Susanne Kennedy will talk about the practical aspects of her work. Thinking, writing, preparing and then rehearsing.
She uses the examples of ULTRAWORLD (Volksbühne Berlin) and Three sisters (Münchner Kammerspiele) to talk about the complex process of creating a work on stage.
Das Foto wurde von Julian Röder gemacht.
Biography:
Director Susanne Kennedy responds to the new balance of power between bodies, technical objects and machines with an aesthetic that is beyond the human. Distorted by masks, playback dialogue, doppelgängers and multimedia, the actors confront the audience with a post-humanistic subjectivity.
Born in Friedrichshafen, Germany in 1977, Susanne Kennedy studied direction at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam. She debuted on the Dutch stage with a series of productions of pieces by Enda Walsh, Sarah Kane and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as the experimental soap opera The Hideous (Wo)men (2013). In 2011 she invited Johan Simons to work with the ensemble at the Munich Kammerspiele. Productions of the film material They Shoot Horses, Don’t they? (2011) and Marieluise Fleißer’s first play Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) (2013) ensue. The director sets Fleißer’s small-town life in a box on stage, in which the actors gradually atrophy into sculptures behind their masks, as in an installation, making the stereotypical and deformed quality of language tangible. It is a procedure that Susanne Kennedy taps into in Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?) (2014), based on the film by Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder and Michael Fengler.
For her production of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt Susanne Kennedy was named “young director of the year” by the magazine Theater heute, and awarded the 3sat prize. Fegefeuer von Ingolstadt and Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? were chosen to be staged for the Theatertreffen of the Berliner Festspiele in 2014 and 2015.
In recent years she has started do work together with the visual artist Markus Selg. They created several plays and installations together. Coming Society was their first collaboration at the Volksbühne Berlin in 2019 and ULTRAWORLD will be their next work in Berlin in January 2020.