Among animals

When money concentrates power and credit constantly creates new money, many people shirk their responsibilities. Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek traces the path of money all the way to the depths of the global financial system. Pigeons, cows, and pigs powerfully illustrate our transparent venality and utter lack of responsibility. Between comedy and unease, the play shows how life itself becomes a commodity and cruelty becomes routine in a thoroughly economized and corrupt society. What happens to our language, our coexistence, when everything has a price? Jelinek’s text is a ruthless reckoning with the logic of exploitation: we are all animals of this system.

Tyrolean director Peter Lorenz approaches the text as a radical diagnosis of the present. Together with the Oberland hip-hop group “Von Seiten der Gemeinde,” Jelinek’s world is also explored musically with wit and precise intuition. The focused production situates global financial events concretely in Innsbruck. Our systems allow unscrupulous investment cowboys like René Benko to undermine the rule of law and trust in democracy! Together with the Innsbruck-based artist Katharina Cibulka, an activist-feminist approach with strong local relevance emerges. The stage and costumes let us feel the hypocrisy and economic violence up close and in a way that fills the space. 

Who checks anything before granting a loan? When everyone forgives everything, then you don’t forgive yourself when you do business with other people’s money…
Elfriede Jelinek