Volksbühne: Susanne Kennedy: Looking into the hamster wheel

Who is on stage? Susanne Kennedy has left this question unanswered for many years. Your actors wear latex masks and can hardly be distinguished from each other, their texts come from a tape, they only move their lips in sync with the recording. Even though Kennedy repeatedly talks about outstanding, almost messianic personalities in her settings, she has no sense of the individual.

She is not interested in the individual fate or in the character and its interpretation. In their settings, spoken text and action instead move into the distance, into abstraction. The little and little of the canon and contemporary drama – all the intrigues, the specific motivations for specific actions, the catastrophes and political statements – none of that interests them. For her it’s about the whole thing, about topics like death, life, being or time. If anything is represented very directly in it, then it is a species that, even a few hundred thousand years after awakening its consciousness, cannot find its way around in the world and its laws.

Now their new production came out on Thursday at the Berlin Volksbühne. »The Work« was once again created in cooperation with the multimedia artist Markus Selg. A double retrospective can be experienced. On the one hand, “The Work” takes up elements from Kennedy’s earlier productions, and on the other hand, the usual loosely told plot is about an artist who looks back on her work and her life.

In the first scene, a journalist interviews this woman named Xenia. At first one is inclined to recognize her as an alter ego of the director, especially since the journalist asks her a few questions that are reminiscent of those critics of Kennedy who only want to recognize very expensive esotericism in their stage tableaus. Every now and then, like a sitcom, audience laughter erupts from the tape. Meanwhile, there is anticipation among the actual audience, because this could be a very entertaining approach: if Kennedy and Selg applied the humor that is always present in their spiritually inspired works to themselves, that is, if they confidently made fun of themselves in this retrospective would do.

But the fun is quickly over when the critic invites you to take a closer look at Xenia’s work. The audience now enters Xenia’s unconscious, enters the stage and moves freely through an ensemble of buildings and video installations, some of which are already familiar from earlier works by Selg and Kennedy. A stele with glowing psychedelic patterns hangs above the stage. In a futuristically cool living room, a figure wearing a mask sits on a sofa and watches the spectators around him. In a video, a dragon flies over an endlessly rotating wheel. One is reminded of the proverbial hamster wheel, only understood in a very existential way: life as an eternal cycle.

The small scenes that the ensemble plays in the middle of the crowd deal with traumatic childhood memories, experiences of guilt and Xenia’s growing up as a woman. In a hut she writhes on a bed in agony, while an old woman sits knitting next to her. The suspicion that it is not the mother of the dying woman, but the doomed woman herself, is quite reasonable.

The one and a half hour production is always about transitions. One person and another, past and present, past and present self – these are not rigid opposites, no clearly distinguishable entities or concepts. Instead, everything is in flux. In this sense, it is not surprising that Xenia ultimately dies as well as being reborn at the same time. The actors reach into their pants and pull out blood-smeared figures of Xenia from their abdomens.

Meanwhile, a strange effect can be noticed. Seen up close, these figures with their masks are still very enigmatic, but significantly less interesting than from a distance. You soon lose interest in them and Xenia’s fate.

As a look into the engine room in which Kennedy and Selg work on their alternative world designs, this retrospective is quite successful. As an independent production, however, “The Work” falls significantly short of previous works at the Volksbühne such as “Women in trouble” or “Jessica.”

Next performances: June 19th, 20th and July 3rd
www.volksbuehne.berlin