conversations in ten questions 61: Milo Rau

Swiss theatre director Milo Rau, who has become an important figure in contemporary Western theatre with his works that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, push the boundaries of traditional theatre, and display an innovative and sometimes radical approach, often using theatre as a tool for social commentary and participation, is in Istanbul for the second time with his work La Reprise. It would not be wrong to say that art and activism are intertwined in Rau's work, who previously as part of the Istanbul Theatre Festival, encountered the Istanbul audience with his work called Hate Radio, that was about the genocide which took place in Rwanda in 1994. Rau, who as part of his Trilogy of Antique Myths, has rehearsed an adaptation of Oresteia by Aeschylus in Iraq in 2019, then staged a film with refugees in Matera, Italy for The New Gospel, has most recently focused on the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil where farmers occupy non-working fields and grow crops inspired by Marxism, and he has participated in the Avignon Theatre Festival with this work called Antigone in the Amazon, perhaps one of the most talked-about works of the festival this year. The project, in which Rau and his accompanying NTGent actors helped Brazilian activists re-enact an event in which 19 farmers were murdered by a military police unit in 1996, can also be considered as a manifesto against neoliberal greenwashing, which has also become a national topic of discussion in Brazil. 

La Reprise, which was postponed twice, the first due to an earthquake and the second for an inexplicable reason, finally meets the audience at DasDas this weekend. Focusing on the effects of violence and the complexity of justice by examining a murder case in Belgium in which a Muslim gay teenager was killed, La Reprise uses both documentary and theater techniques on stage to delve deeper into this tragic event and invite the audience to reflect on the nature of violence and how society responds to it. On this occasion, we asked our questions to Milo Rau in a long and pleasant conversation as he managed to make time for us despite everything, on the day he left Ghent and moved to Vienna to take over his new position as the artistic director of Wiener Festwochen.

 

What is the essence of documentary theatre in your opinion? 

I mean, first of all, I think documentary theatre as a term is wrong. I think the term makes absolutely no sense. What is a document? A document is something that pre-exists, and you would take it. For example, a play by Shakespeare for me is documentary theatre because it's a document from theater history. I mean, it was how Shakespeare staged it, it's documented and now you would redo it and you would do documentary theater. So, what is called, ‘ensemble theater’ actually is documentary theater. And what is called documentary theater for me is fiction because you kind of construct out of traces, witnesses, things that you imagine, things that happened during the rehearsals. You create something that is new and that gives a possible view of an event. So, in La Reprise, we don't know if it happened like this. That's why it's not called the repetition, but La Reprise. It's not a technical repetition of preexisting texts. It's the creation of a possible text that one describes what happens, that gives an atmosphere of what happens, and changes perhaps what happens and gives meaning to what happened. I think this is how I would describe a theater that, of course, produces documents because after you make this, often I do documentary films about the staging. And then you see. It's like a theater producing documents and sometimes people restage these documents as they could restage a play by Chekhov because there is also a script of the play, you know.

Ayşe Draz: I'll tell you a quick anecdote of when your Hate Radio was performed in Istanbul at the festival. There's a moment when the white guy, the Belgian guy, that is playing all this music ‘on the radio’ stares at the audience. And in this one instance some women in the Turkish audience got up and started to dance to the music. And I through that was exactly what the play was pointing at. You know, like you're not thinking what the content is (in this case a genocide), but you're so carried away by what's happening... And that was a brilliant moment.

There are really people who think that this is a show that ever happened, but this show never happened in Rwanda. So, it's kind of taken from 500 different shows, added stuff. For example, we played the new version of Hate Radio just some months ago in Rwanda and in England. We made a new version, and we played it two months ago in Rwanda and there, in April, we met again the first lady Jeanette Kagame… Fun fact is that she reminded listening to Nirvana in 1994, which is completely impossible because this music was not aired ... It's never on this radio. It's a complete invention by the people who claim to remember, but it's not in the files because you can really check it. It was never aired. But at the same time for the people and even in Rwanda, it's the strongest and the truest moment. So, what does this say about memory and documentary theater and you know, it's like ‘as if’, and you have this so often. You could talk for a long time about this strange effect, how you would add elements to create what you could call reality out of your own emotions, your memory, and so on. 

Memory can be the generator, the biggest generator of fiction, no? Can we rely on memory? I always say. 

