Holland Festival: Susanne Kennedy, Markus Selg - Angela (a strange loop)

About Angela (a strange loop)

"What makes Angela, Angela?" That is what the German director Susanne Kennedy and multimedia artist Markus Selg want to know. To find out, they take Angela's existence as dramatic material and follow her from birth to death and beyond. Their journey takes her through everyday situations: illness and recovery, waking and sleeping, birth and giving birth, ageing and dying. The assumption is that Angela is made up of millions of experiences, and some of them reflect what others have told her. Angela could end up being just a strange loop, an endless string.

Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg investigate the new balance of power between bodies, technical objects and machines. With a post-human aesthetic and multimedia approach, they use the distortion that the actors get through the play of masks, the lip-synchronous dialogues and the lookalikes of Germanic folklore. ANGELA (a strange loop) takes us deep into questions of identity and consciousness. Angela leads us to one of the fundamental questions of existence: What is the nature of reality, and what does "I" represent?

Susanne Kennedy: 'Virtual reality is something that people from different traditions have been thinking about for a long time, as, for example, in Plato's cave allegory. Theatre is also an illusion. Theatre is also a technology of simulation, another instrument for thinking about our own reality.'