IN conversation:
​SUsANNE KENNEDY

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SUSANNE KENNEDY IS A GERMAN THEATRE DIRECTOR KNOWN FOR HER EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODIES AND TECHNOLOGY IN HER WORK, OFTEN THROUGH FORMALLY EXPERIMENTAL ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS, FILMS AND CLASSIC PLAYS. HER SHOWS MAKE USE OF MASKS, PLAYBACK, MULTIMEDIA AND THE DRAMATURGY OF THE INTERNET TO DE-FAMILIARISE OUR CONTEMPORARY EXPERIENCE.

​HERE, SUSANNE IS IN CONVERSATION WITH DRAFF-ER AND FILM/THEATRE MAKER JOSE MIGUEL JIMENEZ ABOUT THE PARTS OF LIFE THAT FASCINATE HER AND HOW THEY FIND THEIR WAY INTO HER WORK.

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Susanne: So we’re at the Volksbuhne in Berlin. It’s one of the biggest theatres in Berlin, and also in Germany I think. It’s a theatre I've worked at for the last two years now… I had three shows that were here and I’m preparing the next one, which is called Ultraworld. Theatre is really something that’s part of the German culture and identity. So when you make a piece here you have the feeling that people really try to be placed within a tradition… and if they don’t like it, which I experienced a lot with the pieces I made, they voice that. So I like that a lot actually. But you also have to be able to deal with it. I really felt, "I cannot take this personally. I have to be ok with working here and people hating it." I really trained myself in that and it’s good to do that, because that also prepares you for a lot of other things in life as well. 

​Jose: You’re German, but then you moved to Amsterdam as well?

S: I studied there and I started working there and opportunities arose so I stayed there for quite a long time, but then I got asked to work in the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich, so I felt I had to go back to Germany. There’s so much happening here, but also the works I make are quite huge, expensive, and you need quite an institution to be able to do that. But that’s because I grew with the institutions. I felt I wanted to really make an installation that really belongs here in a sense, that cannot be taken down and put somewhere else. But of course there’s also a heaviness to that in the sense that it’s not flexible. And during the last few years, more and more people asked me to show my projects abroad, so more international festivals, and sometimes it’s possible… but here what I make it’s not possible to tour. ​

Susanne speaking with DRAFF in Berlin.  

J: Have you shown anything over in the States?

S: I was invited with a piece to Sao Paulo in Brazil, and now they've invited Virgin Suicides to New York, so we've done some touring, yeah.

J: And how is the reaction somewhere like Sao Paulo?

S: The piece I showed there was based on a Fassbinder film called Why Does Mr. R Run Amok? And I suddenly realised how German it was. It was very much in a sense people on stage, but somehow I felt it even more, very reserved, no touching, long pauses in between the dialogues, very sort of slow, reserved and in a sense cold. And of course if you go to Brazil… yeah, a lot of talking, touching, movement. And suddenly I felt I had made something kind of frozen, in a sense, the bodies, of course because they were also wearing masks and the way they were talking so I felt it was double, triple as much the kind of effect it had. 

J: I was going to ask you about your aesthetics, your choices… the idea of something being very German or cold, a slow piece, in a cultural context that is very, like, moving and touching, like Brazil… I suppose the strangeness of it can also be very attractive and I imagine it can also open the way you see things, as happens with everything. Things that are too familiar, you don’t see them in a way. You can open yourself to be moved when you don’t know what the artist is doing. Is that something you do in your shows? With The Virgin Suicides, there is this strange world, and the actors are wearing masks. Is that something you work with consciously?
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S: Yes, absolutely. It’s exactly what you said, the things we’re so used to, everything around us, we don’t see it any more. We get so used to stuff and people and the way we interact that we don’t question it any more or we don’t experience the wonder of it any more. So what I do is that I try to tap into that. I think one of the reactions I liked most was an older guy who went to see Women in Trouble, and I don’t think he liked it very much, but he said he came out of the theatre and everything felt strange, the way his body moved, walking, all the other people seemed very absurd even. He went to his car, and drove through the stop lights. And that is something that I find beautiful. For a moment, reality opens up and you get a glimpse of how special and strange and incredible our world actually is. And then it closes again. So I’m trying to do something to your perception I guess… that you walk into the auditorium and you sit there and you watch this piece and something happens to you and you don’t know exactly what is happening to you. So it’s beyond liking or not liking, but it’s that you have to readjust your senses in a way… So I always wanted to work with that. But in the beginning I didn’t know how. As a young director, you have these images in your head but you don’t know how to get there. Sometimes it’s just a feeling and you don’t even know how to translate it to actors. So I very much worked with actors, how they should talk and move, but it was often very confusing for them because I could not express myself very well.
​

