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Im letzten Teil seiner Antiken-Trilogie, die er 2019 mit „Orest in Mossul” begann, entwickelt Milo Rau eine Neudeutung des Antigone-Mythos, die Praktiken des Theaters und des fundamentalen politischen Protestes vereint. Mit Antigones Aufbegehren gegen Kreons Tyrannei hebt Milo Raus Neuinterpretation von Sophokles Tragödie zu einer umfassenden Anklage der Ungerechtigkeit an. In Brasilien, wo etwa 10 Prozent der Bevölkerung 80 Prozent des Bodens besitzen, setzt sich die Bewegung der Landarbeiter*innen ohne Boden (MST) für eine radikale Landreform ein. Als Chor der Landlosen beobachten und kommentieren Aktivist*innen dieser größten Landlosenbewegung der Welt von einer riesigen Videowand herab das Bühnen-geschehen zwischen Kreon, Antigone, ihrem Verlobten Haimon und dessen Mutter Eurydike. Die tragische Geschichte von Recht und Unrecht erscheint als blutiges Aufeinandertreffen von traditioneller Weisheit und Turbokapitalismus.

Milo Rau zur Zusammenarbeit mit der Landlosenbewegung MST

„The intellectual renewal will not come from the gated communites where the authoritarian neoliberalism emerged. The philosophy of the coming era will come from the forests, from the favelas and the banlieues, from occupied houses and monocultures.“

(Milo Rau)

Interview – Milo Rau

Jonas Mayeur: After the production of Orestes in Mosul in the former capital of the Islamic State and the Jesus film The New Gospel in the southern Italian refugee camps, now follows the third part of your Trilogy of Ancient Myths. Why Sophocles’ Antigone and why in the Amazon of all places?

Milo Rau: I studied ancient Greek for almost seven years, and as my final work I translated Euripides’ The Bacchae anew. So the Greek tragedies have always fascinated me, and Antigone is undoubtedly the most famous of all tragedies. Goethe calls it the absolute pinnacle of Western poetry: crystalline and prophetic, insanely complex and yet almost grotesquely simple. From Brecht to Anouilh, from Judith Butler to Anne Carson, the play has been subjected to ever new interpretations. The plot, as I said, is very straightforward, actually a series of a few encounters and choral songs: When Antigone buries her brother Polyneikes, she thereby violates the burial commandment of King Creon, for Polyneikes is considered an enemy of the state. The philosopher Hegel saw the confrontation between Antigone and Creon as the confrontation between traditional, divine law and rational, modern state. For the philosopher Judith Butler, on the other hand, Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order even more radically: namely, from its utopian outside, from a fundamentally different design of human coexistence, of the living and the dead, of man and nature. And this is where the Amazon comes in: I think that the ‘symbolic order’ of the Occident really needs to be questioned and changed from its outside, the peripheries of the capitalist system.

How did this project begin?

Like most of my projects, unplanned, from an encounter. When we met in 2019 – we were touring with a couple of my pieces in Brazil – they [MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra; Anm.d.Red.] said they would like to do something with us. I showed them clips from the film I had just shot, The New Gospel, whereupon they showed me a book they use in their schools, Occupying the Bible. They immediately understood what The New Gospel was about: the reappropriation of a myth, the revolutionary Jesus myth, by the outcasts, the marginalized of today. We are now doing exactly the same with Antigone: we are not only criticizing and adapting Sophocles, we are occupying the play, as it were, just as the landless movement occupies land. With the actors, stories and wisdom of the Amazon.

What role does MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra – the largest social and political movement of landless workers – play in the production? How do they interpret Antigone and what artistic as well as political potential do they see in this project as a political movement?

I think it’s no coincidence that the proposal for Antigone came from them – because of the land question and the fight against a dictatorial state, both of which are central to the play. When we started the project, Bolsonaro was still in power. Douglas Estebam, one of our two Brazilian dramaturges, worked with Augusto Boal, the inventor of the Theater of the Oppressed. So we are very close in terms of our overall conception of theater, working with amateurs, mixing staging and activism, and so on. The appropriation of myths is also very central to MST: the Bible, the lineage of the quilombos (runaway slaves), the labor movement, and recent Brazilian history, especially of course the massacres of state power, all play into our interpretation of Antigone. In addition, the gender and diversity issue that is very present in Antigone is absolutely central to MST. And finally, the use and training of choirs is part of MST’s schools and political training. The idea of forming a choir from survivors of the 1996 massacre, but also bringing in activists from the quilombos and indigenous peoples, negotiating gender issues on an equal footing with land issues, all of this is completely logical for the MST. And of course, Antigone is completely rewritten in this appropriation: Amazonian rituals take the place of the rituals of Ancient Greece, the choirs sing something different, the music is recomposed. And the first time I read it, I was told: Why does everyone kill themselves at the end? The fight goes on, doesn’t it? So we rewrote the ending.

Biografie

Der Schweizer Milo Rau, geboren 1977, ist Regisseur, Theaterautor, Journalist und seit 2018 Intendant des NTGent. Er veröffentlichte über 50 Theaterstücke, Filme, Bücher und Aktionen. Seine Produktionen waren bei allen großen internationalen Festivals zu sehen, darunter das Berliner Theatertreffen, das Festival d’Avignon, die Biennale Venedig, die Wiener Festwochen und das Brüsseler Kunstenfestivaldesarts und tourten bereits durch über 30 Länder weltweit.

Rau hat viele Auszeichnungen erhalten, u. a. den Peter-Weiss-Preis 2017, den 3sat-Preis 2017, die Saarbrücker Poetik-Dozentur für Dramatik 2017 und 2016 als jüngster Künstler nach Frank Castorf und Pina Bausch den renommierten ITI-Preis. 2017 wurde Milo Rau bei der Kritikerumfrage der Deutschen Bühne zum „Schauspielregisseur des Jahres“ gewählt. 2018 bekam er den Europäischen Theaterpreis. Rau ist auch Fernsehkritiker, Dozent und ein überaus produktiver Schriftsteller.