Suchan Kinoshita - platz halter / sur place / taking place
During this residency in STUK, Suchan starts the creation of ‘platz halter sur place taking place’ a new performance commissioned by STUK & M - Museum for the next Playground festival at STUK (14-17 november 2019)
The starting point for this piece was an experience long ago when a friend and I entered the backstage of the theatre Leniger Platz in Berlin as we couldn’t get tickets any more for the performance that evening. We quietly sat down in the last row of the audience tribune before everybody else had entered. A cleaning woman started cleaning the seats one by one, starting from the first row when suddenly the lights went off. One by one the lighting of the first act (three sisters from Tsjechov) was lit into the scene which resembled a conventional living/dining room. The changing of lights continued for about 10 minutes. By then the cleaning woman had reached our row and asked us what we were waiting for and if we had tickets. We left the place with no urge to see the actual piece any more, as we just had witnessed it’s platzhalter.
Suchan Kinoshita (°1960) is born in Tokyo into a Japanese-German family. In the early eighties she studies music in Cologne. Throughout the eighties Kinoshita also works for the Theater am Marienplatz in Krefeld, Germany, where she acts, directs and designs props. In the early nineties, after completing her studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands, she emerges as a visual artist. Kinoshita's mixed background and her experience in multiple artistic disciplines are clearly visible in her work, in which she looks for boundaries, transgresses them, and ignores them. The experience of time and space is a common theme in her work. Important here are both the different conceptions of time and space in the two cultures in which she is rooted, as well as the different ways in which time and space are employed and depicted in the disciplines of theatre, music and visual art.