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    •   OPEN LETTER   “Artistic freedom under attack”: Initiated by the Vienna Festival, the European Theatre Convention, Opera Europa and Prospero – Extended Theatre, the leaders of 200 high-profile cultural organisations from across the European Union have collectively raised their voice against an “acute threat” to artistic freedom and cultural autonomy.   By signing the RESISTANCE […]


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    FREE CULTURE: Join Europe’s largest Campaign for Artistic Freedom!

     

    OPEN LETTER

     

    “Artistic freedom under attack”: Initiated by the Vienna Festival, the European Theatre Convention, Opera Europa and Prospero – Extended Theatre, the leaders of 200 high-profile cultural organisations from across the European Union have collectively raised their voice against an “acute threat” to artistic freedom and cultural autonomy.

     

    By signing the RESISTANCE NOW: FREE CULTURE open letter, they express concerns about the “attacks, bans, layoffs and cutbacks” to cultural institutions that are designed to undermine a “diverse European culture”.

     

    It is an unprecedented drive that connects leading institutions from 39 countries, including all EU Member States, urging the European Parliament to “finally take an explicit stand” on cultural autonomy and implement a “Freedom of Culture Act”.

     

    The open letter (published a. o. in The Stage, Le Soir and Nachtkritik) is launched today 18:30 with a discussion event in Strasbourg, in presence of the initiators of the campaign – Milo Rau, Matej Drlička, Barbara Engelhardt & Heidi Wiley (ETC) – and former French Minister for Culture, Catherine Trautmann.

     

    The discussion will be followed by a performance of the UBU Prize-nominated play Medea’s Children, part of the 10 Days with Milo Rau program organized by Maillon – European Stage.

     

    The Open Letter is available from today for the general public to sign. Join the RESISTANCE NOW! Tour and become part of the largest campaign for European Culture to date!

     

    SIGN NOW!


      When Milo Rau ended his celebrated Europe Trilogy in northern Iraq with Empire in 2016, Mosul was still occupied by the terrorist militia ISIS. Two years later, in the newly liberated city, Rau and students from the Fine Arts Academy of Mosul set “a new benchmark for modern adaptations of classic texts”: Orestes in […]


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    How to Resist? Milo Rau in Mosul and Strasbourg

     

    When Milo Rau ended his celebrated Europe Trilogy in northern Iraq with Empire in 2016, Mosul was still occupied by the terrorist militia ISIS. Two years later, in the newly liberated city, Rau and students from the Fine Arts Academy of Mosul set “a new benchmark for modern adaptations of classic texts”: Orestes in Mosul.

     

    The play toured the world – but “can a Greek tragedy help heal a scarred city?” as the New York Times asked critically at the time. As a possible answer to this, Milo Rau, together with NTGent and UNESCO, founded the Film School in Mosul.

     

    A FILM SCHOOL IN MOSUL

     

    Now the collaboration is entering the next phase: Milo Rau and the actress Ursina Lardi (Compassion, Lenin, Everywoman) are currently researching in Mosul on their new play The Seer, freely based on Philoctetes by Sophocles – a piece reflecting on the connections between art, resistance and war.

     

    At the same time, the focus series 10 Days with Milo Rau starts in Strasbourg. Rau’s adaptations of Greek classics Antigone in the Amazon and Medea’s Children are at the center of the program – both productions have just been nominated for the main Italian theater prize Premio Ubu as Best Foreign Play!

     

    10 DAYS WITH MILO RAU

     

    In addition to films, debates and seminars (a. o. Realism as Ethics), another highlight will be the Strasbourg stop of the Resistance Now! Tour on November 30. After Rau’s speeches in Prague and at the Jewish Museum Hohenems, the expectations are high.

     

    Only this much should be said: the city of the European Parliament will see more than just another debate – but the beginning of a completely new level of campaigning for European culture.

     

    Don’t miss the Resistance Now Tour!


      RESISTANCE NOW! TOUR   “A veritable manifesto of what the operatic genre can be today”, was how critics judged Milo Rau’s “revolutionary” staging of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito at the end of October. But can art really change the world? Or at least resist the current rise of the far right around […]


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    Resistance Now: How to Defeat the Fascists with the Power of Love?

