Jackie is the fourth text in a series on female myths by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. Directed by Alan Alpenfelt, the play explores the mysteries of the dialectic between oppressor and oppressed.
Jacqueline – Jackie – Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is the most famous First Lady in American history, an icon of a society that reflects a television world, a world where image is worth more than reality. Jackie is the prototype of a new woman, the perfect wife, mother and widow, prisoner of her elegant Chanel suit stained with blood and brain matter. Jackie seems unable to escape her character, becoming a mirror of something that belongs to us. We ourselves are Jackie. We, with our made-up faces and party dresses, with our ideal weight and family photos. We who do not know who Jackie really is, just as we perhaps do not know ourselves. And so Jackie instils in us the doubt that behind the image and pop icon status there is a harsh truth and that true existence lies elsewhere.
by
Elfriede Jelinek
from
Death and the Maiden I-V. Dramas of Princesses (ed. La nave di Teseo)
translation
Luigi Reitani
direction
Alan Alpenfelt
dramaturg
Francesca Garolla
with (in alphabetical order)
Caterina Filograno, Francesca Mazza, Anahì Traversi, Carlotta Viscovo
and with the kind participation
of the 35th President of the United States of America John “Jack” Fitzgerald Kennedy Fabrizio Rocchi
original music performed live by
Elena Kakaliagou, Ingrid Schmoliner
set design and costumes
Annelisa Zaccheria
video
Roberto Mucchiut
lighting
Fiammetta Baldiserri
choreography
Francesca Sproccati
wrestling coach
Luca Rusconi ‘Belthazar’
assistant director
Nello Provenzano
production
LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura
in co-production with
V XX ZWEETZ
with the support of
Ernst Göhner Stiftung
production and co-production sponsor
Clinica Luganese Moncucco
Alan Alpenfelt is an independent director and producer for radio, theatre and music. In 2008, he co-founded Radio Gwendalyn, the first independent cultural web radio station in Ticino. With RSI Rete Due, he produced the audio-pictorial project I Am Here Now – stories of young exiles from the former Yugoslavia – and the two-part radio drama Il processo a Henry Wirz (The Trial of Henry Wirz). In 2013, he founded his multidisciplinary project company V XX ZWEETZ, with which he produced a visual and sound adaptation of Samuel Beckett's radio play Words and Music and the urban performance Secret Sound Stories. He is a member of Pulver und Asche Records and curates the programmes Over7, Mazyka and Introducing Labels on Radio Gwendalyn. In 2017, he staged Il processo per l'ombra dell'asino (The Trial for the Shadow of the Donkey) by F. Dürrenmatt, in co-production with LuganoInScena, and Operazione Vega (Operation Vega), also by Dürrenmatt, in the cave galleries of the Val di Muggio in Ticino. In 2018, he began an artistic residency under the guidance of Carmelo Rifici at LAC and in the 2018/2019 season he staged Elfriede Jelinek's Jackie. In November 2019, he exhibited his show Binaural Views of Switzerland at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, supported by Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Foundation for Radio and Culture.
Clothes make the girl. Jelinek's Jackie
‘For the musical flow of song and counterpoint with which she, with extraordinary linguistic passion, reveals the absurd and enslaving nature of social clichés in her novels and plays.’ When, in October 2004, the Swedish Academy announced the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Elfriede Jelinek with these words, the Austrian author was about to turn fifty-eight and had long since given up writing “dramas” in the true sense of the word. At the latest with Nuvole.Casa. (1988), “textual surfaces” completely replaced the dialogic model, the construction of action and the psychological characterisation of the characters. By taking the epic and political demands of Brecht's theatre to the point of rupture (and in keeping with the writing of his best and most heretical heir, Heiner Müller), Jelinek inaugurates a post-dramatic textuality that offers itself in all its versatility and openness to stage and performance work, while maintaining intact the critical potential inherent in the systematic deconstruction of discursive matrices, collective narratives and the mythologies of yesterday and today. The dominant themes of her work since the beginning – language, media and power; gender and identity; the mixing of the high and the low; taboo and violence – are poured into a theatrical repertoire that continues to be enriched and is always sensitive to the urgencies of the contemporary world. Jackie, written and staged for the first time in 2002 and part of a cycle entitled Pièces di principesse – La morte e la fanciulla I-V (Princess Pieces – Death and the Maiden I-V), is no exception. The alienating and alienated monologue, far from any (auto)biographical completeness and assembled from disparate fragments, emanates from an absolute place and time through the voice of one (or perhaps more) Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, then Kennedy, then Onassis, then perpetually fixed and cemented in her style icon. The girl and death embrace each other with no way out, wrapped in a dress of fabric and words that kills the form of the subject and, fatally and definitively, conforms it to its stereotypical eternity.
Marco Castellari, professor of German Literature and History of German Theatre at the University of Milan.
Jackie is the fourth text in the series Der Tod und das Mädchen I - IV by Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. The collection explores the theme of “princesses”: what she considers to be a pre-stage of complete femininity, a femininity that has not yet had the opportunity to take on a definite form.
In light of recent events, starting with the avalanche of accusations against American film producer Weinstein, I have identified the female gender as an interesting focus for investigation, in order to explore the mysteries of the dialectic between oppressor and oppressed, a conflict that touches me deeply. Without wishing to identify either designated victims or potential heroines, I believe that oppression is perhaps more evident in female characters: limited freedom, desires and opportunities for self-expression lead to consequences that can have physiological, physical, psychological and linguistic effects, even in the long term.
This is why I wanted to work on Elfriede Jelinek's theatre, which explores the relationship between power and the language with which it is expressed, and that between genders, where characters are reduced to puppets, simulacra stripped of all psychology, icons contemplating the ruins of their destiny.
Such is Jackie, “the model of our generation and all those that followed”, forced to put on white gloves for everyone's happiness, a symbol of an American dream still very much present in our language and of its worldview that bombs on one side and smiles heroically on the other. Jackie, the prototype of the wife and widow of a perfect Western society, the heroine of a television and consumerist world that manufactures icons for users, prisoner of her elegant Chanel suit stained with blood and brain matter, forced to carry the weight of her romantic relationships forever.
