'ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST
FASCINATING THEATRE PRACTITIONERS'
'ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST
FASCINATING THEATRE PRACTITIONERS'
BRITISH THEATRE
About Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine
Recognised as a major figure of the 21st century avant-garde, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine creates performance works that integrate the performative, auditory, and visual arts with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, forging a singular theatrical language. Our work is not simply ‘cerebral’; rather, its density reflects an urgent, visceral attempt to process the intellectual and artistic legacies we have inherited.
Like our mentor Richard Foreman, we embrace “negative capability” - the ability to exist within uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without the need for resolution. We seek to unsettle and disorient received ideas, opening space for new models of perception, organisation, and understanding.
Under Patrick Kennedy's deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic direction, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine incorporates vaudeville, philosophy, slapstick, dadaism and surrealism.
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.
Richard Foreman and Patrick Kennedy
