Milo Rau – an engaged theatre director, journalist, playwright, essayist, lecturer, and artistic director of the Vienna festival – warned against extractivist colonialism in his opening speech at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, BITEF. Rau is continually using his influence to advise civil resistance against corporate interests and the far right. We talked to Rau on the occasion of his play Antigone in the Amazon being a part of the BITEF programme.
What made you place Antigone in the Amazon?
If you say Antigone and the Amazon, everybody will immediately know what it is about, you know? But the concrete plan to make this performance came up a bit by accident.
While I was touring in Brazil in 2019 with two of my plays, we wanted to tour out of the scheduled towns. I think we were in Rio de Janeiro and in Sao Paulo, and we wanted to go to other cities, but all of their mayors, who were from the same party as Bolsonaro, forbid that. And then I was approached by the Landless Workers‘ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), MST. They have a big theater department because they worked with Augusto Boal (a Brazilian dramatist who created the Theatre of the Oppressed, ed.). Augusto Boal‘s dramaturg came to my last show, in Sao Paulo, and said – But why wouldn‘t you work with us?
From Greek tragedy to Brazil: a clash between traditional and capitalist society
From thereon we discussed how exactly to cooperate and decided to use Antigone to show the experience of the MST. Antigone is a very, let’s say, simply written play about the conflict between a traditional society living of the land, on the one side, and an extractivist, capitalist society, presented through the clash between the allegoric figures of Antigone and Creont.
The conflict starts over the unburied body of Antigone‘s brother. She wants to bury him, but is forbidden to do it because he was an enemy of the state. And that’s, of course, also the raw reality of Latin American movements, with all the disappeared people. For example, a lot of activists from the Landless Movement just disappeared: you don’t know where they are, you will never find their bodies, and you can’t bury them.
The project took a lot of time because there was Covid – so we did it before it, between two waves end after the end of it, and that’s how it came to life on the 27th anniversary of the largest massacre of landless people by the Brazilian police (17 April 1996), at the place of the slaughter. We use the civil war scene from the beginning of the Antigone tragedy as a metaphor of the bloodshed, and survivors of the massacre played in the Brazilian premiere. You can see them in the videos.
The MST is the society of the future, the livable and productive post-capitalist society
This project is gaining in its actuality because the pressure against different types of civic resistance organisations is rising in Latin America. I think last year one activist was killed every two days in the world on average, and most of them in Latin America.
Yeah, I think that’s true. We see with this Rio Tinto story that the fight for raw materials gets more bloody. All that belongs to an industry that produces its green-washing rhetoric and green-washing tools.
The affected regions are engaged in multiple struggles: a fight against racism, a fight against hyper-capitalism, a fight against the agribusiness, a fight against the climate change, a fight against their own governments, a fight against the contradictions inside the leftist movement… It’s super-complex. That‘s why it was extremely inspiring for me, as a European leftist, to meet a movement that found a way to base their flexibility on all these contradictions, that is, the Landless Workers‘ Movement.
In Western Europe you have all sorts of absurd problems; questions like – how can we bring together the green movement, the idea of the welfare state, the identitarian left, the Marxist left, the blah, blah, blah… How do you bring all this together? And the MST did it, you know? So you could have a transgender Marxist from the Pétit-Bourgeoisie, who was working in the gold mine, and whose father came from an indigenous people. MST represents a mixed society that is the society of the future; while in Europe we are still that much bound to our national histories, this is destroyed in the former colonies… Albeit in a tragic way.
So it‘s extremely inspiring to see a livable and productive model of a post-capitalist society, which is not represented in just 10 families or 50 activists or an occupied house or an island, but a nation inside a nation. Big like, I don’t know… Big like Western Europe. I mean, when you think of the lands they have, they are huge. It’s impressive.
Europe is a ghost from the past, immersed in identity politics
When you show their story or their stories to the theater public in the countries of the capitalist core, how do they react? Are the problems that we are talking about well known to the, let’s say, academic milieu or the theater milieu in those countries or are they totally out of sight?
I think both. I think that concretely they are out of sight, but as a general talk about climate change and the Amazon and so on, it’s super present.
