„Almost pornographic“: Milo Rau in New York

ANTIGONE IN NEW YORK

Hardly any other artist has divided critics as much as Milo Rau has in recent years – especially in the American press. While the director of the Vienna Festival was showered with superlatives by the US media and several of his shows were voted into the best-of polls of the New York Times, Five Easy Pieces at the Skirball Center disturbed with its „almost pornographic intensity„. The Atlantic even wrote of Rau’s oeuvre: „His career would be impossible in the United States.“

But judge for yourself: after Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Belgrade, the Resistance Now Tour lands in the United States this week. Already today, the Segal Center in New York is showing two films by Milo Rau, followed by a debate with the director and Cameroonian-Italian activist Yvan Sagnet, who plays Jesus in Rau’s feature film The New Gospel.

HOW TO RESIST

“Resistance has no form, resistance is the form,” as Rau said in his Opening Speech „How to Resist?” at the International Theater Institute’s World Congress last Thursday. What is the aesthetic of the “most influential artist working in political theater”? Workshops on Rau’s films, plays, actions and books at the universities of Yale and Columbia culminate at the end of the week in the Antigone in the Amazon shows at the Skirball Center.

But that’s not all. Before his visit to New York, Rau will open the BITEF Theater Festival in Belgrade: “Can Beauty Save the World?” While Antigone in the Amazon is being shown in New York, Rau’s newest work, the “unbearable masterpiece” Medea’s Children, lands in Zagreb and at the Czech National Theater: the bloodiest tragedy of the Western canon – played by children!

NEWS & TOUR DATES

From The Interrogation to Family, from Medea’s Children to Everywoman, from Germany to China, from talks to a revival of Rau’s “heart-ripping” opera Clemenza di Tito, from a whole week of shows and debates in Taiwan to “ten days with Milo Rau” in France: This autumn will explore Rau’s „global realism“ on all continents and in all its facets.

“For where politics fails, where it chases after national discourse gains, only art can provide a remedy: a place where empathy with others, but also with one’s own blind spots, becomes possible. A place where a new, tragic poetry with all its contradictions and moral pitfalls can emerge.” (ITI Speech)

NEWS

• „How to work with children?“ – Rau’s collaborator and children coach Peter Seynaeve about the work on Medea’s Children

• “The biggest theatre scandal of the Republic” – learn more about the upcoming Burgtheater-Show and the Open Letter by Elfriede Jelinek & Milo Rau

• “Milo Rau, Comparative Lenses” – call for papers for new Documenta edition.

• “Democracy is an agora open to everyone who isn’t a criminal” – Rau on the rise of the Far-Right in Europe.

• “Human rights & good manners” – Mely Kiyak and Milo Rau “bid farewell to this world”.