< input > with Susanne Kennedy
Curated by Julien Bécourt, the input series celebrates the union between the visual and sound arts. From museum installations to underground activism, from Fluxus to noise music, it will invite a visual artist to evoke his or her relationship with the resonance and vibration of sound, and to question the sacred bond that the arts have always forged with music - be it minor or major, popular or learned.
Born in 1977, Susanne Kennedy is a German director. She lives and works in Berlin. Her theatrical devices, a cross between video installation and performance, transform the actors into disembodied presences, as if alien to their own existence. Wearing silicone masks, they playback dialogue pre-recorded in the studio, reinforcing the disconnect between their voices and their bodies. The stage becomes a simulacrum of the domestic universe, revealing the unconscious of the digital world and the other side of consumer society.
After exploring texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Enda Walsh and Sarah Kane, she directed On achève bien les chevaux by Horace McCoy in 2011, followed by Purgatoire à Ingolstadt by Marieluise Fleisser in 2013. Her next production, Hideous (Wo)men (2013), was a collaboration with the performance duo Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot. In it, she hijacks the game show Tournez Manège to turn it into a decadent soap opera. In 2014, she adapted the film Pourquoi R. est-il atteint de folie meurtrière? by Rainer W. Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, refining a theatre of the absurd that prefigures the post-digital age.
This was followed by Orfeo (2015) and Medea.Matrix (2016), her first collaboration with visual artist Markus Selg, in which screens and light play a central role. In 2018, Women in trouble depicts women confronted with illness and death, in a cold, aseptic metaverse setting. This was followed by a series of collaborations with Selg, conceived as tableaux vivants in which nature and technology merged to give birth to new rituals: Coming Society (2019), Algorithmic Rituals (2019), Ultraworld (2020) and Oracle (2020). The dreamlike atmosphere of ANGELA (a strange loop), scheduled for 2023 at L'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, marries the hypnotic strangeness of David Lynch's films with the social satire of the series The Curse. Set somewhere between a TV set, an operating theatre and a witness flat, a young woman experiences the symptoms of a mysterious illness whose origin is never identified. It's a sensory experience that's both burlesque and disturbing, transporting viewers into a daydream.
As a guest of the Festival d'Automne en 2023, she brings to the Grande Halle de La Villette her own version of the postmodern opera Einstein on the Beach, originally conceived by Bob Wilson to a score by Philip Glass. A monumental 4-hour work mounted on a revolving stage, where the real merges with the virtual and spectators can move freely among singers, actors and goats. An impressive maelstrom of sets, songs and costumes where digital aesthetics and shamanism combine to depict the genesis of a new civilisation, where AI has replaced God.
