they shoot horses, don't they?

The third week of the great dance marathon Rave to the Grave is underway, broadcast live 24/7. At the beginning there were one hundred contestants; today, only eight remain. They are competing for a cash prize, as well as for visibility and recognition. The rules are simple: whoever stops, even for a moment, must leave the show; whoever endures on the dance floor the longest will win $100,000 and the chance to change their life.

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The performance They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Horace McCoy. It transposes the story of the Great Depression in the United States into today’s reality of late capitalism, the age of social media, widespread pharmacology, and reality shows. The piece takes a closer look at contemporary young people entering adulthood, confronted with an unwelcoming and dangerously accelerating reality shaped by a society of exhaustion. It asks how a young person today navigates the extreme conditions of 24/7 productivity culture—and what price must be paid to survive it. Are we truly, as Byung-Chul Han writes, “too dead to live and too alive to die”?