Anne Juren (AT/FR) Happy End

41% dance 37% visual arts 22% lost & found

A choreography on the installation of the novel “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’”, the last big installation created by the artist Martin Kippenberger before his death, is the starting point of the piece by Anne Juren, co-founder of Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung, in which she explores such topics as yearning and failure along with the question as to the conditions to which artistic work is subject today.
Kippenberger’s installation claims to have a Happy End for Kafka’s incomplete novel “Amerika”, which deals with the sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann who is sent by his parents to America after being seduced by a maid who is now expecting his child. After a number of existentialist experiences, Karl finally ends up in the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, with belonging and rejection being recurrent themes along this journey. Experiences with which Kippenberger was probably familiar and which are reflected in his oeuvre.
Fascinated by, but at the same time developing a sceptical relationship to the biographies, successes and failures of these men who wrote literary and art history, Juren and four other dancers set out to lend something like physical presence to the novel of Kafka’s text and Kippenberger’s work in a choreographical manner. A piece that oscillates between rumours and facts, familiar and new territory and that – despite the general mood of crisis – soberly adheres to the belief that the uncontrollable can ultimately be controlled.