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Anna Kohler

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ABOUT

Actor, author and director Anna Kohler joined the New York experimental theater scene
in 1982, after studying in Paris and Austria. She has worked on stage with some of
America’s most respected playwrights, actors and directors, and was a longtime
collaborator and associate member of The Wooster Group, performing in such iconic
shows as “LSD, just the Highpoints... “, “The Temptations of St. Anthony.” ,“North
Atlantic” , “Brace Up!” and others. When she reprised her role as Natalya in the Group’s
revival of their seminal piece “Brace Up!” her performance was praised in The New
Yorker as the “emotional center” of the show. 

She also appeared in films like “Far away, so close” (Wim Wenders, with Peter Falk),“White Homeland Commando” (Liz LeCompte, with Willem Dafoe), “The Cabinet of Dr.Ramirez” (Peter Sellars, with Peter Gallagher), “On the Run”, (Bruno D’ Almeida, with Michael Imperioli), The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, with PJ Harvey) and many others.


As an author/director, she has conceived and directed plays that have been performed
in Austria, Germany, Brazil, and, of course, the United States. Her newest piece
“Impossible Joy” ran at The Tank theater in NYC in September 2022, as well as at the
W97 Theater Space in Cambridge, MA in June of the same year. In December of 2016
she premiered her show “MYTHO? Lure of Wildness”, co- starring Hapi Phace, at the
Playwright’s Center Boston and at Abrons Art Center, NYC. Other recent performance
credits include “I am bleeding all over the place”, written and directed by Brooke O'Harra
at La Mama NYC, John Jesurun's “Chang in A Void Moon - The Incubator Episodes” at
the Ontological Theater NYC. Before that she was touring with Richard Maxwell’s “Ode
to the Man who Kneels” all over Europe and Brazil and in “Yesterday Happened:
Remembering H.M." at Central Square Theater in Cambridge. In December 2012, she
appeared as Medea at the Roulette Theater in NYC in “The Medead – the Opera” by
Fiona Templeton. 


From 2010 till 2023 she held the position of Senior Lecturer in Theater and Performance
Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a teaching artist.


Over the years, she also translated over 20 modern theater works from English into
German and French and vice versa. These are several plays by Richard Foreman and
Richard Maxwell, as well as Young Jean Lee and others. She is looking forward to a guest appearance in Daniel Irizzary’s “Class dismissed” at La Mama, NYC in April 2025.

Concrete Wall
Kohler no doubt takes some of the information that she has amassed over many years of performing with powerful directors to make a theatrical work about what looking feels like, to the muse and to her creator. Directed by Caleb Hammond, the performance combines all the mediums Kohler has worked in (video, stage, and audio), the better to create a myriad portrait of a mature actress whose beauty lies in her restlessness and her ability to incorporate theatre’s sadness—all those ephemeral moments—into the energy and excitement that goes into making something new, which exists to disappear, too.

Hilton Als, The New Yorker, December 8, 2016

Film and Television

FILM/TV

as art critic with Peter Falk in "Far Away, So Close” dir. by Wim Wenders

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 with Ron Vawter as anarchist in The Wooster Group's "White Homeland Commando", also on reel with Willem Dafoe

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with P.J. Harvey and Martin Donovan in “Book of Life”, dir. by Hal Hartley

“Golden Boat” by Raoul Ruiz

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Playing Lena, the lead role, in “On the Run”, German movie dir. by Marc Ottiker

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playing Lucy, the lead in "B-Side” by Abigail Child

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Peter Sellar’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez"

THEATRE

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“Ode to the Man who Kneels” by Richard Maxwell, as lead, with Jim Fletcher

photo: Michael Schmelling

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"Brace Up”, by The Wooster Group”, with Willem Dafoe

photo: Paula Court

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in “ Bleeding all over the place” by Brooke O’Harra, with Becca Blackwell and Will Davies

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Performing sitting at a table 20 feet in the air with Drunken Madness with Station House Opera

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in Daniel Irrizary’s “Plumbox” at MIT. 

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in John Jesurun’s “Chang in a Void Moon", as Fangitu

WORKS

Immense Joy

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“Immense Joy” is a new and original work conceived, directed and performed by Anna Kohler, in collaboration with performers Natalia de Campos, John Hagan. Fabio Tavares, Justin Gordon and Associate Director Caleb Hammond . It is inspired by the writing of Brazilian author and femme fatale Clarice Lispector, a woman whose deep understanding of human nature and ahead-of-our-times writing is filled with both intense, quirky humor and profound sadness. 

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photos: Theo Cote

MYTHO?/Lure of Wildness

with Hapy Phace

Set in a famous painter’s studio, the models who inhabit this luscious bohemia become archetypes for all women, who become social pariahs merely for aging. Kohler, who was herself an artist’s model at La Grande Chaumière, the oldest painting academy in Paris, drew on personal experience to conjure her vision. However, as the word “mytho”—which means tall tales, or a person prone to fantasy and exaggeration—implies, this multisensory production also immerses the audience in fictional flights of fancy. Mytho? is punctuated with references to Bresson films, Matisse paintings and the Mediterranean world of such artists.

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photos: Paula Court

Nudity removed from these excerpts

Ask me, I'm Still Here

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Ask Me, I’m Still Here, Part II, a video installation and live performance by Anna Kohler and Joan Jonas (Professor Emerita, MIT). Their conversation took the shape of a storytelling game, which began as a hybrid of pre-recorded video in Joan Jonas’s New York studio and live spoken word by Anna Kohler. When the real Joan Jonas took the stage, replacing her video surrogate, she and Anna Kohler shared jokes, memories and anecdotes of Jack Smith, Spalding Gray, the Wooster Group and the East Village in its heyday of performance art, using terms from “The Dictionary of Winds,” as prompts. These paper fragments were then clipped to a clothesline at the front of the stage. In this novel interview format, Joan Jonas cued videos of her past works to illustrate stories about their creation.

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photos: Jake Gunter

Cara

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More information coming soon!

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photos: Nancy Campbell

D'arc-ness

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More information coming soon!

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photos: Paula Court

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