique that we were able to do this on stage like this. I definitely want to keep developing this. The next thing we are preparing for Munich is a kind of combination between Orfeo and Coming Society. You get into the installation with four people, and you move through it, and then you enter room after room after room; in the beginning, you are a bit free, and then you move. It’s called Oracle and you meet the oracle in the middle. Jürs-Munby: Are you going to return to working with existing texts? Like Drei Schwestern or a Jelinek text? Kennedy: About Jelinek I am not so sure at the moment. She is like from a different time for me now; but yes, I imagine doing Faust, but that needs a lot of preparation. So yes! It is possible. Draft transcription: Parham Aledavood Artist Talk with Susanne Kennedy 215 Notes on contributors Inge Arteel is professor of German literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Her research focuses on neo-avant-garde literature by women authors (esp. Friederike Mayröcker and Elfriede Jelinek), on the German and Austrian radio play (e.g. George Tabori and Gerhard Rühm), and on contemporary theatre. Recent co-edited volumes include Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde: Experimental radio plays in the postwar period (Manchester UP 2021, with Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs and Pim Verhulst) and Fragen zum Lyrischen in Friederike Mayröckers Poesie (Metzler 2020, with Eleonore De Felip). Together with Cornelis van der Haven she co-directs the VUB-UGent research group THALIA that brings together scholars in literary and theatre studies. Eva Döhne is a Research Associate and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where she also coordinates the Dramaturgy graduate program. She studied theatre, film and media studies and philosophy in Berlin, Leipzig and Frankfurt. Her dissertation, “Die (Un)darstellbarkeit der Frau in Theorie und Theater”, was completed in early 2023. Her research interests include contemporary theatre, gender and representation issues, and she has published on memory practices in feminist performance art. Silke Felber earned her habilitation in Theatre and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna in 2021. Currently, she is a Mercator Fellow at the Collaborative Research Cluster 1512 on Intervening Arts (FU Berlin). She is the principal investigator of the project “Performing Gender in View of the Outbreak”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna). Her research is situated at the intersection of Theatre Studies, Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies. She is the author of Travelling Gestures. Elfriede Jelineks Theater der (Tragödien-)Durchquerung (Vienna 2023), and co-editor of several edited volumes, most recently Spuren des Tragischen im Theater der Gegenwart (Tübingen 2020, with Wera Hippesroither). Ulrike Haß is emerita professor of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she initiated the master’s program Scenic Research (established 2012). She held visiting professorships in Paris and Frankfurt am Main, among others. Her main research and publication focuses are space/ image/ theatre (Das Drama des Sehens, Munich 2005), topology of the chorus (Kraftfeld Chor, Berlin 2021), current contexts of art and the public (“Chor der Steine”, Lettre 136/ 2022), and contemporary drama and theatre, especially Elfriede Jelinek, Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef, and Marta Górnicka. Janine Hauthal is full-time assistant research professor of intermedial studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Her research and publications focus on multilingual and intermedial theatre, metareference across media and genres, British drama, postdramatic theatre (texts), postcolonial literature, ‘fictions of Europe’ as well as transgeneric, intermedial and cultural narratology. Her work has been published in Antipodes, English Text Construction, JEASA, Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, LILI, and Modern Drama. Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature” (2021-24). Cornelis van der Haven, Ph.D. (Utrecht University, 2008), is associate pro‐ fessor at Ghent University in the field of early modern Dutch literature. He published widely about Dutch and German literary history of the 17th and 18th centuries, with a strong focus on politics and literature, literature and violence and the role of literature in shaping cultural and social identities. Early modern poetry and theatre are at the core of his research. He is a member of the steering group of GEMS (Group for Early Modern Studies) and with Inge Arteel he is co-directing THALIA, a cooperation between literary and theatre scholars at UGent and VUB (Brussels). Mathias Meert is a postdoctoral researcher and temporary lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is co-editor of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings and the secretary of the Brussels research centre CLIC. His research focuses on German-language modernist and post-war literature and theatre, intertextuality and intermediality, and the genre of the pantomime. He is the author of a monograph on intertextuality in the dramatic works of Richard Beer-Hofmann (Frank & Timme 2020) and has published on Stefan Zweig, Felix Salten, Carl Einstein and Peter Handke. Currently, he is researching the gestur‐ ality and genre development of the pantomime in post-1945 German-language drama and theatre. Maurício Perussi holds a PhD in Performing Arts from the University of S-o Paulo. He is a theatre director, drama teacher and art educator. In order to outline a concept of “theatrical image”, he examined in his master’s degree the status of image in theatre, establishing intersections between theatrical and photographic languages. Since 2018, he has been studying the work of director Susanne 218 Notes on contributors Kennedy, taking her work from 2014 to 2021 as the subject of his doctoral studies. The thesis will be published in Brazil in the collection “Performative Arts and Philosophy”, edited by Annablume. Currently, he investigates the autonomy of the audiovisual elements of the scene in relation to the theatrical text. Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor of theatre and performance studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the MA program “Arts du spectacle vivant” and acts as a director of CiASp, centre de recherche en cinéma et arts du spectacle. His research interests cover a wide range of fields: early modern theatre culture in Western Europe, (circus) dramaturgy, rehearsal studies, contemporary theatre in Flanders. He recently co-authored Marketing violence: The Affective Economy of Violent Imageries in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge UP, 2023). Birgit Wiens (Dr. phil. habil.) is a senior researcher (PD) at LMU Munich, School of Arts, and visiting professor and lecturer at the ZHdK Zurich, the Norwegian Theatre Academy at Østfold University College, and the Institute for Media Cultures and Theatre at the University of Cologne. Her academic work focuses on acting and performance theory, dramaturgy, the history and theory of scenography (western and non-western), eco-design as well as digital art and culture. Recent publications include her edited volume Contemporary Scenography. Practices and Aesthetics in German Theatre, Arts and Design (Bloomsbury-Methuen (2019) 2021), which was shortlisted for the Best Publication Award (special category) at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space 2023. Notes on contributors 219 ISBN 978-3-8233-8550-9 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. Arteel / Felber / van der Haven (eds.) Susanne Kennedy Forum Modernes Theater Schriftenreihe | Band 59 Inge Arteel / Silke Felber / Cornelis van der Haven (eds.) Susanne Kennedy Reanimating the Theatre