< reality opens up and you get a glimpse of how special and strange and incredible our world actually is. And then it closes again >

​J: But then this was a feeling you always had, how to dislocate reality?
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S: Yes. It’s something I wanted as an experience, when I go to the theatre and a world opens up and I do not know what to do with it. I cannot open a drawer and put it inside and say “ah, it’s this kind of thing”. Finding that gets more difficult the older you get, so you have to watch out for that. I wanted to create something that would make me ask questions, not so much rational questions, so that you’re intellectually sitting there thinking about the piece, but much more a kind of wonder. Sometimes you have these experiences in life, but then also in art, and I think the strongest ones for me were when I did not know where to put it or if I even liked it or how to process it even. That’s something I always try to create and of course it gets difficult because by now people know my form, so you have to find out how to still be able to do that. But of course I have to start with myself. I cannot just go and create a piece where I know exactly what’s going to happen, and how I’m going to do it, but I have to always do something that really pushes me somewhere where I don’t know where I’m going. The last thing I did, Coming Society, an installation the audience walks through, for the last two weeks of rehearsals, I did not know where to stand and how to direct this because it was going on simultaneously. The show itself, the stage is turning all the time, so time and space does not work in a way that I’m used to so I really had headaches at the end of rehearsals because I didn’t know what my task as a director was. I liked that a lot, because it really pushed me somewhere where I did not know how to do this, but I had just enough experience to be able to do it. It’s difficult to always be on the edge all the time, but you have to try and push yourself there, or work with people who push you there… I only do one or two pieces a year because I need the preparation time to be able to get there. If you do one after the other without processing what you did, you get into this kind of automatism.

Coming Society. Image: Julian Röder

J: To me it’s always very surprising when theatre companies make loads of productions a year. How do they do it… to me it’s unthinkable. One or two a year is like the limit… It’s funny, because what you’re talking about, it’s almost like the opposite of an epiphany. You know?

S: The moment where you think “ah, now I have it”? The opposite… but I think to get an epiphany you need to do a lot of work before that, and then let it rest, let it do something to you, and then the epiphany can come. Because it’s something that is connected to a lot of deep work… because sometimes you have those moments where I think “ah ha – that’s how I’m going to do it”. But there was a long process before that. 

J: But I mean your shows, your production, in this sense of being confused by seeing the world again… “I don’t know what to make of that”… like the man who saw your show and went out and everything was different… it’s like an anti-epiphany… it’s a very interesting place.

S: Yeah, I think we need that more. So for me, someone coming on stage and saying “I”, there are already so many steps in that that I have to work with… someone coming on stage, how does someone even come on stage, then standing, then uttering the word “I”, who is this person, what is the space when someone stands here and there are so many people watching? That’s where I start… And for me this is so fascinating, this space, especially the space between someone standing there, a person, a human being, and then saying “I”. There’s a whole history of humanity and even creation in that one word. I always had questions about this situation that we take for granted, theatre. The theatre situation in itself. That someone stands there and people sit there in the dark watching him, so in a sense I always have to work with that situation, never just take it for granted. I have the feeling I need to take steps back and work with that. Also the space, the voice, the body, the face…
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J: So it’s like removing certainties?
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S: Yes, but it’s not so much going back to this absolute space of minimalism… but it’s going into that space of uncertainty and then starting to work with it and see what comes out of it.