The European left or academic milieu, which is perhaps the same, focuses on identity politics a lot. In that respect, they are also interested in everything as “exotic” as the MST. But the MST movement in itself is as strong as it is because they have overcome all identity struggles. And I think that’s a beautiful thing – but that’s also something that is hard to understand for us Europeans, who are, like North America, still so invested in identity politics.
For example, since I come from Western Europe, a question that I get asked frequently is: “But, when you work with the landless movement, aren‘t you, as a Western theater company, not only using them to express what you want to express?” And then I say: “But this movement is 500,000 families strong. They are so much bigger than me. They have everything we don’t have.”
And it’s so difficult for Europeans to imagine that there is something stronger than themselves, although we are now really the weakest continent. We are a kind of a ghost from the past, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, you know? Like, we have been killed many times and committed suicide even more – and on the other side of the ocean, you have this kind of super vitalistic, super strong, super Utopian movement.
The philosophy of the Landless Workers’ Movement overcomes the tragic mind of Europe
I think this is the impact that this play makes: it makes you understand that this movement overcomes the tragic mind of Europe.
You know, the first thing they said to me when I arrived, was: “Yeah, we want to do Antigone but we don’t want to end it with the suicides because this is not interesting to us.”
And I am so used to every tragedy ending, of course, with a kind of a collective suicide of almost everybody in the tragedy. And I think the reason for that is that they just didn’t know how to end the story so they killed everybody – and then it’s over. But the idea that you can’t solve conflict and that in the end you have to die is very tragic. Christianity added a little bit of transcendence to it so that in another world you would come back or whatever, but for the MST that makes no sense.
It’s beautiful to see how this kind of poetry of death that we have in the economy and in our writing and storytelling can be reflected in this huge mirror of Latin America. That way you understand – Ah, there is something bigger than us! There is a future elsewhere and we can perhaps have a part in it, you know.
MST: “We have been living in apocalyptic times for 500 years, it‘s you I‘m afraid for”
So that’s one thing. And of course, I think that tragedy bears hope. There is a beautiful sentence… Ailton Krenak, a philosopher from Brazil, plays Tiresias, the prophet. And he says – Now that the apocalypse is coming, I’m afraid, but I’m not afraid for us because we have been living in apocalyptic times for 500 years. It’s you I’m afraid for, because you are not used to the apocalyptic times.
So, I think that, really, the time has come to learn from cultures that know more than we have experienced, on different levels.
For example, when you talk about Rio Tinto and how the people protested against it, a lot of people think: “Ah, they are terrorists, they should not do it! There should be another solution. It’s anti-democratic, it’s anti-European”, whatever. But when you look at Latin America, you see that they came to a conclusion, like generations ago, that the people have to take back the power from the economic elites, that the power is with the people, and that the civic movements are the future, and that we have to save this very future. We have no choice.
I think all these things are very clear when you travel a bit. I remember when I was in Latin America for the first time, in the 90s. At the time I was studying in Paris and I had a girlfriend from Mexico and we went to Chiapas. And I remember that I was saying: “What the fuck, all this is happening in this very moment!” You know, it’s incredible that these parallel worlds exist. A part of the strength of the play comes from a possible revelation that there exists a parallel world and that this parallel world has found some solutions.
Rio Tinto is commonly mentioned in discussions about the environment
You mentioned Rio Tinto, and I assume that you referred to the anti-lithium protests in Serbia. How did you learn about them?
I couldn’t say, I don’t remember when I heard about it for the first time. It appears in many discussions and I would say that it is very visible in my circles in Western Europe. At the same time, I think that it is completely unknown out of the circles of some left-green people. I mean, at least I think so… I can make a check. I will ask a friend who is a middle-class liberal. That will be my little sociological research. (laughter)
Western Europe suffers from a so-called Atlantic delay, so in the very west of Europe you have still the neoliberal idea that in the end everything will be fine – if you say “diversity and sustainability” five times per day everything will turn out ok. And at the same time, I think that you could say that every country has its Rio Tinto story somewhere, in different ways. For example, I’m now in Cologne and half an hour from here is the biggest brown coal reserve on the planet, perhaps. They don’t stop exploiting it – because they just can’t.