When you make a play about reality, for example the Last Days of The Ceausescus, I had to normalize reality. For example, in the behavior of the couple the Ceausescus, the actors had to underact how they really acted in reality because people would think this is theater, that this is not real. And you must do it so often that you have really to kind of level down. A reality that becomes acceptable in fiction. Because of the coincidences of reality, the strangeness of reality, the uncanny-ness of reality is much more than fiction could be. And I mean, the proof is that in fiction you can never die, but you have to die. And this is so uncanny, and reality will always be on top of every fiction you can imagine. So, the simplest facts, birth, and death, you can't imagine. You can only live it. You can only experience it. And everybody who experiences it can’t talk about it because he's dead. It's really like we are living in a world so overwhelming in the most basic facts that, yeah, we need this new way of representation and of theater. This is what I think we had for long years in the bourgeois era of theater, we didn't have any theater as strong as the theater of Shakespeare's time. We didn't have any theater that was really touching reality as they touched reality at their time, or in the medieval ages, or of course in the old Greek tragedy. And I think this is the main topic, however, we call this dream of theater.

We are aware of you having said in your manifesto that theater should change the world, but do you believe in the transformative power of art? 

Yeah, yeah, of course. At different levels. What you described with this kind of making a situation as real so that one would stand up and dance and become part of it, even if one is not invited. This is one thing, the overwhelming strengths of the rhetorics of a genocide, that you can feel. Another thing that is very practical is that you change who gets the author rights, how a play is produced, how a city theatre or now a festival is functioning, and what is represented, for example a black Jesus or a stea in Mosul. The last point what I call microecology, described in my latest book is that you create institutions which continue to exist and produce freedom and art when you are gone. For example the film school in Mosul, we constructed together with UNESCO. Or now the ongoing campaign we have with the landless movement for Antigone. Or the tomatoes of Jesus brought into the distribution system we constructed out of the new gospel, or a new way of making a city theatre, and so on. 

What sources mainly inspire you? 

I'm really a collective personality. So, for me, I'm inspired by the context and the people I'm working with. And whatever I take could be Antigone in the Amazon, it could be the Bible in the Amazon, it could be, I don't know, the works of James Joyce in the Amazon... But it's the Amazon, it's the people I'm working with that would then completely transform it. So, of course, there needs to be a kind of counterweight, which is a myth or which is an event.  You always need a kind of a point of crystallization, I think. Because working completely into the blue is impossible. So, you always need a kind of mirror. When I did Hate Radio, we were talking about it with Dorsey Ruggamber, with whom I developed the play and who is a little bit older than me. We talked about MC Hammer. A star from my school. Because he knew him, and I knew him. But Dorsey survived the genocide. And that was in high school in Switzerland in the Alps. And they said what strange times are we living in, that you know, on the one hand, it's a song of liberation for me, and it's a song of a violent song of killing for him. So, what does this mean about globalization. I think I'm the first globalized generation, the first one who, on ‘89 I was a child, lived the world like as one and the same for. And in Rwanda the opening of the block and the end of the two blocks was a kind of disaster. It was a complete disaster, society exploded, and many societies exploded. I wanted to find a way to understand this and to make this understandable, I needed this radio and I needed these songs, you know, without the radio, with this decrystallization or Antigone or the Bible or the Oristea or Villentel or whatever, or the case in La Reprise, I couldn't describe what I wanted to describe. But of course, La Reprise is about, is a play about coincidence, the method of realism, about grieving, about a society destroyed by the neoliberal change because it was the biggest industrial city in central Europe, Liege. It was destroyed completely by the neoliberal exploitation of the steel industry in other countries, to China, for example. So, a whole society was like, ‘but what is happening now?’ They were living 250 years with this. It's the oldest, you know, the oldest mine in Europe. So, what happens with this society? Where comes this violence from? But you need it. I can do a sociological approach to it, but I need a crystallization. And I think there's a context and a crystallization.

 

When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?