     

    RESISTANCE NOW! TOUR

     

    “A veritable manifesto of what the operatic genre can be today”, was how critics judged Milo Rau’s “revolutionary” staging of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito at the end of October. But can art really change the world? Or at least resist the current rise of the far right around the world?

     

    This is the question posed by the Resistance Now! Autumn Tour, which – after several open letters, columns, controversial speeches and talks in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Belgrade, Antwerp, Liège, New York and Taipei – will be making five further stops in Europe next week, starting today, Tuesday, in Vienna.

     

    REPUBLIC OF LOVE – STREAM

     

    “Milo Rau dedicates the Vienna Festival to Love”: A few weeks ago, the  Funkhaus (Vienna state radio station) was closed, but the Vienna Festival has declared it the headquarters of the Republic of Love: As a kick-off, Rau welcomes today Croatian activist Srećko Horvat, Hungarian producer Nóra Büki and the dismissed General Director of the Slovak National Theater, Matej Drlička, in the legendary Funkhaus.

     

    Together they will discuss the necessity of international solidarity in the fight against the global rise of the radical right. “If we let the dominoes fall one by one, they will all fall,” as Rau recently told the Czech newspaper Denník. “Let us realise that unless somebody stops these people, they will continue until the end.“

     

    IS THEATRE DANGEROUS?

     

    Tomorrow, Wednesday, Milo Rau will open the Crossroads Festival at the Czech National Theater with the debate Is Theatre Dangerous? and the speech After the End of History. On Thursday, in Zurich, the Swiss director discusses the links between film and social change at the Films for Future Festival.

     

    On Friday, Rau will give a speech in honor of the Jewish Museum Hohenems which is currently causing a stir with the exhibition Yalla. Arab-Jewish encounters. And finally, he travels to the Central European Forum to debate with Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Agnieszka Holland, Stanislav Asejew & Didier Eribon about the future of a democratic, open Europe.

     

    Don’t miss out on the Resistance Now! Autumn Tour – live or online!

     

    “AN INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION”

     

     


      “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 […]


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    “Art is our weapon”: Milo Rau & Florentina Holzinger push theatre beyond its limits

     

    “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!

     

    CAN BEAUTY SAVE THE WORLD?

     

    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.

     

    MEDEA’S CHILDREN

     

    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!

     

    RESISTANCE NOW!


      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 […]


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    “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

     

     


      JELINEK & RAU: RESISTANCE NOW   “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 […]


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    RESISTANCE NOW: Elfriede Jelinek & Milo Rau Publish Appeal Against Far-Right

     

    JELINEK & RAU: RESISTANCE NOW

     

    “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!”

     

    BURGTHEATER BY JELINEK & RAU

     

    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.

     

    RESISTANCE NOW TOUR

     

    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.

     

    HOW CAN WE ACT TOGETHER

     

    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!


      THAT WAS THE FREE REPUBLIC   “Today, the Swiss Milo Rau and the Austrian Florentina Holzinger are the most important directors in the world“, declared the news magazine DIE ZEIT this week. The two “mavericks” shook up this year’s Wiener Festwochen, together with hundreds of their colleagues from Kornél Mundruczó to Angélica Liddell and […]


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    “An Institutional Revolution”: Vienna Festival breaks all records!

     

    THAT WAS THE FREE REPUBLIC

     

    “Today, the Swiss Milo Rau and the Austrian Florentina Holzinger are the most important directors in the world“, declared the news magazine DIE ZEIT this week. The two “mavericks” shook up this year’s Wiener Festwochen, together with hundreds of their colleagues from Kornél Mundruczó to Angélica Liddell and from Pussy Riot to Elfriede Jelinek: 47 theater, opera and music productions from all over the world, as well as over 100 activist and art events took place in all parts of Vienna, the capital of modernism.

     

    96% occupancy rate and 100,000 visitors made Rau’s first year of the legendary festival the most successful edition in recent decades. Several million viewers were reached via streams on television and social media, a total of 2800 media reports were published in 25 countries, and the festival debates even shook the city and national parliaments. “That’s what I like about Milo: there’s no fear of provocation”, as Florentina Holzinger revealed to Art Basel Magazine.

