Gisèle Vienne
Jerk

When things get really worrying, art usually stops too. When the pain is no longer pleasant, in other people’s noble desperation or tragedy, when disasters strike that we refuse to accept have anything to do with our own existence yet are somehow our own disasters too. This is the place that young French director Gisèle Vienne and controversial US writer Dennis Cooper go to in “Jerk”.

We find ourselves in a room together with David Brooks, a convict on a life sentence who tells – or rather has his puppets tell – his unbelievable story of harrowing, sexually charged murders in which he was involved as a teenager: “Jerk” is an imaginary – disconcerting, poetic, humorous and at the same time dark – reconstruction of the actual crimes committed by serial killer Dean Corll, who murdered more than twenty boys in Texas in the seventies with the aid of two teenagers. A story based on facts that still seem untrue; a reduced, above all verbal splatter film in a simple stage set. The horror of fantasy and the horror of reality are indistinguishable in Gisèle Vienne’s radical theatre, which does not look for cheap shock or impossible empathy. Fascination, humour, madness and sheer terror are equally indistinguishable.

From a novel by Dennis Cooper

Autorin / Autor, Text: Dennis Cooper
Konzept / Idee: Gisèle Vienne
Regie: Gisèle Vienne
Musik: Peter Rehberg
Musik: Corrupted
Lichtregie: Patrick Riou
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: Stephen O´Malley
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: Jean-Luc Verna
Kostüme: Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak
Kostüme: Marino Marchand
Kostüme: Babeth Martin
Kostüme: Gisèle Vienne
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Jonathan Capdevielle