About Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine
Recognised as a major figure of the 21st-century avant-garde, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine creates performance works that fuse the performative, auditory, and visual arts with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, forging a theatrical language that is both rigorously constructed and willfully unstable.
The work is often described as cerebral, but its density emerges from something more urgent: a visceral need to grapple with the intellectual, aesthetic, and political inheritances of our time. Rather than illustrating ideas, the performances enact thinking itself which is messy, embodied, excessive, and unresolved.
Influenced by our mentor Richard Foreman, the company embraces negative capability: the capacity to remain within uncertainty, contradiction, and doubt without forcing coherence or resolution. Meaning is unsettled rather than secured. Familiar structures are destabilised, allowing new modes of perception, organisation, and understanding to surface.
Under Patrick Kennedy’s deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic direction, the Theatre Machine produces bold, unruly works that collide vaudeville and slapstick with philosophy, dadaism, and surrealism. Popular entertainment and avant-garde tradition are treated not as opposites but as combustible materials, generating friction between the comic and the profound, precision and collapse, control and chaos.
Founded in 2009, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine creates impulsive, chimerical stage productions summoned from deep inside the unconscious which turbulently reverberate. We produce multi-layered, deeply complex theatre pieces motivated by the EXPERIENTIAL NOW. The LIVED EXPERIENCE.
We are always in the NOW even when we recall memories, daydream, anticipate events or do anything routine or creative: we cannot but be in the NOW. And yet, when we try to grasp this experience in the instant of the NOW, we are always too late. The present of the NOW is always absent already when we try to reflect on it.
The Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine reflects and uncovers the primal meanings of this ABSENT PRESENT in their stage productions forcing its audience to continually examine and re-examine its own biases and presuppositions.
Under Patrick Kennedy's deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic direction, The Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine incorporates vaudeville, philosophy, slapstick, dadaism, surrealism and limitless other divergent sources.
The Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine was founded in 2008 by Patrick Kennedy under its original name of PK Productions. It has premiered 10 productions including five works by Richard Foreman and Stanley Silverman.
Performances unfold as theatrical machines: dense systems of images, gags, gestures, and ideas that loop, misfire, and mutate in real time. Logic bends. Language frays. Bodies oscillate between virtuosity and failure. Laughter is not a release but a destabilising force, opening pathways into discomfort, reflection, and surprise.
Resisting polish in favour of presence, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine privileges risk, immediacy, and the volatility of the live encounter. Through humour, absurdity, and a refusal of easy interpretation, the work disrupts conventional theatrical form, reimagining performance as a site of playful rebellion and sustained philosophical inquiry.
