“Heart-ripping” (The Stage) or “the boundaries of opera have been pushed” (DeTijd) wrote the press after the premiere of La Clemenza di Tito last year. Milo Rau’s interpretation of Mozart was voted both in the Netherlands and in Belgium in the best-of-the-year lists.

But can “Beauty save the world”, as Rau claimed in his disputed opening speech at BITEF Festival in Belgrade – or are we “witnessing the end of art”? Judge for yourself: tomorrow, Wednesday, Milo Rau’s “Trial against Mozart” (Le Monde) will be shown in Geneva, in a completely new version!

But that’s not all: While Rau’s first intrusion as a curator in the world  of opera – with Florentina Holzinger’s radical performance SANCTA – “was criticised by Austrian bishops and is now a sellout in Germany” (The Guardian), his mining opera JUSTICE, an “opera like never before”, was named one of the “most important new productions of the season” in the critics‘ survey of Opernwelt.

Antigone in the Amazon was honored with the “Politika Award” last week and is traveling to Taiwan, while Medea’s Children, which depicts Medea’s bloody story with child actors, continues its Europe tour in Ghent, Prague and Strasbourg. “The most important aspect is creating a safe, trusting space,” as Rau’s long-term collaborator Peter Seynaeve said in an interview.

But is a safe space conceivable when there occures mass fainting in the audience? Are Florentina Holzinger and Milo Rau really “the most important directors in the world today“ (DIE ZEIT)? Or do they rather “push theatre beyond its limits”, as the Art Basel Journal puts it – into the unbearable?

“Art is our weapon,” as Milo Rau wrote in The Guardian and Le Monde last week. Join our RESISTANCE NOW! Tour in a.o. Taipeh, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Strasbourg the coming month. Because art is as dangerous as it is endangered, as beautiful as it is cruel!