Vicious Circles

Year & Context

2006

Co-production with Forum Freies Theater & Galerie FiftyFifty

About the Production

“For me, the greatest scandal is that in my neighborhood, in painful and yet everyday proximity, there exists a hell in which a certain number of men, women and occasionally even children are employed, sacrificed day after day to the demands of the Leviathan and the lust of Behemoth. I am still and forever astonished at the silence in which all these people suffer, at their suppressed sighs and their submission to the brutal necessities of the system, as if no alternative were possible, or as if everything else were unthinkable, impossible, unimaginable.”

— Michel Onfray

In 2006, Theater der Klänge turned its gaze on society’s outcasts. The starting point was Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Weight of the World” – his appeal not to pity, mock, or condemn, but to understand. In a collage of forty scenes, the piece looks where one would rather not: the homeless, the addicted, the imprisoned, people at the margins – not as types, but as individuals with a history.

The largely non-verbal piece receives its spoken language through originally recorded interview passages with people living in exactly these circumstances – fourteen hours of material condensed into a scenic soundtrack. The subjects speak of conditions they can do nothing to change. This diagnosis, conceived in 2006 as an X-ray of society, remains unsettlingly current today.

Funded by: Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Van Meeteren, Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V.