Four corpses: a father, a mother and their two children. The four of them hung and shook for minutes on the stage of the Conde Duque theater, whose halls witnessed one of the most depressing silences in memory. his player, Milo RauHe was performed in the play called. Family The true story of the Demeesters, a perfectly normal, middle-class French family with no financial or psychological problems, whose members decided to commit suicide in 2007. They left a note inside the family saying “we made too many mistakes”. They then hanged themselves on the porch. Because? The answer remains a mystery. One year later, Milo Rau returns to the Madrid Autumn Festival with a new work: Antigone on Amazon art director here Ghent National Theater (NTGent) and new director Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) It revisits the tragedy of Antigone and concludes its story. Antiquity Trilogy after that Orestes in Mosul and movie new bible. Rau will return to Madrid, to the National Dramatic Center, in January 2024 with his work. Every woman A death story based on the conversation between two women who are successful actors and a terminally ill woman whose last wish is to take part in a play.
Swiss director, playwright, filmmaker and journalist Rau became known in Spain in 2013 with the following films: I Hate RadioIn this film, a montage about the Rwandan genocide, he re-edited the broadcast of Radio Televisión Libre de las Thousand Hills, known as the ‘radio of hate’ for its role in the service of the war, with Tutsi actors. Since 2007, the year created International Institute on Political Murderhis film and theater production company, Rau has staged more than 50 films, books, exhibitions, actions and theater productions.These include the trial of Ceaușescu or Pussy Riot, the persecution of Marc Dutroux or the civil war in the Congo. Theater of Milo Rau, one of Europe’s great stage directors It adds to its artistic dimension a clear political call focusing on the structural violence of Western society.. But Rau has no intention of filling the stage with activist rhetoric and assuaging the guilt of the middle-class audience. What the Swiss artist is after is a change, a transformation, and a transcendence of what happens on stage beyond purely theatrical boundaries.
Nothing is more beast than man
In this rereading of the text SophoclesAntigone is played by an Amazon indigenous activist Kay SaraHe is the person we will see on the screen together with a Greek chorus of survivors of the massacre that took place when Brazilian military police opened fire on a group of villagers in the Amazonian state of Pará on April 17, 1996. Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) They marched for agricultural reform. 19 people were killed Rau re-enacts that massacre on stage For him, it represents “a bloody conflict between conventional wisdom and global turbo-capitalism, the saga of humanity’s struggle against its self-induced decline into greed, blindness and hubris.” In his staging, Rau focuses on the artists’ process of creating the work, their experiences with the survivors of the massacre, or how “There are many monsters but nothing is more monster than man“Antigone,” says his director in a work he conceived as “the people’s struggle against the dictatorship.”
Rau represented Brazil in 2018. AgainA work in which he reconstructs the murder of a young man named in Liège in April 2012. İhsane JarfiMuslim and gay, when MST members approached him and suggested the possibility of working together on a play.. “They were the ones who came up with this idea. antigone and we decided to do it together because it’s a story about dissent, about a traditional society facing modern capitalism,” she explains in a zoom conversation to this newspaper. Antigone’s brother is killed and Creon forbids him to be buried, and according to Rau, this “It’s a bit like what happened in Brazil, where there are missing people, people who can’t be buried.”
In this work, Milo Rau’s commitment to the Landless Movement is not limited to his participation in the creative process or his stage presence, but goes further and concerns the way he conceives this type of production: “From the beginning, We decided that the rights we would receive from the tour would go to MST and we signed a contract with them.not only with actors, but also with organizations. We also ran a campaign with the participation of many intellectuals from Europe and the USA. Varoufakis, Angela Davis anyone Noam Chomsky and we got their support for MST. “They are the largest rice producers in Latin America, but their products are not distributed because the network is in the hands of European companies such as Nestlé, so we started distributing their products in organic supermarkets in Europe as well.”
It is difficult to keep up with the militancy and activism of a director like Rau. whose job is it art It aims to change the rules of the game not only in the economic and production field, but also at the political and diplomatic level. “The MST is the strongest social movement in Brazil and on the planet,” says the Swiss director, “but they are not well known in Europe, at least in the north, so this work is also a means for them to promote them. ” is better. For example, in Austria, I introduced them to the president, and in Avignon, I introduced them to the French Minister of Culture. In fact, I am trying to give them diplomatic support, because in Brazil, not with Lula, but before with Bolsonaro, they are perceived as illegal, and I want them to be legalized.” “I’m trying to contribute in some way, and this is how we can connect with the work.”
Rau explains: “What we’ve learned throughout this whole process is how they combine classical Marxist policies with identity politics, how they combine LGTBI rights or Black Lives Matter in a classic fight to take back their land. The same land distribution as during colonization continues in Brazil and this is madness, no reforms have been made and this can only be done with the support of Europe. I think there are a lot of things that European activists and artists can learn from them because they are generations ahead of us. And that’s extremely impressive.”
Let’s take institutions
Regarding this contradiction inherent in the fact that creating critical works is created by a system that initially funds them and eventually absorbs them, Rau appeals to the philosopher Adorno: “He said that you cannot live a just life in a society.” wrong system so it’s right When you do political theater against capitalism within the capitalist system, a performative contradiction emerges, but I think there are ways to do this. One of them is to create what I call invincible solidarities or invincible groups of people.”
Last January, Rau was named the new artistic director of the Vienna Festival, which he will attend in July this year and for the next five years. He later explained that his intention was:A legendary, huge and controversial theater festival where everyone comes together to create a festival for everyoneversatile, formally diverse, passionate and challenging.
In a country where the far right has made serious progress, how combative can you be at the helm of a major festival like Vienna? “Of course we know the far right is coming and we need to be prepared for next year’s elections. We had a very stable democratic system in Europe, but this system is collapsing, so we will make the festival a utopian venue. When I became director of the Ghent National Theater a few years ago, I made the decision to enter institutions and realized how difficult it is to change and open them once I become part of an institution. But I think this is very important, we are a generation born to criticize every action, every institution, every story, every moral point of view, and now is the time to take on the institutions, to build what we believe can be a better alternative. and change the ways of producing, representing and distributing. And of course the city’s theaters and major festivals are the places to do this.”