Sonne / Luft

The sun is burning; no, it is scorching. The life-giving mother, the centre of the sky, the goddess, has become a hellish and merciless destroyer. But we humans have failed to grasp this truth. We willingly allow ourselves to get fried, for example, on the beach.

This text, created after an original idea by the choreographer Doris Uhlich, turns the sun into an “I” looking down on the disappearing people. The sun disappears too, but she comes back again and again, to infinity. But all that the people will do to infinity is remain dead, even if they cannot (yet) conceive of their demise. In the second part of her text, “Air”, Jelinek changes perspective: rather than being a single “I”, the air is polyphonic. It has always been there to envelop us on earth, there has always been “room to grow”. In contemplating a universe fallen out of joint, in which humanity has gambled away its own place, the writer encounters herself in a very existential way – as an “I” who is running out of air when she moves, whose own end forms the horizon before her eyes.

Without the phrase “climate change” being mentioned even once, we are launched into the middle of our era of struggle and hesitation. Jelinek seeks to order the elements but she inevitably collides with an unsettling chaos: the limits of her language which also mark the limits of our thinking. In this production, writer and director Falk Richter – who has already premiered two texts by Elfriede Jelinek – devotes himself with music and elements of choreography to the emotions behind Jelinek’s furious text. We sense a gigantic change with which we are unable to cope because it transcends our imagination, like the idea of ​our own death.

Now we’re getting into a tight spot, there’s is no more room to breathe.