Before the interview, I find out that Milo Rau is at the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen), where he will officially take over artistic direction next month. “We can talk now. Just call.” During a break from the “five or six urgent things” he needs to resolve, Milo Rau, the “friendly revolutionary” of European theater, calls to action in just twenty minutes after I approached him. This disarmingly proactive attitude perhaps defines him more than the labels of “the most controversial” or “the most influential” artist of our times. A Swiss theater and film director, Rau is also a sociologist, essayist, playwright, and journalist who has worked in war zones before shaking up the theater world.
Since 2007, when he founded the International Institute for Political Crime (IIPM), he explores, together with his team, extremely difficult themes – traumas always marked by collective failure. Whether it’s the trial of the Ceaușescu couple (The Last Days of the Ceausescus, 2009), the genocide in Rwanda (Hate Radio, 2011), confronting the aftermaths of war (Orestes in Mosul, 2019), or current ecological issues (Antigone in the Amazon, 2023), his deeply political art uncovers, re-animates, re-questions, re-writes, and artistically transforms the tragic images in the collective memory.
Rau often resorts to theatrical reconstructions or adds recollections of trauma through the optics of the personal experiences of the actors and the participants involved, which creates a connection with the realities and problems of the present (for example, The Repetition, 2018); he organizes public trials and debates (The Moscow, Zurich, Mosul Trials) or, where justice fails, constructs so-called “symbolic institutions” or alternative accountability instruments (The General Assembly, The Congo Tribunal). For Rau, it is essential for art to bring solidarity, so many interdisciplinary projects continue beyond the theater stage – “The Revolt of Dignity” or “A Film School for Mosul” forge relationships between various partners (from civil society, but also governmental structures).
In 2018, when Rau begins his work as artistic director at NTGent, his vision of a democratic and sustainable process to create theater crystallizes in the Ghent Manifesto. The purpose of theater is no longer to represent the world but to change it, it is announced. Consistent with the principles of the manifesto (including a cast that includes non-professional actors or even pets), the show featured in the #FITS30 programme, The Family (2020), stages the evening when the four members of the Demeester family from Calais hanged themselves in the silence of their own home. This intimate production that penetrates the basic structure of society – the family, with its demons and mysteries, highlights the humor and tenderness with which Rau approaches the darkest subjects and makes us actually reflect on the deeply precarious and tragic state of the world we live in.
In “Familie” (2020), presented at this year’s FITS edition, you’re tackling a sensitive topic that has recently made its way into Romanian mainstream media, almost always discussed in terms of ‘whys’ – suicide. However, your play seems to be an homage to humanity in its messiness and doom; you’re not searching for explanations. What did you intend it to be?
Milo Rau: It’s a very concrete play, very in detail. You watch a family inside an apartment or in a little bungalow, during a very ordinary evening, with common habits and common scenes –learning English, taking a shower, having dinner, or watching films. Of course, this family could be any family, and for me, the important thing is this metalogical point – these are not actors but a real family. Of course, our dramaturgical use of time is a kind of ultra-Aristotelian approach that borders on the nonsensical and indeed mirrors daily practices. I think what makes this play full is the act that the family decides to hang themselves again every evening, and they decide to go as family on stage. Without this, it would be just a formalistically interesting play or film (since it was also made into a film). This is what makes the difference.
Many might not know, but one of your earliest projects that established your artistic style internationally was “The last days of Ceaușescus” (2009). Why Ceaușescus? What did it mean to you?
It really impressed me as a child. I was twelve, and this image was incredibly striking to everyone who saw it on the 25th of December, but it faded over time because the film was only published later – or leaked later. I found myself wondering what was happening there because it really marked the end of an era. We had lots of images from ’89, but this one was the only truly dark one because all other images are kind of very positive. The image of the Ceaușescus is also very personalized – you had this couple, these colors, and a very different aesthetics. Then later, parts of my family, around ’92 – ‘93, strangely, they went to work in Romania. And for example, my cousin married a Romanian girl, so I was often in Romania. After years, these images came back to me, and then I decided to make a play out of it. And that’s how it started.
Everyone in our country is familiar with this historical moment, yet it seemed hidden under the rug for years. What did your project leave behind – do you believe it has stirred more conversations at a societal level?
Yes, it was interesting to stage it because often what we know the most, we understand the least. As in Edgar Poe’s story, ‘The Purloined Letter’: the hidden letter is always on the table in front of everyone, but they can’t find it and they won’t read it. They won’t understand it because it was hidden all the time. And often that’s the case with images everyone knows. Like the moon landing, the assassination of J. F. Kennedy, the collapse of the Twin Towers, the execution of the Ceaușescus – these are images known by all but inscribed under the biggest traumas and mysteries, not only for Romanians and Europeans but for history in general. Because the images of the Ceaușescus are in the collections of probably the ten most important events that have been filmed or captured in pictures, and everyone would recognize them. We are at a level of media heritage that we all share as humanity, and that’s why it was intriguing to look closer at what we know, exactly as the mysteries of the seen, the unseen of the seen.
In “The Last Days of the Ceausescus”, when you really look closely, you have the whole trial, not only a few moments, you see how this shifts from communism to post-communism, how the elite plays again to survive into democracy by scarifying this old couple: you understand how they don’t know how to use the rhetoric of the revolution, how they are all Stalinists and they are talking like Stalinists, and it’s interesting how the revolution is born out of this extremely dark moment. You understand why or how difficult it would have been, or it was, for democracy to work, and not only in Romania but also in Eastern Germany and in other countries, which after ‘89 were trying to adapt to being eaten by another system, and all these are expressed in one hour. The interesting thing is that often a document says much more than what you think you would see in it, it says more when you put it on stage. And that speaks to the reality of this form called re-enactment, where you create a reality that was unseen before you staged it.
