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MELANCHOLIC HUMANISM THE LAST GENERATION   “Rau may be called a scandal director who likes to dabble in riots and controversy, but there is a melancholic humanist in him above all,” wrote Belgium newspaper De Standaard after the long-awaited premiere of The Last Generation last week in Liège.   For the adaptation of Pasolini’s scandalous […]


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“A History of Theater”: Tim Etchell’s Takeover!

MELANCHOLIC HUMANISM
THE LAST GENERATION

 

“Rau may be called a scandal director who likes to dabble in riots and controversy, but there is a melancholic humanist in him above all,” wrote Belgium newspaper De Standaard after the long-awaited premiere of The Last Generation last week in Liège.

 

For the adaptation of Pasolini’s scandalous film Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom, Milo Rau worked together with Theater Stap, a company of actors with mental disabilities. “Rarely were they on such form as here,” wrote De Standaard, “how refreshing not to see them for once as the embodiment of good morals.”

 

The performance led to countless reactions, as varied as the evening itself. France Culture reported on the reactions: “Some leave shocked, others crushed by the weight of the evening. But everyone will remember the experience forever.”

 

Today The Last Generation celebrates its Flemish premiere in Turnhout, the headquarters of Theater Stap. Next stops: NTGent and National Theatre Brussels.

 

 

HISTORY OF THEATER
TIM ETCHELLS´ VERSION

 

In 2018, Milo Rau/IIPM started with the show La Reprise a series that he has curated since: Histoire(s) du Théâtre. Every year, a creator tells their own personal “history of theater” – sometimes funny, sometimes cruel, sometimes intimate, sometimes political.

 

After Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula, Angelica Liddell and Miet Warlop, Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) is now adding episode No 5 to the series (dramaturgy: Matthias Lilienthal), using a fragmentary quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as its title: “How goes the world, Sir.” Four performers enter an absurd orgy of entrances and exits, sound cues, and memories. A total theater, minimalistic, ironic, touching!

 

“Go see it,” Belgian newspaper De Standaard advised back in September, “because Tim Etchells himself is a bit of living history.” Today Thursday premiering at NTGent – go see it!

 

NEWS

 


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  THE LAST GENERATION RAU STAGES PASOLINI   The very announcement that Milo Rau would stage an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma together with actors with disabilities led to a broad debate in the Belgian media during the last weeks.   Skewing between a poetic interpretation and a […]


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ARE WE FASCISTS? Rau stages Pasolini

 

THE LAST GENERATION
RAU STAGES PASOLINI

 

The very announcement that Milo Rau would stage an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma together with actors with disabilities led to a broad debate in the Belgian media during the last weeks.

 

Skewing between a poetic interpretation and a disturbing appropriation of Pier Pasolini’s film and De Sade’s book, Milo Rau and Theater STAP hold up a mirror to modern society: Are we, apparently more tolerant and sensitive than all previous societies, perhaps the real fascists? Why do we preach diversity while eradicating all that is different?

 

The foundations for his new production were laid in 2017, when Milo Rau worked closely with Swiss theatre HORA to stage the play Die 120 Tage von Sodom. With The Last Generation, Milo Rau reworks this project, focusing on the socio-political context of Belgium.

 

Get tickets for the premiere at Théâtre de Liège on November 5, or the first tour locations in Brussels, Ghent and Turnhout.

 

HARD TO TAKE
RECLAIMING THE FUTURE

 

“You are not interested in theater? Because it’s theater? This is your book. Provided you love life.” This is how the Frankfurter Rundschau judges Milo Rau’s aesthetic autobiography The Reconquest of the Future (Die Rückeroberung der Zukunft), which already became a bestseller in Germany.

 

“Here writes an intellectual who has never lost his tenderness,” judges DIE ZEIT, and is impressed by the “utopias for the 21st century”, while Austria’s Falter reads “an honest, splendid, self-ironic and clever book.”

 

On the other hand, the Süddeutsche Zeitung finds Rau’s “revolutionary pathos” “hard to take”, and Tagesspiegel even suspects the director of playing at being a “prophet”: “For Rau, art is a grip on the mechanics of the world, so that it becomes a different one.”

