WHAT A YEAR
THIS WAS 2024
What a year: In 2024, Milo Rau’s performances and actions enchanted audiences from Taipei to New York, from Belgrade to Bourdeaux, from Shanghai to Cologne, from Prague to Stockholm – touring more than 20 countries. Celebrated from the Venice Biennale to the Vienna Festival, Rau’s newest work, the “unbearable masterpiece” Medea’s Children was voted into numerous Best of 2024 lists and listed as Best Play of the Year a. o. in the Netherlands, Austria and Italy. Following directors like Pina Bausch and Ingmar Bergman, Rau got the Politika Award 2024 for his theatre work.
But the Swiss director’s impact on the opera world was even more resounding: While Florentina Holzinger’s opera SANCTA, co-produced by Rau’s Vienna Festival, shocked audiences and critics alike, Milo Rau’s JUSTICE, an “opera like never before”, was nominated one of the “most notable new productions of the season” in the critics’ survey of Opernwelt. Consequentially, Die Zeit declared Holzinger and Rau “the most important directors in the world today.”
But that’s not all: Süddeutsche Zeitung put JUSTICE on its list of “5 operas that will remain” – and Rau’s “masterful version” of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito received the highest praise: “A true manifesto of what opera can be today”. No wonder that Rau “fell in love with the opera”, as he revealed to Art Basel Magazine.
ATHEM OF THE FREE REPUBLIC OF VIENNA
2024 was also the year in which Rau could finally realize his “childhood dream”: the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL at NTGent, in which all 32 surviving Greek tragedies were performed. “I don’t know how to thank this city for the wonderful years I was able to spend here,” as Rau said at his last season presentation. Milo Rau, author of the “Ghent Manifesto” and artistic director of the Ghent City Theatre from 2018 to 2024 – a “game-changing stint” (The Stage) – will remain linked to the house as artist and curator of the Histoire(s) du Théâtre series.
But it was the proclamation of the Free Republic of Vienna on 17 May 2024 in front of 36,000 people with which Rau left the deepest mark on the European theater world last year. “The most exciting thing theatre has to offer at the moment,” was how Die Welt summed up the fireworks that ignited Europe’s largest crossover festival in 2024. “Vienna is finally back at the centre of the theatre world,” wrote Der Spiegel, while Agence France Presse witnessed “an institutional revolution” and die tageszeitung called Rau “without doubt the hero of the season”.
The Resistance Now! Tour – which started at the beginning of September – culminated in a petition to the EU Parliament that reached more than 100 million readers in 50 countries, according to the European Theatre Convention. With controversial speeches all over Europa such as How to Resist, Beauty will save the world, After the End of History and pamphlets like Culture is our Weapon (Guardian or Le Monde), the Resistance Now! Tour redefined the way cultural institutions are run.
“What we do today will be the heritage of the future, the poetry of the future,” as Milo Rau said in his year-end interview with the Portuguese newspaper Público. But will our actions of today stand the test of time? “Beyoncé, Lamar, Eribon, Ernaux, Rau and Holzinger: without the political turnaround in the arts, their lasting success would not have been possible,” as Die Zeit noted in a long essay last week – and criticized the “overestimation of the impact of art”.
But whatever the impact: We are looking back on a year that will be unforgettable for us – and forward to another year full of shared experiences and debates! Thank you for your support, cooperation, friendship, enthusiasm, solidarity and critical interest! Next stop: Sidney, Australia.
RESISTANCE NOW! – 50 CONTRIES – 100 MILLON READERS