'Angelina Dream', Women in Troubl​e. Image: YouTube

J: I was going to ask you about, the thing of removing faces… when I was coming here I was thinking about removing individuals maybe… like with Women in Trouble, it’s this actor character…

S: Angelina Dream, yeah.

J: …repeated six times and obviously played by six different actors. But in a way that it’s - and this happens also in The Virgin Suicides, with the masks - there’s no individuals, but there’s like a duplicate or a copy of an individual. I thought about it because the other day I watched this documentary about Mass Games in North Korea… it’s a BBC doc, years ago this BBC team got access and they followed these school girls that were practicing to get into the Mass Games, extreme preparation, for years, every day… and obviously there’s the whole political discipline, and ideology behind it. And they were talking about the communist ideal, that their dream is basically, as individuals, to completely disappear in the group. That was the dream. If I’m really good at what I do, I will disappear. 

S: Amazing, yeah. 

J: And I was thinking about that, how I made a connection with this disappearing thing, the masks and this standard voice, almost. And I wonder if, politically, that’s something you work with. Does that make sense?

​S: I don’t know, I have to think about the political aspects of it… but if I work with the actors, what I experience in the process is often that people I have not been working with before, that in the beginning they’re a bit afraid of the mask and also this thing about disappearing and also the question of freedom… in the beginning there’s this feeling, “But I’m not allowed to do anything”.
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< the communist ideal, that their dream is basically, as individuals, to completely disappear in the group >

J: Which for an actor can be very difficult.

S: Yes! And then something happens, something else opens up, when they really go for it. A kind of inner freedom, that you feel the mask allows you to act in a way that you’ve not acted before. And makes a kind of experience possible that was not possible before. And in a sense a space opens up that is in between the individual and… what would be the other side, that you’re just a mask. So the actors in rehearsals do not feel they have to prove themselves to me. So you get into a different kind of space and in a sense the individuality is not lost. You always recognise this person, what they do with their body, with their gestures, it stays this person. But something else opens up and that’s always very beautiful to experience and I have to say that the actors I work with often describe it as a very liberating experience. People who would not experience that are somehow not interested in working with me. And there is a joy of letting go of yourself. That’s absolutely there. But it doesn’t mean you have to disappear at the same time. So it’s an act of balance, I guess. And in political terms I mean, yeah, I don’t know, I guess I would rather think of it in spiritual terms. When we experience real joy and real flow, this is the moment where we forget ourselves, you do not think about yourself at that moment, you just do. And of course an actor knows this space on stage, where you’re in the flow and you forget about yourself, and you’re not worried about how you look and what you do. Also outside of the theatre when this happens, when you really do something you love, then you do not matter any more and that’s a state of joy. But of course people often react… I mean, the masks are seen as something… as if I would impose something on the actors and they have to suffer underneath the masks. So this potential that it has is never seen I think. But it’s also funny because of course the Western theatre tradition comes from masks. 
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<A kind of inner freedom, that you feel the mask allows you to act in a way that you’ve not acted before. And makes a kind of experience possible that was not possible before >

​J: I was wondering about the political thing, because obviously you also work with a lot of feminist subjects and the portrayal of women, so I was wondering about how the masks, and the external voices, are taking the agency of the voice from the actor. I know that’s not necessarily intentional… I was also reading that by the time you premiered Women in Trouble, it was the exact time as the Harvey Weinstein case… It seems like a lot of people connected it to that. I was wondering what did you really think about that?
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S: I think I became less of a feminist since then, in a sense, because I have the feeling that what happened is we developed a new script that everyone has adopted really quickly and which everyone is now playbacking in a sense… about how the world works. And I have the feeling we jumped from one state into a different one without really going deep, analysing, questioning our own blind spots, women and men. I sometimes have the feeling that sometimes young men and women come up to me and talk to me like they’ve learned the script by heart, and it sounds very automatic I have to say. So something has happened to me since Women in Trouble… And it’s not that I have answers to it, it’s not that I say it’s like this or that, so I think it’s important that this movement has come. But it’s so difficult to stay conscious in it and to stay aware of what you yourself are also doing. It’s so easy to blame and to get rid of responsibility. And really, really taking your own responsibility, that’s a question of growing up… it’s not easy and we also don’t like it, it’s nice if we can blame other people. I question myself in that also. I just really have the feeling there’s so much possible. I have this feeling all the time. I never have the feeling “nothing’s possible” or “I can’t do it”. But I constantly have the feeling that things are possible. I have the feeling everything’s possible in a sense. And then I make it possible. And I have the feeling that that’s an inner drive that helps a lot. So you yourself, you can really put the brakes on, or let it flow. It’s really up to you. And of course people come from very different backgrounds and very different experiences and then you have to deal with that.

