Well, Angela... this 'posthuman' performance by German-British director Susanne Kennedy, now to be seen at the Holland Festival, wants to touch on many things: life & death, time & space, truth & fake.
The play begins with a text running across the walls announcing that everything in this story is real, based on diaries and facts. Soon after, this statement is turned on its head: the actors seem to be androids, human-looking and acting robots. Their English-language conversation is wooden and awkward, their voices pre-recorded adding to the artificial effect.
The main character is a social media influencer which her unremarkable life - it largely takes place in one room - via live streams shares with an invisible outside world. Angela's life is one acting act before the camera: she eats fast food with a friend, where we hear the chewing and smacking sounds amplified and the conversation is sparse and superficial. She suffers from indistinct pain in her intestines, á la Moliere's Imagined Ill. We see the child Angela being comforted by her mother, with the exact same text with which Angela addresses her teddy bear: such repetition - loops - and role reversals recur frequently.
Animations
The piece is divided into black, white and red phases, but the message is that time and space are fluid. This is heavily emphasised by stroboscopic lights flickering on and off and sci-fi-like animations that suck us into expanding spaces of colour. They are designed by German multimedia artist Markus Selig, who has worked with Kennedy before.
Through a screen, Angela's teddy bear tells a story from the cosmos, where animals possess wisdom. Then an angel appears, near-named Angel, who 'leads Angela to the light', out of the room-an emergency exit that has been referred to all along the show via the redwashed words EXIT on the walls. Afterwards, Angela recounts how even her bones are pulverised to ashes.
Whether she is resurrected like a phoenix or we see her life in flipped order, either way Angela gives birth to a foetus from her mouth moments later and mother and daughter thus swap roles: the strange loop from the title. While the angel remains present in the room - Angela's alter ego?- mother also dies saying: 'don't worry, I'm only going to die'.
Dominant
It is clear that Kennedy wants to take us out of our usual ways of seeing and experiencing things, and she pulls out a lot of technology to do so. For my taste, too much: the set-filling animations are very dominant in the performance, but what exactly do they add? In the end, the intention seems mainly to make us think about age-old themes: birth and death, time and memory. And above all: the inability to really connect-despite constant online connected are.
These are not new insights, rather clichés. By having these played by figures made of cardboard, the performance itself is superficial. The result was polite applause at the premiere and a number of premature departures.
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