In Susanne Kennedy's Angela, you have a say as a spectator. #hf23

Not much happens in Angela (A Strange Loop) by Susanne Kennedy. That is not a bad thing; there is more art in which little happens. Beckett, for instance, was a master of it. Just as he caused confusion in the 1950s with pieces like Waiting for Godot, viewers and critics alike are getting a bit thrown off guard by Susanne Kennedy's latest project. Indeed, so little happens that one wonders exactly what all that investment in technology was needed for. Though there are those, who find it worthwhile for that very reason

I saw the performance in Brussels and was confused by it. Upon entering the auditorium, someone is already on stage, squatting on a mattress in what first looks like a realistic setting of a colourless flat, but gradually turns out to be a triple projection. Ingenious, what video is capable of these days. Into the projection runs a text, telling that everything is based on dozens of interviews and documents, and that it will consist of three parts, each with its own colour.

Deliberately wooden

Once it starts, we see little happening except that the figure on the mattress is joined by other characters, who playback lyrics. The lyrics do not go deep, nor are they very particular in language. Empty conversations, deliberately wooden.

There is also a sort of elf coming on with a violin, who seems to have slightly more lyrics, and who for a long time I suspected of actually speaking live, but according to others this is not the case.

We find ourselves, it seems soon, in the universe of a youtube influencer with a nasty hereditary digestive disorder. Terminal, but because she still gives birth (orally) to a baby, a continuation of the cycle is guaranteed. The strange run who is actually a hereditary disease, can pass on.

According to the news ticker at the beginning, it is all true, but of course, in these times of electronic disinformation, you have to take such information with a grain of salt.

Long Covid

In an interview with Susanne Kennedy handed out with the performance, we can read that she found her inspiration in the unexplained symptoms of Long Covid: "With long-term Covid, the body continues to react long after the disease has gone away. In setting up the piece, I didn't rely on scientific research, nor did I want to talk about the effects of Covid, but it is an issue that struck me, and one in which I saw connections. Angela's illness is more like a kind of fever, but it remains vague."

It remains unclear even in this interview exactly how the pandemic intervenes in this story, in which main character Angela does indeed disappear from the scene at some point, only to return later, or is it her mother who returns?

Kennedy: "I like to flirt with the aesthetics of science fiction, where one space can contain multiple layers of meaning. We shift from the real to the supernatural, living in one world, then another. [...]This kind of sensory confusion, which challenges our perception of reality, fascinates me; it is often the starting point for a mythology. We need stories to explain reality, especially that which is difficult to explain."

Project

You won't become much wiser from this interview by Moïra Dalant, made for the Avignon Festival, where the play will also be performed. It closes with the words of Susanne Kennedy: "Angela remains a mystery, we don't really know what she thinks or feels. She is quite passive, like a blank screen on which we can project our own desires."

Rarely read an interview with a creator that demonstrated more clearly where the shoe pinches, while again revealing exactly what sometimes makes art so fascinating.

Because this is the question this work, and its presentation in the Holland Festival, raises: to what extent is art something we project ourselves, and is it only up to the artist to provide us with the canvas on which that is possible? Books of theory could be written about this, and they will be.

Death of the author

Kennedy is of the school of philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The latter argued that the meaning of a work of art is not fixed, but constantly negotiated and rewritten by the viewer.

Barthes wrote - on literature - that the interpretation of a text should not be limited by the author's intentions or biography. Instead, he argued that the meaning of a work is created by the reader: "The birth of the reader must be paid for with the death of the Author."

As far as I am concerned, you will have to make do with that for a while.