Women in Trouble. Image: Judith Buss

J: Feminism, I think it’s… I mean together with climate, and probably they are the same source in a way, I think it’s a very important discussion right now.
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S: Yes, but I refuse to get captured by it. It’s as if you have to deal with these… and otherwise nothing is… you know, it’s like if you’re on Facebook, these are the themes and that’s what drives it… there’s so much more… I mean, of course it’s important… the basic question is how to become fully human. And we have so much female and male qualities inside of us. I feel I have a lot of both at the same time and they don’t fight with each other. I’m a mother and I love being a mother, I love spending time with my daughter, baking, doing crafts and taking her to bed every night. And in between, I love my work and really going into it and going deep. And I found out that one does not have to fight the other. There is space for a lot of different things within us, and to make that possible, I think that’s something we should fight for.
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< the basic question is how to become fully human >

​J: It’s funny you say that. They talk about the redefinition of humanism… rethinking what humanism really means, outside men and women. And then you enter the cyborg thing… I don’t know if you’re interested in that… when I saw The Virgin Suicides, I was like “ah, all the technology and all the renderings of the woman figure”… there’s a lot of conversation about the cyborg, that we are cyborgs now.

S: AI is already playing, and will be playing, a very big role in our lives. I find it fascinating. People in Germany are very dystopian about it… “we’re going to lose the human being, then it’s going to be the end of us”. I’m not so attached to us being here and being the dominant species. I’m very fascinated by this idea of becoming, what Deleuze says, that you’re always in a state of change, becoming something else. Man becomes woman becomes child becomes plant becomes mineral becomes robot… in the end, it becomes… that you’re…  imperceptible… you cannot be perceived any more. So you disappear in a sense. Mineral, atoms and then… you become part of everything I guess. That state of being, not holding on to one state.

J: Fluidity.

S: Yes… and the becoming, the process of becoming is very vital. And that’s something that fascinates me endlessly. Part of that chain is technology, so it’s already part of us in a sense and will be even more so. And to in a sense embrace it and not be afraid of it and see where it takes us. But you still have to do it in a responsible way… you can already see it in your own life. The way you use technology is very important. So technology is going to be a big mirror for us, and a lot of exciting things are happening there I find. The project I’m going to do at the Münchner Kammerspiele next year is with a robot called Oracle. You’re in an installation you can move through. In the end you can meet the Oracle, but it’s a robot. It’s technology sitting in front of you, telling you about yourself.

J: So I wanted to talk to you about this term… Uncanny?… Unheimlich…?

S: Unheimlich, yeah. 

J: So the way they translated it was “un-homelike”.

S: Yeah, un-homelike, so that you don’t feel at home actually. 

J: Estrangement.

​S: Yeah, so if you translate unheimlich into English, it’s “uncanny”, but the German word is very interesting because “heim” is like home, so it’s “not-homelike”. You feel that you recognise something, it feels like you know it, but then you don’t at the same time. So this combination of a well-known situation and then you do something to it. And that’s interesting in a sense, especially in the beginning of my work, when I was working in the beginning it was something I very much concentrated on. I’m not so much interested any more in this estrangement feeling. 
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< You feel that you recognise something, it feels like you know it, but then you don’t at the same time >

​J: Oh, ok. But this is like a new thing or?

