“Grief & Beauty” in Ghent: Is death representable on stage?

“Grief & Beauty” in Ghent: Is death representable on stage?

 

While the “superb cast” (New York Times) of Milo Rau’s “dark secular mass” (The Guardian) “Family” is touring Europe and the film version is coming to the cinema, Rau and his team are currently rehearsing the second part of their “Trilogy of Private Life”: In “Grief & Beauty” – premiering on 22 September at NTGent – four actors accompany a woman who seeks assisted suicide. Their personal stories about farewell and rebirth, art and love, memory and forgetting frame a radical and tender production that goes to the limits of what can be portrayed.
 
“Beauty is ultimately incommunicable, and grief – as anyone who has lost someone knows – is the loneliest work,” Milo Rau explains in an interview about the play. “In the ‘Trilogy of Private Life’ we use a maximum of concreteness against transience – a kind of dramaturgy of everyday existence.” You can read the full interview and more info about the play here. Tickets for the premiere on 22 September at NTGent and subsequent performances can still be reserved here.

 

“School of Resistance” at Schauspiel Köln : For a Politics of Justice!

 

With “Grief & Beauty”, a packed opening week starts at NTGent  – with new productions by Luanda Casella and Luk Perceval, talks and film screenings, as well as the already 17th “School of Resistance” episode since its foundation in 2020. On the occasion of the german federal elections, Milo Rau and the IIPM, LeaveNoOneBehind, the School of Political Hope and numerous other partners* from all over the world are organising a dense festival on 24 and 25 September at Schauspiel Köln under the title “For a Politics of Justice!”: a broad workshop programme, three hybrid panels, a rally, a concert and a joint fundraising campaign for a just and humane refugee policy. Among the guests are the writers Navid Kermani and Mithu Sanyal, the lawyers Wolfgang Kaleck, Céline Tshizena and Omer Shatz or the activists Mattea Weihe and Yvan Sagnet. You can find the whole programme here.

 

A monograph on the work of Milo Rau/IIPM

 

Still not enough? A monograph of academic, activist and artistic voices on the work of Milo Rau and the IIPM over the last 20 years has just been published by the American Yale University. For the first time in its 50-year existence, an issue of “Theatre”  was devoted entirely to a single artistic position, edited by Lily Climenhaga and Piet Defraeye. The issue focuses on Rau’s plays, films as well as his activist work, and features academic contributions as well as Rau’s collaborators from Brazil, Europe and Africa, including the Cameroonian activist Yvan Sagnet (“The New Gospel”), the indigenous activist and actress Kay Sara (“Antigone in the Amazon”) or the actress Ursina Lardi (“Everywoman”).