     

    NUMBERS & QUOTES

     

    The proclamation of the Free Republic of Vienna, the world’s first art republic, in front of 36,000 people on May 17 was followed by the appointment of a 100-member council, including citizens from all parts of Vienna, but also artists like Annie Ernaux or Sandra Hüller. In the Vienna Trials against the Austrian government, the right-wing party FPÖ and finally the festival itself, Milo Rau “put reality in trial” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). “The most exciting thing that theatre currently has to offer”, was how Die Welt summed up the fireworks that Europe’s largest crossover festival set off in 2024.

     

    With the Vienna Declaration, the Wiener Festwochen became the first festival ever to adopt guidelines that set out quotas, the democratic organization of curation and ethical and ecological standards. “An institutional revolution that no other festival in Europe has delivered”, reported Agence France Presse.

     

    VIENNA DECLARATION

     

    But it is not just politics and discourse, but intensive structural work that is at the heart of the Free Republic of Vienna. “Frustrated by the persistent gender imbalance in classical music, the Wiener Festwochen  have this year founded the Academy Second Modernism, an initiative that will present works by 50 female and non-binary composers over a period of five years,” as the New York Times reported.

     

    “Staging an entire city” and “creating a Baroque World Theater” – that is what Rau and his fantastic team have achieved in Vienna, according to media reports. But that’s not all: the 2023/24 season continues at the Venice Biennale (Italy) with the “unbearable masterpiece” Medea’s Children and at the Aranya Theater Festival (China) with Rau’s and Edouard Louis’ performance The Interrogation. We wish you a provocative, but also relaxing end of the season!

     

    TRAILER


      ANTIGONE IN ZURICH   “Unbearable masterpiece”, was De Morgen‘s verdict on Milo Rau’s farewell to NTGent, Medea’s Children, awarding it five stars. Also critic Johan Thilemans came to the same conclusion: “Masterful is the only word that fits this performance.” And the critic from Sceneweb even went one step further: “Medea’s Children breaks the […]


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    „Unbearable masterpiece“: Milo Rau brings all Greek tragedies to the stage

     

    ANTIGONE IN ZURICH

     

    “Unbearable masterpiece”, was De Morgen‘s verdict on Milo Rau’s farewell to NTGent, Medea’s Children, awarding it five stars. Also critic Johan Thilemans came to the same conclusion: “Masterful is the only word that fits this performance.” And the critic from Sceneweb even went one step further: “Medea’s Children breaks the boundaries of imagination.”

     

    Rau, who declared 2018 NTGent the “City Theatre of the Future” and published the globally discussed Ghent Manifesto, will leave the “fantastic” city of Ghent another legacy: the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, a festival dedicated to Greek tragedy, presenting at sunrise the entire canon of 32 surviving plays in the streets of Ghent.

     

    This “lifelong dream of Milo Rau” brings theatre back to the centre of society. “Why not spend our best hours on it? Why not enjoy theatre in the morning when we have the greatest clarity of mind?”, asks Rau’s co-curator Matthias Velle. Find all info about this “biggest tragedy festival since Sophocles” here.

     

    Another piece of news shaked the theatre world these days: Nobel Prize Winner Elfriede Jelinek has given Milo Rau the permission to stage her play Burgtheater, which was banned for 44 years and is probably the most myth-enshrouded work in German speaking theatre. And not just anywhere, but on the stage of the Burgtheater itself, the largest in Europe: the “sensation of the coming season”, as the press unanimously wrote.

     

    But before that, next Tuesday, Rau will open the TANGENTE festival with his acclaimed mining opera Justice. Already today, Antigone in the Amazon finally lands in Rau’s hometown of Zurich after stops in Finland, Australia, Italy, France and a dozen other countries. Last tickets here!

