BLEIB opus #3
Michel Schweizer

What are five magnificent Belgian sheepdogs, a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, a dancer and an actor doing together on a theatre stage? Since May 2005, Michel Schweizer has been maintaining a fruitful conversation with Dany-Robert Dufour, a philosopher, and Jean-Pierre Lebrun, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, about some of the crucial themes of contemporary society, individual freedom and the impositions of consumerism, education and standardisation, politics and manipulation.

It is impressive how the show BLEIB, created in 2007, prophesied the bankruptcy of the unfettered capitalism that triggered the current world crisis. It questions the social behaviour and the attitudes of the new “man without any seriousness”, who is led to believe that the sum of individual ambitions equals the common good. We don’t need to think any longer! exclaims Jean-Pierre Lebrun in the course of the show, we don’t need to organise ourselves collectively any longer, we don’t need to strive to live together in society… We have become a society of consumers, individualists obsessed with our purchasing power, but without realising that we are being controlled and manipulated. An absolute silence ruled over the room, wrote De Volkskrant after the show’s performances in Rotterdam, the hundreds of spectators seemed to be feeling the same sense of unease. As if we were all feeling the leash being tightened further…