Schweinerei

‘SCHWEINEREI’ is a grotesque, sensuous musical trip about innocence, excess and the seductive pull of collapse. Theatre‑maker Lieselot Siddiki stages a baroque bacchanal on the edge of the abyss: a final feast before the slaughter. Three iconic figures - Marie Antoinette, Michael Jackson and Mozart - appear as eternal children, both wonders and monsters of their time, trapped in carefully constructed paradises that function as gilded cages.

Mozart’s piano music forms the beating heart of the performance: playful, brilliant and otherworldly, luring the audience into a dream state while an undercurrent of dread intensifies. His harmonies soothe and seduce even as they signal danger.

Marie Antoinette is re‑examined not just as a symbol of decadence but as a woman whose body has long been turned into a monster by misogyny and spectacle. In SCHWEINEREI, her body is reclaimed - as weapon, myth and flesh.

Drawing on Rabelais’ grotesque imagination, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and the uncanny aesthetics of artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Siddiki creates a universe where the childlike and the monstrous merge: a toy‑filled Eden of pigs, porcelain flutes and clown noses, beneath whose glossy surface something dark is brewing. Revolution is near.

Ultimately, SCHWEINEREI is a vision of a world order on the brink of collapse — and what might follow. A mirror for our own age, where decadence and revolt embrace. It offers no comfort, no lesson, no moral: only a warning in the form of a spectacle, a ritual, a fever dream. The table is set. The flesh is warm. The music divine. Outside, the people are pounding at the door.