S: It’s something that happened, a development of the last sort of four or five years, when I met my partner, who I also work with, Markus Selg. He’s a visual artist and we decided to work together. We do the whole concept together, and he designs the stage. That has been very important to the direction of my work. So we have not done so many works together yet… we did Coming Society and MEDEA.MATRIX. It really took me out of the box I was working in. Very much this closed box of a family situation and then things become very strange and unheimlich, and I felt it was sort of as if the box had gotten to me as well, in a sense, that you feel not free in it... Very much working with him sort of also got me somewhere else, really made me also question my own form in a sense, and it doesn’t mean I’m throwing everything away, but, I don’t know, a different development started. So it’s much more a question of how can we fulfill our potential than to show our estrangement. That’s the shift, the big shift. Once we’re in the rehearsal room, it’s quite clear I work as a director and he’s very busy with the form. But the process now when we’re preparing, yeah, we talk about everything. I’m doing the writing now but we talk a lot about it. It’s very much a partnership, that’s new for me. Before I always worked with stage designers. But with stage designers, I came with an idea, and then they went away and worked on it and came back. But now it’s constant, what kind of piece are we going to do, what’s it called. Everything, we talk about. We really do the concept together. 

MEDEA.MATRIX. Image: Deutsche Presse Agentur

J: The Virgin Suicides, when I saw it, I was really interested in how it looks. The renderings are so computer-like, there was no intention to make it look human-like. I thought it was very interesting, the mixture, almost kitsch in a way. I just got a big screen for my computer, especially for editing. What happens is I have loads of things, tabs, open now… I looked at it yesterday and thought… if I’d been my granny, to look at this, I’d be like “What is this!?” How can you even understand it?

S: This is actually, what you’re describing now, a kind of dramaturgy that interests me a lot. You read something, you click on it, a new window opens, you click on it… So it’s a kind of strange time and space warp thing going on.

J: Like hypertext.

S: Yes, exactly. I’m very much working with hypertext dramaturgy… so what I do is, I have a scene and in the scene, someone says something, and then I Google it, I find a YouTube video of it, I find the comments underneath, and I use them. I type them out or I just copy-paste them, and then I record that, and I put them into the piece. So it’s like people commenting on the scene that’s being played and talking about the scene in YouTube comments underneath. And so you get a kind of Internet dramaturgy that I like a lot actually. Because that’s how we live and work – it’s really our dramaturgy of this time. 

​J: Yeah, it’s true, so instead of grabbing the actual content, you go for rendering after rendering after rendering, you know what I mean, the content, a YouTube video, a comment about the YouTube video…
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< people commenting on the scene that’s being played and talking about the scene in YouTube comments underneath >

​S: Yes, so… and then it’s also interesting because of the language people use to write these comments, abbreviations and missed spellings, and I use it all. So of course people come into the studio to record the comments, and they’re like “Oh, there’s a mistake in this”. We’re like, “no, use it, we use it”. We also use the mistakes people make in the recordings. So what happens is that you think it’s all pre-recorded, it’s playback, but then you hear a mistake and it seems to make it real. But it’s even more artificial. Even what we did with Three Sisters at Münchner Kammerspiele just now, we have the technician guy who gives comments about the reading in the studio, we put that in as well, so it’s like a control room outside that tells people on stage the mistakes they made, and they react to it. So you’re in this state where you think “This is the reality, oh no it’s the reality behind it.” So I’m always very interested in this question about, what is this reality that we perceive as reality?

J: What’s the floor in a way?

S: Yeah, when you’re talking about The Matrix… what interests me is the construct. When Morpheus says to Neo, “We’re inside the construct now”, and then suddenly a chair or a TV set appears. Everything is possible inside the construct so I believe we live in this kind of construct where everything is possible once you believe it. That’s the kind of mind power Neo discovers. I don’t believe in it so much as it’s a good film, but it’s true. It’s true.

​J: I think so too. I mean, and then the question is, who is in power in that construct? To what extent are we in control of it or not.