That's the industry deciding on this. I learned two things in my humble career. If you have one title out that is not the final title, it will somehow stay forever and it will be somewhere forever, and you can't erase it anymore. The first communication is always the only important communication later you can’t. Because the media today spreads all super, super fast. So, when would you communicate and how? And it makes no sense to have working titles because always then for the co-producers it is a working title and so on and so on… You need it quite early because people want to co-produce like three years before or four years before, and they have to know. That's what makes it necessary to be early on the title. On the other hand, the enigmatic power of a title was always something I loved. So to say, I'm now doing a play, one play I'm doing is called “All About Love”. And I don't know what the content will be, but everybody, if s/he hears the title will then start telling me stories about love relations, about the book that s/he read. So it's even a kind of a trigger for the actors when I say, ‘okay, I invite you to work in ‘all about love’. And then they ask, ‘but what is it about?’ And I say I don't know. We will find it out. But of course, they are triggered. And I think it's good to have a title that gives you a kind of what you're doing. Direction maybe. 

Are there any artist or person whom you think influenced your art the most? And if so, who?

As a poet, Anne Carson. How she appropriates classical literature by translating and rewriting it. Anne Carson, she didn't get the Nobel Prize unfortunately, but she became a friend, and she's really like one of my absolute favorite poets. So, she's very important to me. Then for me, a source of inspiration was always Lars von Trier, the filmmaker. He was a deep, deep inspiration, a bit on the same level like Michael Haneke. Haneke and Lars von Trier as a realistic approach. And besides that, there is not so much influence; there are the influences from Greek tragedy, from the Bible, from Russian war movies.. And I think my biggest influence, which is more a political one, is from my dad who was an activist when I was young. My biggest influence is the experience of mass movement of solidarity, of making together something that is for me the basic inspiration. It's not that I wanted to do a film like Michael Haneke, it's like I wanted to meet people to do whatever I wanted to do. But for me, theater is a meeting tool, you know? And if I would do theater alone, I wouldn't do it. I didn't become a writer because it's a lonely work. I really love Anne Carson, but I couldn't sit down and write the book because it's so lonely. And we write books, but like fast in between somewhere, but not as the main work. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of writers that I love over the years. So, it's really difficult to say. 

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you at the moment? 

I mean, the most important issue is that we have to find other ways of distributing products and meaning. Because the problem is not, I think you could really save the world in a finger snippet, because capitalism is the best system to save the world. Capitalism has no value. And if you could introduce to the distribution system of capitalism, for example, everybody wants to have green products. Everybody wants products that don’t destroy nature, but these products don't exist in the supermarket, and they exist with fake certificates. They are greenwashed, but they are not. And if you would introduce from today to tomorrow, these products that exist into the distribution, the global distribution system, we would save the world like this. If the lobby would stop to say... For example, if you take biodiesel, that is by law, now introduced in the European Union, which is three times worse than fossil diesel. Three times worse for CO2, biodiesel, and soy, I saw how soy destroys the forest in the Amazons, but we tell these wrong stories because the industry is there, and the industry can do the most absurd things. We need another information, and we need another distribution system to connect this power of the consumers that is overwhelming and is kind of democratic and on the other side, and it's crazy that it doesn't happen. You were talking about changing the world. You can only change it by this. You can change the world by talking about it, because that's exactly what the big companies are doing. They are talking about the beautiful world with certificates and everything. And behind that, it continues and is even worse than before. 

Ayse Draz: We don't need packaging, we need action.

Yeah, absolutely. That's very nice.

You have invited different artists for the Histoire(s) du theatre series. The upcoming one is Tim Etchells and there have been Faustin Linyekula, Miet Warlop and Angelica Liddle in the past. How do you decide on whom to invite for this series?

I try to be objective and really ask myself who is alive now, who has an approach that is not mine but is defining what theater is in different ways. For Linyekula as a choreographer and Angelica Liddell - I don't share her opinion about art and the machine, and the industry, et cetera. She has a kind of old-stylish, even a bit fascist approach. But she's important and she's doing stuff that is super, super important. So, I invited her. Miet Warlop comes from Ghent and she's an important voice. I've known her for a long time, but I also thought she was really an important voice. And I think the play she did, it turned out that I was right. And of course, Forced Entertainment, Etchells is a myth, you know, a living figure of history. So that he would appear at one moment, or Forced Entertainment would appear at one moment, was clear. I would never invite Thomas Ostermeier or, you know, somebody who is working with existing text and staging that is more like good makers, but not at all reflecting on what theater really is. Not making new work., Miet, Faustin, Angelica, Faust, and Tim, they always reflect on what point of history in theater are we, and they always do absolutely new work. 

