What lies beneath: The body horror of Susie Wang
On a Norwegian collective whose frequently blood-splattered work explores the supernatural and the uncanny.
This week I’m still in Belgrade for the second week of BITEF, where I’m on the international jury. I’ve also been thinking a lot about horror and how it translates to the stage, since speaking to British director Jack McNamara and novelist Jessica Andrews about their upcoming adaptation of Rose Glass’ cult film Saint Maud for Live Theatre in Newcastle. (Here’s my article in The Stage). And while the busy festival schedule means I still haven’t had time to see The Substance, body horror features prominently in this week’s newsletter, which focuses on the Norwegian company Susie Wang.
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A woman in a white dress sits on a museum bench and studies the artefact in front of her. When she rises to her feet she leaves a red stain on the white marble, a crimson smear that resembles in a Rorschach test.
Blood – and other bodily fluids – feature frequently in the work of Susie Wang. Susie is not a person, rather the name of a Norwegian collective whose work is well versed in the horror of the body. Founded in 2017, the company’s shows are hypnotic and deeply disconcerting, surreal and grotesque.
In their 2018 show Mummy Brown, a heavily pregnant woman is sucked towards an eerie black hole in the floor. She ends up wedged belly-first in the hole, like a human bath plug, before the hole – or whatever is down there – appears to bite the baby from her body leaving her mid-section a fleshy mess. We can still hear the baby wailing from some far-off place. (“This horror satire is not for tender minds,” wrote one critic after they performed the show at the International Summer Festival at Kampnagel).
Their 2020 show Burnt Toast tops even that. Set in the crimson carpeted lobby of some kind of spa hotel, it features a scene in which two people appear to drain the life essence from a baby – and that’s not even the most disturbing moment in a show featuring malevolent elevators and an unnervingly realistic foetus. When they performed the show at the Schaubühne’s FIND festival, Berliner Zeitung described it as a work in which “B-movie cliches, political depth psychology and Zen atmosphere are surrealistically compacted,” while the New York Times described it as a “clammy but rigorously precise chamber piece” and a “disturbing yet tender tale of love and cannibalism.”
Burnt Toast is performed in English, the characters conversing in exaggerated Southern accents, which somehow only adds to the off-kilter quality. There’s a wicked streak of humour running through all their work, even in its most sticky-icky bits, though the kind of laughter it induces is of the half-gasped variety, laughter of shock and astonishment.
With its twin elevators and saturated reds, Bo Krister Wallström’s set design for Burnt Toast evokes both Lynch and Kubrick, while there wider body of work channels everyone from HP Lovecraft to, most overtly, David Cronenberg. With the crucial difference being that they are all male and here the horror is presented through the lens of the female gaze and the female body. The idea of pregnancy as a kind of inhabitation is very present in their work. The female form is at once miraculous and terrifying, capable of making a new entity, yet also prone to leakage. Male bodies, on the other hand, are subject to various amputations and dismemberments (and one memorable reattachment). Everyday spaces take on the air of the alien and ancient. The sense of wrongness is strong.
“Take a happy place and take the happy out of it” - an interview with Trine Falch
“We are newcomers to fiction theatre,” says the company’s cofounder Trine Falch, “so we're still really curious about all the possibilities that it creates.” As part of the renowned Norwegian artistic collective, Baktruppen, Falch’s background is very rooted in the post-modern and post-dramatic. “No characters, no plots, no fiction - so really embracing the reality of the live situation.”
“We thought representational theatre was fake. The whole idea of playing roles was very distanced from us,” she says, “but somehow along the way I guess we became corrupted, because now we love the fakeness that theatre offers.”
This pivot towards fiction dates back to 2013 when the people who would later become Susie Wang made Laksespelet, a show about the Norwegian salmon industry. The show ended up drawing on horror, because the salmon industry is horrible, says Falch.
Eventually, in 2017, Falch joined forces with her friends and colleagues, Martin Langlie, Mona Solhaug and Bo Krister Wallström, to found Susie Wang. Susie is a kind of imaginary artistic director, Falch explains, a person or character they are still getting to know.
Their 2017 show The Hum, the first piece in what would become a horror trilogy, is set on a beach. They chose a beach because a “beach is a happy place, and we wanted to take a happy place and take the happy out of it.”
Coming from a ‘non-acting background’ as they do, she explains, she and her fellow company members became increasingly interested in “this uncanny gap between the real and the unreal, the original and the fake.”
“In Norway, with our Protestant background, being yourself is the best you can be. Even flirting is hard for us,” she says, “because we try so hard to be ourselves. So, to us the act of pretending to be something we're not, has a quality of horror in itself.”