 

Judge yourself: The Reconquest of the Future is available in all German-language bookstores. Translations into various languages are in preparation.

 

 


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  RAU MEETS MOZART ART OR ANTI-ART?   The live premiere of Milo Rau’s first opera direction, La Clemenza di Tito, at the Antwerp Opera delighted audiences and press. “Rau totally lives up to his reputation: he questions himself and, above all, delivers a very human piece,” wrote the critic of Het Nieuwsblad. “The boundaries […]


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“The boundaries of opera have been pushed” – new opera, new book!

 

RAU MEETS MOZART
ART OR ANTI-ART?

 

The live premiere of Milo Rau’s first opera direction, La Clemenza di Tito, at the Antwerp Opera delighted audiences and press. “Rau totally lives up to his reputation: he questions himself and, above all, delivers a very human piece,” wrote the critic of Het Nieuwsblad.

“The boundaries of opera have been pushed a bit,” wrote De Tijd, NRC gave the “rough and magical” production 5 stars, and De Standaard emphasized: “The most creative and confrontational interpretation of La Clemenza in recent decades.”

But of course, Rau’s radical take on Mozart’s last opera shocked many lovers of the genre. “The most brutal form of director’s theater I have experienced to date,” wrote a critic on a blog, another one complained: “No respect for tradition. Is Rau becoming a travesty of anti-art?”

Make your own judgment: after Antwerp, La Clemenza di Tito travels to Ghent and Luxembourg this autumn – and will be staged at the Vienna Festival 2024 in a completely new version!

 

More info

 

IN PRAISE OF EXTREMISM
NEW BOOK OUT

 

“The doors to the future must be opened again,” said Milo Rau last week in an interview. In his essay Die Rückeroberung der Zukunft (The Reconquest of the Future), which has just been published by Rowohlt Verlag, Rau now reveals the methods of his artistic work.

How can we break out of the “total present” and reclaim a human, solidary future? How do IIPM’s “poetics of the real” work? And what are its dangers – morally, politically and humanly?

In three parts – On the Total Present, In Praise of Extremism, and The Reconquest of the Future – Milo Rau outlines the aesthetics of his projects in film, theatre and institutional work. Now in all German-language bookstores – various translations are in preparation.

 

More info

 

NEWS


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  “What grows everywhere cannot be dissolved.” Les Soulèvements de la Terre   From this Sunday on, Milo Rau and his team come to the Festival d’Avignon with their newest show Antigone in the Amazon. Parallel to the play, the makers of Antigone in the Amazon and The Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) will present their […]


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THE RADICAL NO. Milo Rau, MST and Soulèvements de la Terre at Festival d’Avignon

 

“What grows everywhere cannot be dissolved.”

Les Soulèvements de la Terre

 

From this Sunday on, Milo Rau and his team come to the Festival d’Avignon with their newest show Antigone in the Amazon. Parallel to the play, the makers of Antigone in the Amazon and The Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) will present their “poetically and politically engaged theatre” in a whole series of discussions – in presence of Maria Raimunda Cesar, leader MST Pará, and Kananda Rocha Xavier, MST activist & choir leader of Antigone in the Amazon.

 

What do the art institutions of the future look like? How do theatre and activism go together? What is the place of the real in art? “The European artist who redefines political theatre” critically discusses the theory and practice of “global realism” in various debates and with various other artists and activists at the Avignon Festival – find a detailled list of all events at the end of this mail.

 

“I don’t want an electric car. I don’t want a car at all.”

Ailton Krenak / Milo Rau:  The Radical No

 

The highlight is The Radical No (The Making-of Antigone) on 18 July: MST and Milo Rau will present first sequences from the Antigone in the Amazon documentary (Fernando Nogari) and the Destroy What Destroys You videoclip (Pablo Casello & Elia Rediger) of their anti-greenwashing campaign Our Future is not for Sale – together with the philosopher Jerôme Baschet and representatives of the partner movement Soulèvements de la Terre (SDLT), which was recently dissolved by the French government.

