GOATS

Sarah Baltzinger & Isaiah Wilson have been making a name for themselves for several years with high-profile and socially engaged pieces. Their new choreography GOATS is an imaginative satire on contemporary times. With powerful images, humorous dance language and absurdism, they comment on existing social systems and power structures. Playfully, they challenge the audience to look at the world with new eyes.

In GOATS, the performers inhabit a surreal world between pastoral satire and bestiary dream. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s «becoming animal», the piece explores alienation through hybrid bodies—half-human, half goat— trapped in a reality where they no longer belong. Their only escape is metamorphosis, a shift toward animality in a desperate search for freedom.

Conceived as an absurd carnival, GOATS collides myths, power structures, and untamed instincts, questioning identity, oppression, and our bond with nature. The goat, a symbol of both reverence and fear throughout history, becomes a vessel for transformation—an icon of rebellion, hybridity, and the unknown.

« The stage, covered in grass, transforms into an ambiguous pastoral realm. Neither a prison, a human zoo, nor a sacred space, it blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy. This space, structured as a disciplinary dispositif, organizes bodies, imposes rules, and reflects the dynamics of power that shape the masses. Here, where the sacred and the playful overlap, it becomes an absurd playground where the mechanisms of an alienating system are laid bare.

At the center of this reflection lies the figure of the goat—as a specie, as a demoniac representation and as a toy. This animal has been appropriated, in between sacred and demonized throughout myths and religious narratives: from Pan and satyrs to the scapegoat of Judeo-Christian tradition, the goat has often been reduced to monstrous projections. With GOATS, we reclaim this animal, offering it a hybrid and critical ode.»

Sarah Baltzinger & Isaiah Wilson

Coproduction Théâtre Bielefeld and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg.