Milo Rau is known for bringing the outside world into the theatre. He does this idiosyncratically and directly, and always on the cutting edge. After travelling to the former capital of the Islamic State for Orestes in Mosul and to the refugee camps in southern Italy for the film The New Gospel, the Swiss director recently travelled with his team to the Brazilian state of Pará, where the Amazon forest is going up in flames to make room for soya cultivation. Critical of the destructive powers of capitalism, the team formed a creative alliance with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, the world’s biggest organisation of the ‘landless’. Together with indigenous people, activists and actors from Brazil and Europe, they created an allegorical piece about the violent destruction and displacement by the modern state, which regards private property as more important than the traditional right to land. The result is a political Antigone for the 21st century.
Thematic trigger: violence