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.