As director Susanne Kennedy was developing her new drama with her partner, the multidisciplinary artist Markus Selg, she was also writing a set of lectures for the Saarbrücken Poetics Lectureship. Reflecting on her personal life’s influence on her career for a lecture, she realised that “on stage, I still keep it at a distance. Why not try and go there – not be afraid of it?”
Kennedy and Selg, who also share a child, have been partners in life and work for a decade now, but THE WORK – the third in their trilogy about female figures, which began with JESSICA – an Incarnation in 2022 and continued with ANGELA (a strange loop) in 2023 – is their most personal piece yet.
An immersive installation that invites the audience on stage, THE WORK features decades of Selg’s multimedia art installations and Kennedy’s own voice as the protagonist Xenia, a dying artist whose final moments comprise the piece’s retrospective structure. There’s also a video of Selg’s childhood home, including an image of his mother. With the show now open at the Volksbühne, we spoke to the artistic couple about the lines between life and work, life and death, and endings and beginnings.
How did you first conceptualise The Work?
Markus Selg: I mean, it’s always hard to say where it started. I don’t know if the idea was there at the beginning, but it turned out to be something like a retrospective of our work, which is quite unusual in the theatre. I mean, I come from the visual arts field, where it’s normal that you keep things and then you show them in different contexts. And in theatre that’s not so common. Normally it’s this transient thing and then it’s gone – you throw it away. There was an idea of bringing pieces from different stages together and building a whole new universe with it. I had this practice through all our plays, where I tried to save pieces from being thrown away by putting them in the next piece – so it’s also something that is ongoing. It’s a bit of a continuation.
In these few moments of dying you get an idea of her life
Susanne Kennedy: Because I created these women like Jessica in JESSICA – an Incarnation and then we did ANGELA (a strange loop), I thought, I want to create another female figure that we can zoom into. And this time she’s called Xenia, and she’s an artist. And it’s her retrospective that you get to see at the Volksbühne. The whole thing starts with a kind of interview about her work, and it’s her life’s work that is being shown on stage – a kind of magnum opus. She’s an artist, so they’re her objects, but she’s also a director at the same time. And she does a casting process. She casts people to play scenes with these objects or these stations, as we call it. But it’s all scenes from her own life. So, she casts people – and they play her mother, her father and herself when she was young. But then strange things happen, so that the illusion and the reality start to blend. And it is as if the illusion starts to take over. We have a room that Markus created nearly 20 years ago that we call the ‘Death Room’, where, at the same time that this unfolds, Xenia is dying. It’s as if we enter her mind. So the whole retrospective is not just a retrospective of her work, but also of her life, as if in these few moments of dying you get an idea of her life. So ‘the work’ means not just the work as in the objects that are being shown, but also the work you have to do before you die.
You’ve said that you often began with the vision of the stage. Do you normally begin with imagery?
MS: There was maybe even an earlier start of the work. I think it was on Christmas, and we were home at my parents’ place and we were sitting there and I made the first 3D-scan [with my new LiDAR scanner], just as a test, in the living room. And you (turns to Kennedy) were sitting at the table with my mother, and you [as the audience] see this very private place where I grew up. And then afterwards you look at it and then you can move the scene, you can look from the top of it, you can look from under. And it was such a strong image. I think it was like when photography was invented, people probably had the same feeling. You thought, wow, this one moment in time, which is frozen, and also you’re a bit afraid of it. You think, is it the soul of the people in there? When I saw it, I thought, ‘my parents are dead in this moment. You can look at [this scene] later when they are dead, and you can walk in this room. And I knew I could put it on a VR set and be in that room – technically, it’s no problem. And [Kennedy] then said this should be the centre of a piece.
SK: And now this scan appears in the work. It is as if it’s Xenia’s childhood.
MS: It’s there, one to one. I put in the video, which also feels quite personal. I mean, there’s this scene, “Mom, mommy, mommy”. And then there’s my mom in this strange, glitchy… other people don’t know, but you kind of feel it. You feel this privateness, because all the other videos are much more stylised.
How do you two see the relationship between life and work?
MS: I think it gets more blurred and blurred all the time. That’s the beauty of it.
SK: It’s as if the material of life becomes material of the work itself. It used to be much more divided, I think.
MS: And vice versa. Also, things you try in work help you to develop in life.
It is as if the illusion starts to take over
SK: Yeah, I think we always use our work to reflect on how to live. And then of course, it would be kind of strange to just do it in the work part, and that it doesn’t bleed into your life. So it’s an ongoing process. It’s not as if there are no boundaries – boundaries in the sense that sometimes we say, “Okay, now we don’t want to talk about work.” But in a way, it’s all connected all the time. That doesn’t mean we’re work maniacs. I mean, we know how to stop.
MS: Because we also think [about] how we want to live, and we don’t want to work all the time.
SK: Yeah, sometimes you have to say, ‘Okay, now it’s enough.’ And we also have a daughter. She gets really bored when we talk too much about work. She helps us to not go into it too much. We’re definitely not workaholics. Well, I’m certainly not. You’re maybe more than me, because you’ve got so many projects on at the same time. But really once we get home, we’re like, okay, it’s done for today. It’s the inner thinking and processes – with that there’s no division.
Death has been a frequent theme of your work, Susanne. What keeps drawing you back to this precipice?
You have to die before you die
SK: I really liked watching [Christoph] Schlingensief – he once had a piece that was called Sterben Lernen (“learning to die”), because he was sick by then. I think the quote “you have to die before you die” is something I’ve explored in the theatre, but I would say in life as well: you have to practise it. You can’t push it away your whole life and then it comes and you’re kind of overwhelmed and scared by it – that it’s taboo. You can practise it in small ways, you know? Let go of things that you can’t control, for example. You practise this over and over again. And the theatre, of course, is an incredible tool for that, because you can experience it through the people on stage – what it could be like, maybe. We’re trying it out this time in the death room that we have, where we have a death midwife.
MS: I think that’s what we’re really interested in – in cycles. All death is a start of something new. It’s not only the big death at the end of life, but there’s also this small death. One of my big parts in life is as a gardener – I’m a big gardener. So you see the cycle all the time – you see it every autumn. Everything dies and then comes back, life comes back and we feel it in ourselves. Now that we look a bit back on our work in this retrospective, you also think, ah, okay, 20 years ago when I made this, who was I? Where is this guy who made this? Sterberaum [“Death Room”] was already the end of a trilogy I made back then, and it was called The Testament. Back then I said, this is what I give as a testament. Now it appears again on stage [as part of THE WORK]. And you think, who was this? When did this guy die? Or maybe, part of him is still alive…
SK: But it’s also that when you look back at your childhood, this person doesn’t exist anymore. And this is also what we’re looking at with this figure, Xenia. She has to let go of a certain persona that she was or that she clings to – this persona of artist or director, of having power and telling people what to do, having this as your identity. But you have to let go of that if you want to grow – but also when you die. I mean, it’s not something you can take with you.
- THE WORK Jun 1-2 and 19-20, Volksbühne, Linienstraße 227, Mitte, in English with German surtitles, details.