Even the Green Party, the Social Democrats, everybody supports it… It’s only the civic movement that is against it. The authorities still tell the story that it will be shut down in 2030, but I don’t see how, because they gave up on nuclear energy, and now they have only brown coal. It’s also seemed so natural to use it for more than a hundred years, that it only got problematised, like, by the generation of my daughters. Only ten years ago people started to say that it’s kind of crazy that they erase everything for the brown coal, but before nobody was asking what the plans were… It was the big project of the Social Democrats, together with the car industry. These are the two German success stories, and all the rest is just, like, decoration.
I mean, they even reopened the brown coal mines – you know, they almost closed them, but then they reopened them.
I would say that anyone who reads any kind of news is aware of that, because it’s been used as an argument for other countries, like: Okay, you see that the Germans aren’t closing their coal mines, so there’s no need to close ours. And this story goes on in perpetuity.
On the other hand, I think that environmental fights gained strength and visibility. Political conflicts or the struggle for civic rights were dominant untill a while, but now it’s the environment; and I think in these discussions it’s very common to mention Rio Tinto.
The “second coming” of neoliberalism
But for us here, I need to mention it’s really important to make people aware that there is another kind, another part of Western societies who are not far-right voters and who are not voters for what the Greens have become in the last decade, but who are against extractivist processes, both in their countries, but also abroad, and who are trying to make these kind of solidarity networks.
Would you say that the Resistance now! debate tour, that you are now traveling with, is a part of this effort to build solidarity networks?
Most recently I talked to people from Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, the US, and so on, ‚m talking to you, and I am really trying to connect the political struggles in different countries.
When I was in Antwerp I had a speech about what I call the “second coming” of neoliberalism. In the first round of neoliberalism, its idea was a non-political idea – it was really to just merge stuff to have as least less state as you could. There was a kind of a very mechanistic ideal. That didn’t work at all in the cultural sector and we had to rebuild then everything from scratch and the beautiful international scene appeared from that struggle… And then, like five years ago, they started to cut funding again! And I was like, what the fuck? It didn’t work the first time, why do it again?
And then I understood – it is political and it’s not economical anymore. It’s not liberal. Because I mean, neoliberalism was still somehow liberal, you know, in Fukuyama’s idea of that if you had a lot of business exchange, there’s no war. So there was a kind of, let’s say, a kind of a positive invitation of the post-histoire that I could somehow respect it even if I’m against it, of course.
But now when the second round of neoliberalism came, decorated with nationalistic rhetoric, I understood that this is a kind of en ndgame and that we now really have to connect, or every country, one by one, will lose its freedom of art.
It starts with the cutting subsidies: if you as an artist want to have the last little subsidies available, then you will agree to do what you are expected to; but in the end, even the people that use the allowed narrative will lose out. That’s exactly where we are heading to now, for example, in Austria: most of the people start to adapt to what is expected of them, just to be left without subsidies, like, I don’t know, two seasons later. So that’s it.
It’s now or never for resistance
I have the impression that it’s now or never. Elfride Yelinek and I wrote together a letter against the Austrian far-right party, the FPO. And now that the far right has won the elections, people started saying; “You won’t have subsidies anymore and then it’s over for you. You are an idiot, it so bad strategically”.
But I just said to Elfride: “Let’s write this letter of resistance, so that at in twenty years, we can say that at least we wrote the letter, whatever happens.” I think that we have really have to unite now, to become aware, because people in every country thinks that only them have it strange, you know?
It’s a good question to ask “Have you heard about Rio Tinto?”, because of course, the mainstream media is never talking about it. You don’t open a newspaper in Germany that says: “Scandal! Scandal! Germany wants to kind of re-transform Serbia to a kind of resource colony, you know?” You won’t know anything about it if you don’t look for information like that on your own. And that’s why we need to really connect and to understand that same things happen in all countries, just on different degrees and backed up with different rhetoric and with different parties in power.
