TOUGH BABY
performance
40 min
2018
Theater im Kunstquartier Salzburg/
Thalia-Theater Hamburg
Tough Baby explores the paradoxes of social mobility, questioning whether true ascent is ever fully possible. In dialogue with Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims and Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the performance examines how upward movement is not merely a passage to another class position, but a process marked by rupture, loss, and ambivalence. Edith Saldanha stages a return, not as reconciliation, but as confrontation. What begins as a journey home unfolds into a reckoning with the protagonist’s past, a negotiation of belonging, and the unsettling realization that mobility does not necessarily lead to arrival. Oscillating between shame and disidentification, proximity and estrangement, Tough Baby situates the body within the contradictions of class passage. The peformance weaves together spoken text and physical sequences moving fluidly between introspection and confrontation. The notion of mobility is challenged as a liberatory force, instead it is revealed as a process of displacement - one that unsettles the past without securing a stable future.Tough Baby was part of a series of performances curated by Volker Lösch focusing on precarious living and working conditions in Europe. Performers from Brussels, Helsinki, Ljubljana, Maastricht, Munich, Oslo, Riga, Salzburg, and Warsaw examined social tensions and divisions in their immediate urban environments.
concept+text+director: Edith Saldanha
performers: Edith Saldanha, Anna Stein, Iman Tekle,
dramaturgy: Christoph Lepschy
choreography: Julia Schwarzbach
music: Edith Saldanha