After Orestes in Mosul, Antigone in the Amazon. Swiss director Milo Rau delivers a bold new twist on Greek tragedy to expose the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest.
The first performance will take place on May 13 at the NTGent theater in Ghent, Belgium, one of the major European theaters of dramatic art which he has directed since 2018. This contemporary reinterpretation of Sophocles’ tragedy is also scheduled in France, at the festival d Avignon, in July. But the final stage of the play’s creation took place in Brazil, where this week was filmed the reenactment of the 1996 massacre of activists from the Movement of Landless Peasants (MST) in the Amazonian state of Para.
The sequence shot with hundreds of extras will be screened during the performances of the play, whose first role, that of Antigone, was entrusted to an indigenous Brazilian activist, Kay Sara.
Milo Rau, 46, spent nearly a month in Brazil preparing for this re-enactment, at the exact spot where 19 MST activists were killed by police as they blocked a road near the small town of Eldorado dos Carajas. The Swiss playwright explains to AFP that he chose among the actors and extras survivors of this massacre, who had to “relive the trauma” by hearing the detonations of blank fire at the scene of the tragedy. But it is also “a way forward”.
Milo Rau has already suffered threats on several occasions because of his strong political commitment and his transgressive style. In Moscow, he was declared persona non grata after his staging of a fictionalized version of the trial of Russian protest and feminist group Pussy Riot. In 2019, Orestes in Mosul was a transposition of Aeschylus’ tragedy in northern Iraq devastated by war and the abuses of the Islamic State (IS) group.
With Antigone in the Amazon, Milo Rau tackles another destruction, that of the forest considered crucial for the survival of the planet in the face of climate change. A jungle undermined under the mandate of the far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), which saw the average annual deforestation in the Amazon increase by 75% compared to the previous decade.
“Antigone is the fight of the people against the dictatorship. Landless peasants, natives… The MST fights against the State and the big landowners, who can be identified in the character of Creon”, the tyrant of Sophocles’ tragedy, explains Milo Rau. “Antigone says: ‘No, we don’t want compromise, we want agrarian reform,'” he continues. For the reenactment, hundreds of extras, including many MST activists, blocked the road still used today by trucks transporting livestock or minerals.
The filming of this sequence is “a political act” in itself, to denounce this “incessant back and forth which symbolizes the exploitation of the Amazon”. During the reconstitution, Milo Rau wears himself a black t-shirt and a red cap displaying the MST logo. “It’s more than a social movement, it’s an example of a post-capitalist society for a new agriculture. We have a lot to learn from the MST,” he insists. Since its foundation in the early 1980s, the MST has fought for a more equitable distribution of agricultural land. Their methods are sometimes controversial, including occupations of land belonging to the state or to farmers. Activists also lead campaigns against monocultures or for the preservation of forests.
In 2018, Milo Rau openly took a stand in the Brazilian electoral campaign, signing a manifesto evoking a “catastrophe” for the Amazon in the event of Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the presidential election. Today, he sees a glimmer of hope with the return to power in January of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “After these difficult years, things are starting to change. Brazil has for the first time a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. The situation remains complicated but a window of opportunity has opened,” he concludes.