Three Sisters. Image: Judith Buss

S: So I believe you have a lot of control and people do not know how much control they have. They always give their control away. That’s also what happens with something like blaming, or if you perceive that you’re the victim, that this person prevents me from doing that, or the system prevents me from doing that. So you never get into the full potential of what you can actually do. And this is also the new piece I’m preparing, that you have this main character who gets into the same scene over and over again. I mean it’s classic, it’s how do you react to change the scene. In the scene, always his wife and daughter die at the end. And so the scene starts again, he’s like “What am I doing in this scene again?” So it’s also about being an actor in a scene, and what’s your impact on a scene actually and of course he always tries to save them, but he never succeeds. So now I have to think about what is it that he has to combat, in a sense, or look at within himself to make it possible to change his scene. So you can also look at your own life, that you might over and over again, get into the same kind of scene. And the outcome is over and over the same outcome. So what do you do to change the scene? Because of course you can go, “No, no, it’s the other one who has to change the scene, it’s their fault”, but the only one you can control is yourself. So it’s you who has to change the scene. I have the feeling that once you change, the world around you changes. For me it’s also when I left Holland and the situation I was in, and I said, “No, ok I want to live in a different way”, then things around me changed a lot. I cannot compare who I am now to who I was six years ago. But of course the seed was planted, I mean something happened. I mean it’s not like change is just out of nowhere, something has to grow within ourselves. And often we don’t even notice because we don’t listen to ourselves, we don’t become still enough to actually listen to what’s going on within ourselves.

Three Sisters. Image: YouTube

J: It’s funny, this is where I am in my life and it seems to get critical at this age. It seems to be around the 40s…

S: You need to live your life in a way that you live it fully. That you don’t live on a kind of… yeah… things are gonna change next year or then or maybe then. No. It’s now – you have to do it now. It’s like the principle of Nietzsche – eternal recurrence. So what if a demon visited you tonight and said to you, you have to relive your life exactly the same way as you have now, over and over, in the same way. Do you throw yourself on the ground howling and crying and telling him he’s the devil, or do you embrace it fully and say yes to it? That question is being put before you. And that’s an existential question that you have to answer for yourself. And if you say, “No, that’s a horror”, then you have to think about your life. And if you can say yes… the question already does something to you that changes something, in a sense. So I used it for Three Sisters, but the three sisters are trapped in a loop. They say “Oh, I want to get to Moscow, I want to get to Moscow”, but they never get there. And we’re always going to the theatre to look at them not getting to Moscow. It’s this strange theatre situation, with all the classics. I was interested in this loop, and the question, can you change within this loop? So it’s not about getting to Moscow, for them, but it’s evolving in a sense, within this space, where they’re sitting and where they are with these men and the same scene keeps repeating itself with little variation and there’s a liberation possible within that scene. It’s actually the same situation with a classic traditional play.

J: It’s funny because it is also connected to The Matrix in a way, in terms of, you know, what The Matrix proposes is this awakening, because we have been in the matrix and the idea of being unplugged from the matrix, and also waking up to this horrible reality… in which, many of them say, I wish I’d never woken up.
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S: But The Matrix goes only this far, there’s a horrible reality, machines are taking over, and this is the matrix you were kept inside of, but the mind boggling thing is, you’re doing the matrix yourself. It’s not so much people, the system, but you’re doing it yourself. It’s also what… the veil, the illusion, in all religions you find a similar concept to that, in a sense.
​

< I was interested in this loop, and the question, can you change within this loop? >

​J: I mean, the problem possibly, or a theory or explanation, is that we have internalised a lot of those things as the only option that we have, like a belief, that we’re trapped in that and we keep making the matrix. There’s a Passolini quote about capitalism, from just before he died, he said “I think this is a much worse version of fascism – fascism was totalitarian, but this is totalising…”

S: Mmm, we incorporate it.