Reflecting on your work process, it’s intriguing how you later started deconstructing the re-enactments in your projects. But your approach to artistic freedom versus control is equally thought-provoking. You provide considerable freedom and flexibility, frequently adapting to participants’ needs. How do you ensure your artistic objectives are met?
There’s a rule in my work which states that the process is more important than the premiere of the product. I try to always stay inside the process and reflect on it and perhaps depict it. You could say that my role is to document what happened when I, or a team, or a collective of people tried to do a project—like Antigone in the Amazon, for instance. “The last days of Ceaușescus” is not deconstructed in that way, but there’s a documentary that deconstructs the play. Later, I began to develop these mirror-like making-off films, extending beyond what happens on stage and deconstruction. Because deconstructing is beautiful but also an outdated method that I use, I know that is a method of the 90s. Today, we have to go further – we have to create what I call “micro-ecologies”. These are new constructs for producing and distributing images, like campaigns. In “The New Gospel”, for example, we distributed tomatoes and provided papers to African illegal immigrants and so on. As Jean-Luc Godard says, a film can’t be just a film; it should change how the industry functions, how films are produced, who produced them, who is depicted in films, who distributes films, who holds author rights, who is liberated by the arts. In my opinion, this is the next step. There’s no deconstruction without reform.
I think the question is how much you’re willing to compromise and what is that essence you want to keep.
Yes, the compromise is always inside the institution. It’s already a compromise to stay, or a decision. You could say compromise is another word for a decision. There’s never a pure decision, and that means that’s never a pure institution inside the system we are living in. There’s not a pure festival; there’s not a pure production budget – it would never, never be possible. The only pure decision can be to stop producing, and the best solution is suicide because every second I am on Earth I pollute. It’s better if I am not here. This is bit of what “Familie” is about – they understand it’s better to not be on Earth. At a very universal, objective, and philosophical level, this is the only truth, and the only possible decision is suicide, the immediate suicide of the entire humanity. But as this position is, of course, on a human level impossible, you have to make compromises and say ‘OK, go inside an institution to change it’, and to open it from inside, to use it in another way. I use realism to create a more open realism because the realistic method is fucked and has been for hundreds of years. Then you create what you could call global realism or situationistik realism or whatever. I mean, it’s a way of saying ‘let’s continue, but in another way’. For example, what the Landless Workers’ Movement does. They say let’s continue to cultivate the earth, but not in an extractivist way, in a different way. We cultivate ourselves, and the land cultivates us while we’re cultivating the land. How can we do what we always have done in another way. And this is the compromise. As some philosophers say there’s only one thing better than suicide: it’s never being born. And as we are born, what do we do then?
Staying at this topic of cursed present, I remember reading that you’ve been influenced considerably by Nikolai Evreinov, the Russian director who staged in 1930 The Storming of the Winter Palace re-enactment. How do you see Russian theater today? Does it have enough energy to survive? To readapt? To take political action?
I have a lot, a lot of friends who are exiled from Russia. A lot. I don’t know what Russian theater is now. Is it an institution, a system, which, of course, is now deeply problematic? But then there are the exiled artists (like Evreinov in the past, who left himself and moved to Paris). It’s a bit cynical, but the situation in Russia is positive for the whole Europe because we have now all these artists working here, and they are influencing us with their radical performative styles, with their different aesthetic past, with their more detailed stories about what Russia is, with their acting style, with their sometimes-strange mix of emotion and intellect. Take Ilya Kabakov, for example, who just died recently; he was an example of huge influence that came to us. In Russian arts, you have a lot of mixes of realism, surrealism, political approach, and very formalistic thinking about why you would produce something or not. This is a very melancholic approach to being present. And I think this is extremely influential, more than we know, and there has never been a written history of the influence of Russian aesthetics on European artistry. We think that we have been super influenced by the US and by popular cultures, but there’s little about the influence on the other side. In Germany, for example, they stage Dostoyevsky and that’s it. That’s how they see the influence. And, of course, there’s Chekov and Stanislavski and others. But if we talk about the 20th century, most people won’t be aware, and that’s interesting.
There used to be many barriers such as language or political walls, it was mostly inaccessible to the rest of Europe.
No, it’s over with the barriers. Since I am in Vienna (at the Vienna Festival), I meet every day at least two Russian artists.
By the way, as you will be taking over the role of artistic director at the Vienna Festival next month: is it a new phase in your career or simply a continuation of what you have always done?
A sad thing about artists, and perhaps human beings in relations and also in institutions, is that they tend to repeat themselves. You can’t change your method; you can only change the context. I can go to the Amazon or to Romania, I can make city theater, film productions, or festivals, but I will always stay who I am. That’s why when I started in Ghent, I said that I would leave in five years at the latest. Because I did what I could do and then somebody else should continue. At the Vienna Festival that’s really the need to make these changes I’ve made in Ghent, together with my team. It’s a question of character. Starting with Bertolt Brecht, who says if there’s a city A where they love you, and a city B, where they need you, go to city B. I think that you always understand when city A becomes city B, and you should go to city B, which reaches city C. And voilà! I felt that I should leave Ghent, and I hope that people forgive me that I stayed almost 7 years because of Covid.
We just lost two years, so I am sure it’s not counted. Milo, you are going to receive a symbolic star on the Sibiu Walk of Fame at #FITS30. It’s a small gesture of appreciation for your work. How do you relate to fame and recognition in general?
I don’t know, I think everyone is searching for recognition and love, and understanding. It’s the same for me. I’m always happy when someone says that they like what I do, and I’m always a bit sad if someone says, ‘I hated your last show’. Then, I try to convince them that they should love it, but they don’t. And that’s tragic! (He laughs, I laugh, the tragic dissipates in the air).
Cover photo: Bea Borges
