Bad Mexican Dog

In the organizer's words:

Cancun. Mexico. A beach full of sun loungers under parasols. Tourists from the global north fry their plump, clean-shaven bodies in the sun. This is the luxury they have paid for. The beach is a sun economy in which all dependencies take place in the smallest of spaces.

The beach boys empty themselves internally, become cute little panthers and flatter the tourists in order to get their money. The service knows no bounds as long as the payment is right. The bill doesn't really add up, because vacationers want to be able to boast back home that they've had another really cheap vacation and escaped the scams. But in this system, everyone has to make sacrifices and the dream vacation can quickly turn into a nightmare.

The Beach Boys, on the other hand, sit in the changing room after sunset and rub against each other in an attempt to form a network through the exchange of bodily fluids that resembles an ecosystem on alert. How can love be found in a world that draws its drive from repression?

We witness a burgeoning love between two beach boys that is crushed by the violence of everyday necessities. We see how people humiliate each other and yet never tire of trying to strengthen themselves. The boys develop fantastic-orgiastic rituals and dream worlds in order to survive. To escape reality. They fertilize each other with their desires and flee into the sea from the oily film of after-sun lotion that covers everything here. In the process, even the damaged nature, the infinite blue of the sky and the sea is only an escape that attempts to counter the pain of inner emptiness.

Jonas Eika, born in 1991, is a Danish writer and political activist. Eika's book "After the Sun" was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature in 2019, the highest award for authors in Scandinavia, and was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2022. With its sensuality and musicality, Jonas Eika's text takes us on an almost physical journey to the soulscapes of his protagonists. It opens up new imaginative spaces in which we can explore the emotional worlds of alienation. Ensemble member Claudius Steffens takes us to the seabed, a perceptual space in which we examine the troubled subsoil of our ailing ecosystem together. "Bad Mexican Dog" is being dramatized for a German audience for the first time in Düsseldorf.