Santa Giovanna dei Macelli

The duo ErosAntEros, with the creative contribution of the Slovenian cult band Laibach, rereads Brecht’s text Saint Joan of the Stockyards, recognising the actuality of the themes but proposing at the same time an overcoming of them. Economy, capital, financial speculation, exploitation of workers, these are the major themes at the heart of the play, written following the great collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, which led, first the United States and then Europe, to ten years of economic crisis, industrial failures, land abandonment, unemployment, poverty, until the Second World War. Today we are in the permacrisis, the centers of production have shifted, the great working masses no longer live in the privileged West and the owners are more difficult to identify, but the exploitation of living beings and resources has not stopped, indeed, it has generated other changes, such as global warming, wars, pandemic, energetic crisis, consequences of the same diseased economic system. All of this continues to make Saint Joan of the Stockyards a contemporary text that addresses issues not far from us, offering an opportunity to connect them in a dialectical relation to our present through the use of videos of reality. And if the billionaires reread Marx to save capitalism from itself, we reread Saint Joan of the Stockyards to free ourselves from it, bringing it to the scene with a staging in which Brecht’s words are entrusted to actors of different languages, precisely because in the age of globalization only by joining forces we can achieve the revolution that can grant future generations to continue living on this planet.

Oh, let nothing be counted good, however helpful it may seem, And nothing considered honorable except that Which will change this world once for all: that’s what it needs.

Bertolt Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards

performance in Italian, Slovenian, German, English with surtitles