 

The artists of Antigone in the Amazon and the members of MST will be available for interviews after the press conference of 16 July (10:30) and the The Radical No (The Making-of Antigone) event at 18 July (14:00).

 

Press contact here. Discover also our upcoming projects: All About Love, The Last Generation, The Seer & Medea’s Children.

 

“The beauty of the collective comes from the freedom of each individual.”

Transfuge Magazine

 

MEET MILO RAU

 

EVENTS

 


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  “A small history of theatre and a school of life as cruel as it is poetic.” Milo Rau on Medea’s Children (Season 23/24)   “I believe theatre is a place where we look lovingly at each other, as if together we could even overcome our mortality” : Milo Rau presented the Season 2023/24, the […]


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All Greek Tragedies (and two operas): This is Season 2023/24!

 

“A small history of theatre and a school of life as cruel as it is poetic.”

Milo Rau on Medea’s Children (Season 23/24)

 

“I believe theatre is a place where we look lovingly at each other, as if together we could even overcome our mortality” : Milo Rau presented the Season 2023/24, the last season programmed by him and his team at NTGent, with a speech about the individual and the community.

 

The coming season will be entirely dedicated to the Greek tragedies – with performances from Gisèle Vienne to Luanda Casella, from Needcompany to STAN and from Tim Etchells to Jetse Batelaan, culminating in the All Greeks Festival: all 32 Greek tragedies, reinterpreted and restaged in the city of Ghent, “a tragedy marathon, a dream I have cherished for many years.”

 

Rau himself will create two brand new pieces: Medea’s Children and The Last Generation – in collaboration with many international partners, a. o. the Wiener Festwochen, for which Rau is responsible as Artistic Director since this month. His first edition will take place in early summer 2024, a “mythical, powerful and controversial theatre festival” is announced!

 

23/24 will also see two operas: the re-staging of Milo Rau’s “post-operaLa Clemenza di Tito by Mozart, with which the Swiss director will open the Flemish Opera in September. And Rau’s first opera of his own: the “choral elegy” Justice, created together with the Catalan composer Hèctor Parra and the Congolese poet Fiston Mwanza Mujila for the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

 

And, highly anticipated: These days, Milo Rau’s successors as Artistic Directors of NTGent will be announced! We look forward to continuing the adventure of the “City Theatre of the Future” – united in diversity.

 

Season Program

 

NEWS

 


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  “The indigenous peoples who had been driven from their lands, the enslaved people who had been brought from Africa to Brazil in ships for three hundred and fifty years, the thousands of destitute men and women who fled here from Europe – that mishmash of peoples and stories make up the MST movement.” (MST […]


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From Dusk till Dawn: Milo Rau & NTGent present Season 2023/24

 

“The indigenous peoples who had been driven from their lands, the enslaved people who had been brought from Africa to Brazil in ships for three hundred and fifty years, the thousands of destitute men and women who fled here from Europe – that mishmash of peoples and stories make up the MST movement.”
(MST on the making of Antigone in the Amazon)


Read the full text here in
Portuguese or English.

 

Antigone in the Amazon, the radical appropriation of Sophocles’ Antigone by the activists of the Brazilian Landless Workers‘ Movement (MST) in partnership with NTGent and IIPM travelled Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria the last month. The project “digests the Greek classic in a poetic as well as subversive act, deflating its hierarchies of vision and interpretation,” as a critic wrote.

 

Accompanied by an international campaign against greenwashing and a series of debates about the political and esthetical backgrounds, conflicts and utopias of a radically transcultural production, organized together with MST and local activists, Antigone in the Amazon returns this weekend to Ghent before traveling on to France and many other countries.

 

Meanwhile, the “vivid and urgent” (The Guardian) new version of IIPM’s classic Hate Radio premiered in Rwanda itself, in the presence of the Rwandan First Lady, and went on tour to France and England. While Rau’s new book What theatre can do – a “literary jewel” according to a critic – hits the bookstores, IIPM and their partners close the running season with shows of  Everywoman and La Reprise in Spain, Portugal and Turkey.

