Antigone in the Amazon

Curators’ Statement

Antigone in the Amazon by the NTGent city theatre from Belgium is a performance in which yet another mythical and ancient female figure is reinterpreted and presented in a new and contemporary light by blending it with modern contexts. Famous Swiss director Milo Rau, well-known to the Bitef audience, with this piece concludes his trilogy that reinterprets ancient myths. For the needs of this production, Rau and his team travelled to Brazil, where capitalism and fire devour forests and nature, and where 1% of the population owns 45% of the land, and produced this piece in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the largest landless workers’ movement. Four performers on stage and many more participants, members of Brazil's indigenous peoples, recreate the story of Antigone by participating through video projections, placing it within the context of a specific event of 1996. Rau navigates between video and live performances on stage, between ancient drama and documentary material, between reality and fiction. In the theatrical space, bordered on one side by land and on the other by a screen that immerses us in the world of the Brazilian people's struggle against injustice and violence - the key themes of Antigone - a metaphorical performance emerges about the fight for human dignity. "Much is monstrous, but nothing is more monstrous than man", says Sophocles in Antigone, and unfortunately, Rau confirms that this idea is today all the more present.

About the Performance

Through the Eyes of MST: "Man cuts down the forests in search of gold and other minerals, he takes the energy from the rivers with dams, forces the children of the forests to forget their native soil, and labels the places where their ancestors lived as his property." These are some of man's monstrous deeds that are already sung in the prologue of the Amazon tragedy by the chorus, which consists of members of the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), the movement of landless farmers. 

We are in Eldorado do Carajás, along the road across the state of Pará, over which the agricultural products and mined minerals of this area are transported, the road where one of the greatest massacres of agricultural workers took place and which plays a central role in the play. The city still carries in its name the mythical imagination of colonisation, the myth of Eldorado, the lost gold city in the middle of the South American jungle. The Western myth of conquest and progress through civilisation is linked to the story of the destruction of nature, of violence, the decimation of peoples and destruction of cultures.

We have been camping along this road for ten days and we have not seen any people, buses or passenger cars. We hardly find any human tracks. There are only monstrous trucks carrying away natural resources, to international markets. How can we change the situation that, at the same time as modern capitalism, was created six centuries ago during colonisation?

The Author

Milo Rau, born 1977 in Bern, is director, writer and artist in residence at NTGent. Rau studied sociology, German and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich with Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Critics call him the "most influential" (Die Zeit), "most awarded­" (Le Soir), "most interesting" (De Standaard), "most controversial" (La Repubblica), "most scandalous" (New York Times) or "most ambitious" (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002 he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions.

Rau's theatre productions have been shown at all major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d'Avignon, the Venice Biennale, the Wiener Festwochen and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and have been touring in over 30 countries worldwide. Milo Rau has received many awards, including the 3sat Prize 2017, the Saarbrücken Poetics Lectureship for Drama 2017 and, as the youngest artist after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch, the renowned ITI Prize of the World Theatre Day in 2016. In 2017, Milo Rau was voted Director of the Year in a survey conducted by Deutsche Bühne, in 2018 he received the European Theatre Prize for his work and in 2019 he was the first artist ever to be appointed Associated Artist of the European Association of Theatre and­ Performance - EASTAP. In 2020 he received the renowned Münster Poetry Lectureship for his complete artistic oeuvre. His plays were voted "Best of the Year" in critics' surveys in over 10 countries. In 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden, in 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ghent University.

Since 1 July 2023 Milo is artistic director of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen).

From the Reviews

"The performance unrolls in the jumping between fiction and reality, from stage with actors to the inhabitants of the Amazon on screen. In the smooth editing of video recordings (Moritz von Dungern et al), locations and stories blend into one. It is theatre that brings worlds together.

...

The theatre makers have the intention, but even in the performance it is the landless who fight the real struggle. The bereaved who form the chorus carve their revolt into your soul with their singing."

Lucia van Heteren, Theaterkrant