J: … in terms of, it’s in every fibre of how we live. So there is the question of, what you said, which is true… We are making it happen, in that way. How do you get out, what’s the price…

S: That’s a very personal journey of course and that’s the hero’s journey, I think, actually, because this is where you encounter yourself. So the hero’s journey in all the classic films and everything and in the myths, you go out because you get a call, and you encounter the dragon or the evil, and this is the moment you look at yourself. This is not so much about the outside things that happen to you, but you encounter yourself, you see the real you. And the question is then, do you deal with that, do you go into it, do you rise to the challenge, or don’t you. And then you go back home and use the knowledge you’ve gained about yourself and then apply it

J: And there’s always in the hero’s journey, a sort of death at some point – a version of you has to die. You have to get lost.

​S: Yes, that’s very important. If you’re too afraid of that death, or of getting lost, you will never make the transition, and you will not encounter the real you, in a sense. You need the courage to do that, to go on that journey. A lot of us when we’re too comfortable and too afraid of looking that in the eye, we’ll never get there. And then life throws us stuff, throws us enough challenges all the time, you just have to recognise them for what they are. It’s also this quote where Neo says “My eyes hurt” and Morpheus says “Yes, because you’ve never used them before”. So this is seeing the world like it really is – so that can be scary because it can be ugly, but it’s also beautiful as well.

The Matrix. Image: Imgflip.com

J: Which is the hero’s journey, very painful. Like a rebirth in a way, but it’s funny because it’s a rebirth into who you always were.

S: Exactly, that’s a fascinating cycle. So in our culture, we’re so afraid of death.

J: Are you?

S: No… no… 

J: Me neither. I don’t think about.

S: No, I think about it, but I have the feeling like, ok, there’s another great adventure coming then. I don’t think it’s over and done with.

J: When I say that to my friends, they think I don’t appreciate life then that much. And I’m like, yeah, I think life is ok, I think it’s fine, I don’t think it’s incredible.

S: Ok, but I think then… but then you have to go on a journey. I mean it doesn’t have to be incredible all the time, but just drinking a cup of tea, there’s so much in that. But it’s like you have to learn it. But children can do it. I see it with my daughter. There can be joy in these things, and so you think, so when does it start to fade, where is the moment where you start to lose that? And then you have to relearn it. I mean it’s crazy. We come to the world already able with a kind of wisdom in a sense also… I mean children are also crazy at the same time. It’s not like they’re all saints, I’m not saying that at all. I just had a huge fight with her this morning. But then she goes full into the emotion, completely, and the next moment it’s over, and then it’s full into the next emotion.
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< I mean it doesn’t have to be incredible all the time, but just drinking a cup of tea, there’s so much in that >

​J: I think that’s very healthy, I think we’re taught to lose that. I think it’s a sort of indoctrination, with school… The goal is always to get there… to solve your adulthood… you’re never in it. The idea is all these things that are not productive…

S: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s also something interesting when my daughter says “no”, and you have to respect that. We don’t know how to do this anymore, to just say no, and not be afraid we’re hurting someone or someone thinks we’re arrogant, or whatever. Just to say no, and that’s it. But the impulse is, if she says no to another child or to someone else, you say “oh come on, let’s share” so you constantly are trying to make the child feel like “what I feel now is not ok, I should be different”… especially with women, the ability to say no, and I don’t mean now in sexual situations. I don’t want to do this, I’m gonna do this instead. I think that’s fascinating, the way children can say no is really…

​J: That’s true yeah… cos there’s no, there isn’t this contract of politeness, of good behaviour and bad behaviour. Behave within these norms. I think it’s all about the idea of production, within these norms. You will get to the next step, it will open doors… good behaviour…

S: It’s very much about being liked, which is so important to us. We want to be liked, by everybody. The thought of someone not liking us, because we say this is how far I go and not further, is very difficult for us.

J: It’s funny how with the social media thing, that became absolutely literal – how many likes you get, it’s not secret any more, it’s ideologically super exposed… Ah, but look at the time! You have to go, no?

S: Yeah, I do. Ok, I’ll see you tomorrow at the apartment?

J: Yeah, I’ll text you. Bye, thanks!

​S: Yeah, see you.