     

    JUSTICE AT TANGENTE

     

     


    MEDEA’S CHILDREN   The myth of Medea is the bloodiest in the European canon. It begins with Medea’s love for Jason and ends with the murder of their children. Milo Rau’s version of the play is a radical re-reading. For Medea’s Children, he mixes Euripides’ version with a modern murder case. And: all the roles […]


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    Trigger Warning: MEDEA performed by Children

    MEDEA’S CHILDREN

     

    The myth of Medea is the bloodiest in the European canon. It begins with Medea’s love for Jason and ends with the murder of their children. Milo Rau’s version of the play is a radical re-reading. For Medea’s Children, he mixes Euripides’ version with a modern murder case. And: all the roles are played by children!

     

    After the globally acclaimed reinventions of Aeschylus’ revenge trilogy Oresteia (Orestes in Mosul) and Sophocles’ Antigone (Antigone in the Amazon), Milo Rau turns to a classic of Greek tragedy literature for the third time with Medea’s Children.

     

    Together with six child actors, Milo Rau, his dramaturge Kaatje De Geest and NTGent create a synthesis of Greek tragedy and childish wisdom, made of film, music and performance. Bitter and sweet, tender and cruel, absurd and gory – like love itself.

     

    TRAILER

     

    How can affection turn into hate? Are we forced to make the same mistakes again and again? From the hunt for the Golden Fleece to a quintuple murder: Medea’s Children is an examination of the human soul through the eyes of children.

     

    Medea’s Children celebrates its premiere on April 18 at NTGent, followed by premieres in the Netherlands and France. The German-language premiere is on May 31 at the Wiener Festwochen.

     

    And: Medea’s Children is the prelude to Rau’s “oldest dream”, the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, for which NTGent will have all the classic tragedies restaged in public spaces over 32 days – conceived by Milo Rau himself, curated by Matthias Velle and Benoît Vanraes. Find all details here.

     

    ALL GREEK FESTIVAL

     

     

    NEWS

     

     

     

     


    FREE REPUBLIC OF VIENNA   “Really? Balaclavas at the programme conference, skating nuns, Pussy Riot and the proclamation of a republic”, wrote Austria’s largest daily newspaper, the Kronenzeitung. And indeed: it was certainly the craziest press conference that the Wiener Festwochen, Europe’s largest crossover festival, has ever experienced. Followed by the fastest ticket sales in […]


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    Skating Nuns & Balaclavas: Join the Free Republic!

    FREE REPUBLIC OF VIENNA

     

    “Really? Balaclavas at the programme conference, skating nuns, Pussy Riot and the proclamation of a republic”, wrote Austria’s largest daily newspaper, the Kronenzeitung. And indeed: it was certainly the craziest press conference that the Wiener Festwochen, Europe’s largest crossover festival, has ever experienced. Followed by the fastest ticket sales in the history of the festival: a third of all places is sold in just 10 days after the programme conference!

     

    “The cultural event of this spring” was how the French culture blog Mediapart summarised it, while the Belgian Standaard wrote: “Milo Rau is tackling it big at his first edition at the head of the Wiener Festwochen.” A total of more than 45 projects are planned – from Mateja Meded’s Cunt slime power to Peter Brook’s Tempest Project, from the creation of the Academy Second Modernism to the Vienna Trials, from the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra’s Kaddish Requiem to Rau’s newest play Medea’s Children.

     

    Meanwhile, the Council of the Republic is growing. New members are joining every day: Elfriede Jelinek, Annie Ernaux, Yannis Varoufakis, Kirill Serebrennikov, Kim de l’Horizon, Carola Rackete, David Van Rreybrouck – and dozens more!

     

    Be with us when the Free Republic of Vienna is proclaimed on 17 May in front of 50,000 spectators in the center of Vienna and live on television. Because we owe the world a revolution!

     

    PROFESSIONALS

     

     

    NEWS

     

    • “Is Putin happy?” – Milo Rau on Navalny, the Vienna Trials and the need for a civil society uprising

    • “I can’t think alone” – Rau on his late friend, playwright and director René Pollesch

    • “Draw for change” – ARTE documentary about Victoria Lomasko, official draughtswoman of the Free Republic of Vienna

    • “Pure and simple” – Belgium tour of The Interrogation, Milo Rau’s collaboration with the writer Édouard Louis, launched

    • “Antigone in Australia” – after Europe, Antigone in the Amazon tour continues in Australia