Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot have worked together since completing their studies at the mime department of Amsterdam’s Academy for Theatre and Dance in 1999. The duo makes expressive, physical, daring and visual theatrical installations that revolve around the struggles and challenges people face in today’s media-driven world. They look for ways theatre can be relevant in the 21st century and focus on developing new theatrical forms and idioms that give space and meaning to our post-humanity and the flexible, multiple identities emerging from it.

Visual statements From 2011 on, Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot worked on the series Visual Statements. Drawing inspiration from the work of Guy Debord and his book La Société du spectacle, in this series they explore the so-called society of the spectacle. The dominant role visual culture plays has made us spectators to our own existence, in which representation seems more important than what is ‘real’. The series consists of five pieces: Bimbo, Small World, SpectaculaireVoorstelling, Hideous (wo)men(a collaboration with the director Susanne Kennedy) and The Immortals.

Collaboration with Susanne Kennedy

In 2016, they joined Theater Rotterdam’s core artistic team of makers. Since then, they have worked in Rotterdam and Berlin, where together with the director Susanne Kennedy they were co-creators at the Volksbühne. After Hideous (wo)men, the artistic dialogue with Susanne Kennedy was continued with ORFEO, a radical adaptation of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo in collaboration with SolistenensembleKaleidoskop at the Ruhrtriennale in 2015. Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot made three productions together with Susanne Kennedy for the Volksbühne in Berlin: Women in Trouble (2017), Coming Society (2019) and Ultraworld(2020)

Future Fossils

In 2019, Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot began work on the new series Future Fossils. The series explores what it means to make art in the ‘non-human era’, an age in which humankind is no longer the measure of all things. The performance Headroom was the first part of the series, followed by Botanical Wasteland, a co-creation with Touki Delphine: a multi-form art project about digital creatures in a non-human age. This was followed by ANTIBODIESin 2020 and Fremdkörper in 2021.