 

But the season 2023/24 is already around the corner: On Monday, June 12, Milo Rau – together with NTGent artists Luanda Casella, Lara Staal, Linda Leah Nyirenda, Julie Mughunda, Chokri ben Chikha and Alexander Devriendt – presents his last season as Artistic Director at the Flemish City Theatre before moving to the Wiener Festwochen.

 

Especially for this evening, Rau is staging a sequence of scenes inspired by the 32 surviving Greek tragedies, performed by Arne De Tremerie and Princess Hassan Isatu Bangura, musically accompanied by Antigone in the Amazon co-composer Pablo Casella.

 

Season Presentation


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  „Different kinds of struggle complete each other, like forests. Antigone in the Amazon is one of the seeds planted by many hands whose fruits will nourish our hope and confidence in the future.” Douglas Estevam, Landless Workers’ Movement (full text)   The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) has been working with IIPM and the […]


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Invitation to Public Press Conference: Landless Workers’ Movement & Milo Rau/IIPM at Burgtheater Vienna

 

„Different kinds of struggle complete each other, like forests. Antigone in the Amazon is one of the seeds planted by many hands whose fruits will nourish our hope and confidence in the future.”
Douglas Estevam, Landless Workers’ Movement (
full text)

 

The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) has been working with IIPM and the Belgian theatre NTGent for many years now. Since May 13th, their play “Antigone in the Amazon” is touring Europe and, after shows in Ghent and Amsterdam, will come to the Burgtheater in the context of the Vienna Festival.

 

Already in May 2020, Kay Sara, one of the protagonists of “Antigone in the Amazon”, opened the Vienna Festival with the widely discussed speech “This Madness has to stop“. Now the second part of the “Declaration of 13 May” campaign against greenwashing – supported by Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Ailton Krenak, Annie Ernaux, Brian Eno, and Elfriede Jelinek – will be launched in the Austrian capital.

 

In the morning before the German-language premiere of this “analysis of activism, existence, and resistance”, MST, IIPM and NTGent organize a public press conference at the Burgtheater: How does transnational solidarity work in art? What can a fair global economy look like? In addition to the world premiere of the campaign video clip “Tomorrow is not for Sale”, the first agricultural products of the “Declaration of 13 May” will be presented. For an ecology and aesthetics of radical care!

 

MST & IIPM
Press Conference
Thursday, 25 May 2023, 11:00 am
Burgtheater, Pausenfoyer, Universitätsring 2, Vienna
Free Access

 

With: Douglas Estevam, member of the coordination group of the MST national cultural collective; Alan Leite, activist of MST Pará and actor in “Antigone in the Amazon”; Pablo Casella & Elia Rediger, composer “Tomorrow is not for Sale” campaign song; Milo Rau, director “Antigone in the Amazon”.


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  DECLARATION   Milo Rau, Noam Chomsky, Brian Eno, Elfriede Jelinek, Yanis Varoufakis, Angela Davis, Slavoj Zizek, Annie Ernaux, Carola Rackete, David Van Reybrouck and 50 other prominent scientists, artists and activists from around the world have signed the Declaration of 13 May, published today. The signatories declare their solidarity with the Landless Workers’ Movement […]


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Milo Rau, Angela Davis, Annie Ernaux, Brian Eno, Yanis Varoufakis and 50 more prominent figures call for boycott against European food companies!

 

DECLARATION

 

Milo Rau, Noam Chomsky, Brian Eno, Elfriede Jelinek, Yanis Varoufakis, Angela Davis, Slavoj Zizek, Annie Ernaux, Carola Rackete, David Van Reybrouck and 50 other prominent scientists, artists and activists from around the world have signed the Declaration of 13 May, published today. The signatories declare their solidarity with the Landless Workers’ Movement MST in Brazil, the largest social movement in Latin America, criticise the practices of big Brazilian agrobusiness and companies such as Ferrero, and demand immediate action against greenwashing through certificates.

 

“Food producers claim that everything is fine because the big agribusinesses where they buy palm oil or soy have green certificates. Indeed, everything looks good and sustainable on paper, but in practice these companies flout the rules. There is deforestation, land grabbing and serious human rights violations. We are demanding a radical system change, starting with an immediate verification of certificates and the boycott of all products from the buyers of large Brazilian agro-trusts that destroy the Amazon rainforest”, the signatories say.