In The Hum, the characters recline in their swimming costumes in front of a shimmering sea of metallic fabric. The idea was to create an alluring environment, says Falch, to lure the audience into their new, fictional universe. A beach is a space where people engage in familiar patterns of behaviour, in ritual, right down to the way they arrange their towels on the sand. But here the sea seems to crackle and the bathers’ bodies arch and contort. One of them is seduced by an egg which forces her to sit on it until it hatches.
Imagery of pregnancy and birth runs through both The Hum and the following pieces Mummy Brown (2018) and Burnt Toast (2020). It’s also present in their most recent show Heavy Breathers, which premiered in June this year and takes place in an antenatal class (run by a man) where one of the women claims to have been abducted and impregnated by an ancient alien (though one could argue all pregnancy is this to a degree). “It is crazy that we, as women, can be two persons in one body for months. I think this is eternally interesting.” Placing women’s reproduction at the centre of their work is also a statement, she says. Men have assumed the role of the universal, while women are defined as special, different, other. "Everyone dies, but only women give birth, which is probably why dying has a much higher status in art than birthing."
Horror occurs when what belongs inside the body comes out, she explains, when our inner bits, blood or other matter, is made visible. It’s fundamentally an issue of misplacement, a hair, when found in your soup, she says, “becomes disgusting because it's at the wrong place.” We are not repulsed by our toenails when attached to our toes, but to come across one on your pillow or in your lunchbox would be another matter. “Horror also externalizes inner experiences, like pain, allowing us to share them,” says Falch.
“An increasing distance exists between the flesh and the mind,” says Falch. “We are inventing machines to do the thinking for us, while our bodies are only slowly changing, at the rate of evolution.” There is a growing feeling of alienation towards our bodies, she adds, “and how we can’t control them. We can’t control the fact we need to pee. We are all dying slowly, and we can't stop it, however hard we try. We are all control freaks. We want to be in charge of the whole world, including our bodies. Horror is anything that reminds us of our mortality.”
Letting horror be a key element of their aesthetic approach, is a part of their attempt to break down the theatrical hierarchy that centres the performers. As Falch puts it, “we want to take some power from the characters and give it to the scenography, so that the human and unhuman, living and non-living can interact on more equal terms, in natural, unnatural and supernatural ways."
Their sets are constructed in a particular way, with the stage elevated above the floor, creating a kind of underworld beneath the stage that enables them to create illusions and special effects.
“We care a lot about surfaces,” says Falch. We try to make surfaces that look familiar and beautiful, then introduce holes or cracks in them, allowing ugly or hidden things to emerge, or for things to fall down into them.”
In Norway, everything is very clean and almost glossy, she explains. In Susie Wang’s shows, the lighting is very bright, but darkness eventually pierces the skin of the worlds they have created. This under-floor gap allows their technicians to enact their magic. Scissors skitter across the floor as if of their own accord, Slick crimson limbs emerge as if from some nether-realm. These clean spaces eventually become peppered with glistening umbilical threads, spurting breastmilk and severed penises.
The company works with a special effects specialist with a background in television and film to create these fleshy effects. “We use a lot of fluids, like lubricants and fake blood.” says Falch. She also regards music as a kind of special effect because “it has this quality that you can't protect yourself against. It just goes straight to the primitive parts of your brain, which Susie likes to communicate with.”
While it’s hard to pin down what the performances are about, she tells me, "it usually boils down to trouble with body, sex, and reproduction. And vacation gone wrong. We always try to find some kind of balance between realism and unrealism or whatever other transgressive stuff happening. It needs to start in some kind of realism in order to make the weird things work. Alfred Hitchcock said: What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out. Susie likes to take some dull bits of life and make as much drama out of them as possible.”
Falch describes Susie Wang’s work as “children's theatre for grown-ups.” They use all kinds of tricks to draw the audience into places they don't really want to go, she explains. “Our tricks may be simple but they work, because the audience wants them to work, and the sense of togetherness that arises through collective immersion feels wonderful.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
MESS – The 64th edition of Sarajevo’s international theatre festival opens with Metro Gaza, a co-production between Switzerland and Palestine, based on based on a text by Khawla Ibraheem and Hervé Loichemol. The festival features a programme of work from Bosnia as well as Germany, Bulgaria, France, Serbia and Croatia, concluding with a production of Catch the Rabbit, based on Lana Bastašić’s hit book. It runs from 4th-13th October.
Method – The new project from Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó, the creative team behind Pieces of a Woman, for the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz draws on their film-making experience and explores the idea of method acting. It opens on 6th October.
Signal to Noise - The new AI-inspired show by Forced Entertainment, created as the renowned experimental theatre company celebrates its 40th birthday, plays London’s Southbank Centre on 10th and 11th October as part of a wider season of their work. Go On Like This, Tim Etchells’ collaboration with percussionist Tony Buck will play at the same venue on 12th and 13th October.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
Oh my god. Such a good piece about a group I'd like to see right now. "Suzie as an an artistic director they're still getting to know". Brilliant!