RESISTANCE NOW: Elfriede Jelinek & Milo Rau Publish Appeal Against Far-Right
“Vienna is finally back at the center in the world of theatre,” wrote DER SPIEGEL last Saturday in a review of Milo Rau’s first edition of the Vienna Festival, while a few days ago taz – die tageszeitung called him “without any doubt the hero of the season”.
Despite such enthusiasm, the Austrian radical right-wing party FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party) is calling in their election program for an immediate stop to subsidies for “woke events” such as the European Song Contest and the Vienna Festival.
It’s just one particularly absurd point in a program “full of hate and conspiracy theories” that calls for the transformation of the country into a nationalist “Fortress Austria”, alluding to Joseph Goebbels’ “Fortress Europe”.
Time to resist! Together with Elfriede Jelinek – with whom Rau is preparing a production of her mythical anti-fascist play Burgtheater – Rau is publishing today the RESISTANCE NOW appeal: “Not a single vote for the FPÖ!”
But it is not only in Austria that the radical right is reaching for power. “One European country after another is falling,” said Milo Rau recently on Swedish television, commenting on the dismissal of the director of the Slovakian National Theater for political reasons.
Nationalist parties are on the rise across Europe, from the German AfD to the French Rassemblement National, from Hungary to Austria – and their first victim is the freedom of art.
This week, the Vienna Festival and partners from different countries are therefore launching the RESISTANCE NOW TOUR, starting with events in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp and New York.
But the strongest resistance is art itself! While special focus programs are being organized in Taiwan, France and Sweden, Zagreb, Prague and Belgrade will experience the “unbearable masterpiece” Medea’s Children which shook the Venice Biennale last July.
“Why isn’t American theatre like this?” asks The Atlantic in an essay. The Swiss director will try to answer this question in September: lectures, panels and films will be grouped around the guest performances of the North American shows of Antigone in the Amazon.
But the most beautiful recognition to Rau’s recent work as curator and director starts this Thursday at the Flemish and Dutch Theatre Festivals.
No less than 3 productions from his last season as Artistic Responsible of the Belgian company NTGent have been invited to the Flemish Theatre Festival 2024: Electra Unbound by Lua Casella, SERDI by Lara Staal and Gruis / aan de twijfel by Werktoneel – congratulations to all artists and the whole team!
Milo Rau himself opens the Dutch Theater Festival in Amsterdam with Antigone in the Amazon. And: Together with Lua Casella, Rau starts off the annual conference of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) on 19 September. Because the only answer to nationalism is artistic solidarity!
We look forward to an autumn full of debates, beauty and resistance!