Ayse Draz: Can we say they have a metatheatrical approach.

They have a metatheatrical approach and they have a creation approach. As I wrote in the Ghent Manifesto, I'm not interested to see, as a public, of course, a new Shakespeare or a good conducting of actors for a Molière or whatever. But from a metatheatrical approach, from let's say an artistic approach I'm not interested at all. The industry needs good directors like Ivo van Hove or Thomas Ostermeier or this kind of people to stage the repertoire, because it's an interesting and important thing. You need these products and the canon has to live somehow and to be questioned. But this is not making art. Making art is making something new on a metatheatrical level. It's the difference between a James Bond film which can be a good James Bond film and a Godard film which is an art film. I don't say a James Bond film is bad, but it will not define if I do a history of film, because the idea was taken of course from Godard, István Szabo... I wanted to invite people who define what art is... And of course, I also wanted create a bit of an alternative canon to the existing canon. We are only on chapter five now. 

 

Will there be anything like Lam Gods at Wiener Festwochen? Anything related to Vienna, its history? 

Many, many, many things, many things. I'm completely amazed by the city of Vienna. It's like one of the fourth cities of Europe. And it has an incredible history, the whole of modernism, from Schönberg to Freud to, I mean, everything that happened in Vienna. I don't know why history decided that from the end of the 19th century until the 20s, and now even fascism was born, the anti-Semitism, like good and bad things, but also modern painting, modern theater, modern film, everything was happening there and I don't know why. And now you have Haneke and Elfriede Jelinek, you have like hundreds of crazy activists and artists there and I relate of course to this. I meanIf the Vienna festival is calling you, you can't say no in Europe, in my sector. If you want to do that, I have to do it. So, it's not that I could decide on that, but it was also for me like, wow, Vienna, because for me, it is the same as when Avignon asked Tiago if he wants to do Avignon. Of course, he had to say yes, because it was Avignon, you know, but I think the difference is that Avignon is a pop-up festival. Avignon does not exist as a kind of a ready-made history of what happened in Avignon during the festival and the popular theatre and all these kinds of things. There is not this kind of planet like in Vienna, where you have this kind of historical and social planet of incredible history and everything. It's like if you only look inside the city, the ten biggest art institutions in Europe are in Vienna. The United Nations is in Vienna. It's like everything is in Vienna. And I don't know why. I think because the city was and the country was kind of like just completely destroyed. Like the Ottoman, Osmanic Empire. I mean, the Hapsburg Empire was also like just like gone. And I think that's perhaps also the reason why Istanbul is so big and so important because it's kind of like as if the whole history of an empire that doesn't exist anymore went to one city like in Vienna. It's an incredible power. And that's what is interesting to me. 

As an activist, as an artist, you have a collection of so many people, not just artists, but you meet local nonprofessional actors, and you are surrounded by so many people. How do you continue your relationship with all these people that you meet? 

That's what I call microecology. Absolutely. You construct something as a network that consists of the artwork. Because normally you imagine, you do an artwork and then you stay in contact and then you lose contact and then that's it. But what I do is construct networks that are completely outside myself and the artwork. For example, now we are in 150 supermarkets with the tomatoes of Jesus. The people in the film are working and have jobs and papers. We are talking about 1,500 people that got papers until now and we are going up. And this is not, they don't need me anymore. Just sometimes I organize a propaganda event. The Congo Tribunal consists, we have until now 10 Congo tribunes done by independent production companies. And I am in contact with these people, but I don't have to push it. And I think to understand that art creates something that is a network, an institution that is a connection in people outside of it, is really important. It's also not metatheatrical. It's nothing like this. It's reality. It's something that exists, and it didn't exist before. And it connects people, it gives agency to these people, it gives jobs to these people, papers to these people, it produces new artworks, the art school in Mosul, we have nine films produced there. And I didn't invest, I didn't direct, I didn't do anything. But they now go to European festivals. Perhaps in 10 years, they are the new stars of European theater and film. And that's how this should work. Because of course, I can’t be on the phone all the time with everybody I know. But of course, we stay in contact. I have friends like, for example, that I would like a call every second or third day because we are friends.

[The Turkish version of this interview was published in unlimited.]