Schweinerei - LOD / Lieselot Siddiki

With ‘SCHWEINEREI’, theater maker Lieselot Siddiki creates a grotesque, sensual, and musical trip about innocence, excess, and the temptation of downfall. The performance is a baroque bacchanal on the edge of the abyss: a last party for the slaughterhouse. It lets three iconic figures – Marie Antoinette, Michael Jackson, and Mozart – appear as eternal children: wonders of their time, but also monsters, targets of mockery, lust, and anger. Their paradises (Versailles, Neverland, …) are not oases of innocence, but carefully staged cages. They are trapped in a sick fairy tale. Mozart’s piano music forms the beating heart of the performance. His sounds – playful, childish, brilliant, unearthly – accompany the spectacle as an enticement and a warning at the same time. The music drags us into a dream state, while the subcutaneous tension rises. Mozart’s harmonies seem innocent, but accompany the ritual like a fever dream that becomes increasingly bitter. His music lightens and numbs, comforts and obscures. In this universe, Marie Antoinette also gets a new reading: not only as a symbol of decadence, but as a female body that has been made into a monster for centuries. She was mocked as too empty, too beautiful, too sexual, too cruel, too innocent – everything at the same time. She is both princess and projection screen: victim of misogyny and spectacle politics. In ‘SCHWEINEREI’, her body is not restored, but reclaimed: as a weapon, as a myth, as meat. Inspired by the grotesque world of Rabelais, the carnivalesque thinking of Bakhtin, and the unheimliche aesthetics of artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Siddiki constructs a universe in which the childish and the monstrous flow into each other. A courtly game with porcelain flutes in the ass, a garden of Eden full of toys, pigs, and clown noses. Where something dark bubbles under the thick layer of glaze. The revolution is approaching. ‘SCHWEINEREI’ is a performance about the end of a world order – and what comes after. A mirror for our time, in which decadence and revolution embrace each other. Because what happens when excess becomes uncontrollable? When paradise turns out to be rotten inside? History teaches: where decadence blooms, revolution knocks on the door. ‘SCHWEINEREI’ offers no comfort. No lesson. No moral. It is a warning in the form of a spectacle. A ritual. A purification. A fever dream. The table is set. The meat is warm. The music is divine. Outside, the people are pounding. Schouwburg Kortrijk is a proud UiTPAS partner. Save UiTPAS points during the performance. Are you entitled to a ticket at an increased allowance? Keep your UiTPAS at hand and reserve your ticket online or by phone at 056 23 98 55. You can also come by our ticket counter. Be sure to bring your UiTpas then too.