 

The call for boycott comes at the same time as the European premiere of Milo Rau’s latest theatre production: For Antigone in the Amazon, Rau and his team travelled to the Brazilian state of Pará to work with the Landless Workers’ Movement MST. Near the city of Marabá, where 19 MST activists were shot dead by military police on 17 April 1996 on a road through the Amazon forest during a march for land reform, the Swiss director staged a new version of Sophocles’ Antigone this spring.

 

Now, Milo Rau and 50 prominent figures from all over Europe, Brazil and the world declare their solidarity with the MST, which is fighting for land reform, truly ecological agriculture and against the destruction of the rainforest. Stop the certified sell-out of our planet!  Land reform now! Against neoliberal greenwashing! For an economy of radical care!

 

HOMEPAGE & FACT CHECK

 


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  Rehearsals on Antigone in the Amazon are nearing their first climax: Coming Monday, 17 April 2023, the largest massacre perpetrated by the Brazilian military police against the Brasilian Landless Movement (MST) in 1996 will be re-enacted at the scene of the crime: the occupied Transamazonica near Marabá in the Brazilian State of Pará.   […]


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“Antigone in the Amazon”: We occupy the Transamazonica!

 

Rehearsals on Antigone in the Amazon are nearing their first climax: Coming Monday, 17 April 2023, the largest massacre perpetrated by the Brazilian military police against the Brasilian Landless Movement (MST) in 1996 will be re-enacted at the scene of the crime: the occupied Transamazonica near Marabá in the Brazilian State of Pará.

 

The mythical Transamazonica Highway, which not only cuts through the rainforest but also destroys indigenous societies, will be paralyzed for a whole day by MST and Milo Rau’s team and used as a political stage for resistance.

 

Hundreds of activists, including the survivors of the massacre, who also form the choir for the theatre production Antigone in the Amazon will participate in the restaging of the horrible massacre. “So that what happened is never forgotten,” as a spokeswoman of MST announced.

 

Meanwhile, the filming of a central part of Antigone in the Amazon is taking place: the dark prophecy of the seer Tiresias about the coming downfall of capitalist society and the necessitiy of resistance. The role of Tiresias is performed by world-famous indigenous philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak, author of Ideas to postpone the end of the world.


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  ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON COMING SOON   After the productions Orestes in Mosulin the former capital of the Islamic State and the Jesus film The New Gospelin the southern Italian refugee camps, Milo Rau and his team travel to the Amazon in Brazil to conclude their Trilogy of Ancient Myths. On an occupied piece […]


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“Nothing more monstrous than man”: Milo Rau stages ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON

 

ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON
COMING SOON

 

After the productions Orestes in Mosulin the former capital of the Islamic State and the Jesus film The New Gospelin the southern Italian refugee camps, Milo Rau and his team travel to the Amazon in Brazil to conclude their Trilogy of Ancient Myths. On an occupied piece of land, in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the world’s largest landless workers’ movement, they create with Antigone in the Amazon an allegorical play about the violent devastations and displacements caused by the modern state.

 

A Modern Antigone

 

On 17 April 2023, the largest massacre perpetrated by the Brazilian military police against the MST in 1996 will be re-enacted at the scene of the crime – an occupied highway through the Amazon – as part of the Brazilian premiere of Antigone in the Amazon. The European premiere is scheduled for 13 May at NTGent, Belgium. Indigenous activist Kay Sara will play the role of Antigone, Teiresias will be embodied by South American theatre legend Zé Celso, and the choir will consist of survivors of the massacre.

 

Connected to the making of Antigone in the Amazon is a political campaign in cooperation with MST and important international non-governmental organisations directed against European multinational companies that shamelessly enrich themselves from the destruction of the Amazon forest. Brazilian director Fernando Nogari, known for his video clips for singer Selena Gomez, provides the video clip for the campaign and a film about the making of Antigone in the Amazon that looks behind the scenes.

 

All about the play

 

“There is no profit in this world. There is only life.”
Kay Sara, protagonist of Antigone in the Amazon

 

NEWS