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PRESS KIT MILO RAU / IIPM ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON RE-ENACTMENT, VIDEO INSTALLATION AND THEATRE PERFORMANCE

> 16 MAY 2020, 4 PM, WIENER FESTWOCHEN, BURGTHEATER OPENING SPEECH „AGAINST INTEGRATION“ OF KAY SARA AND MILO RAU

> NOVEMBER 2020, PARÁ, BRAZIL RE-ENACTMENT

> JANUARY 2021, AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE, BERLIN VIDEO INSTALLATION AS PART OF THE EXHIBITION “SCHOOL OF RESISTANCE”

> APRIL 2021, NTGENT, BELGIUM THEATRE PERFORMANCE

© Photo João Roberto Ripper

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CONTENTS

0 CREDITS 3

1 ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON 4

2 INTERVIEW WITH KAY SARA AND MILO RAU 8

3 MOVIMENTO DOS TRABALHADORES SEM TERRA 14

4 MILO RAU / IIPM 16

5 ACTORS 17

6 APPENDIX INTERVIEW FROM "THE ART OF RESISTANCE" 18




CREDITS

ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON

DIRECTION AND CONCEPT MILO RAU TEXT MILO RAU AND

ENSEMBLE WITH KAY SARA, GRACINHA DONATO, CELSO FRATESCHI,

ZÉ CELSO, ARNE DE TREMERIE, CÉLIA MARACAJÁ AND MANY MORE

DRAMATURGY AND CONCEPT EVA-MARIA BERTSCHY

DRAMATURGICAL COLLABORATION CARMEN HORNBOSTEL,

DOUGLAS ESTEVAM AND MARTHA KISS PERRONE SET DESIGN AND

COSTUMES ANTON LUKAS AND OTTAVIA CASTELLOTTI COSTUME

ASSISTANCE GABRIELA SANTOS CHERUBINI VIDEO MORITZ VON

DUNGERN AND FERNANDO NOGARI GRAPHIC DESIGN NINA WOLTERS

SOUND VANESSA SILVA PHOTOGRAPHY ARMIN SMAILOVIC

DIRECTORIAL ASSISTANCE PAULA SERRA PRODUCTION

MANAGEMENT MASCHA EUCHNER-MARTINEZ AND GABRIELA

GONÇALVES PROJECT COORDINATION MARIA RAIMUNDA CÉSAR,

SECRETARIA MST PARÁ AND COLECTIVO NACIONAL DE CULTURA MST

PRODUCTION ELISA CALOSI AND EVA-KAREN TITTMANN PRESS AND

PUBLIC RELATIONS YVEN AUGUSTIN, TOM DE CLERCQ, MÁRCIA

MARQUES AND CANAL ABERTO

“Antigone in the Amazon” (re-enactment and video installation) is a

production of the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) in

collaboration with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) and

NTGent, with support from the Pro Helvetia programme COINCIDENCIA – Swiss & South American Cultural Exchanges, the German Federal Cultural

Foundation and the Goethe Institut São Paulo.

“Antigone in the Amazon” (theatre performance) is a production of NTGent in collaboration with MST and IIPM.




1. ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON

The images of the burning Amazon from last summer caused

quite a stir throughout the world. The attack by the Brazilian

agribusiness on the world’s largest contiguous jungle, which

was strongly supported by President Bolsonaro, not only

threatens the planet’s “green lung”, but also puts the peoples living there and their traditions dating back thousands of years

at risk. After the productions “Orestes in Mosul” in the former

capital of the Islamic State and

the Jesus film “The New Gospel” in the southern Italian refugee

camps, Milo Rau and his team

travel to the Amazon Basin in

Brazil to conclude their “Trilogy of Ancient Myths”. In the federal

state of Pará, the government has

fuelled land conflicts for decades

through large-scale mining pro-

jects, the construction of dams

and the state promotion of mono-

culture soy farming. In a new pro-

ject which will take place on an

occupied piece of land in coopera-

tion with indigenous people, ac-

tivists and actors from Europe and Brazil, the tragedy of “An-

tigone” will be retold: as a bloody encounter between tradition-

al wisdom and global turbo-capitalism, as an epos of the strug-

gle of mankind against its self-inflicted decline into greed, de-

lusion and hubris.

It is probably due to the archetypal simplicity of the plot that no other classic tragedy has experienced as many adaptations as Sopho-cles’ “Antigone”, written in 472 B.C.: Antigone buries her brother Poly-nices even though King Creon has forbidden the burial as Polynices is considered an enemy of the state. According to the philosopher Hegel, the conflict between Antigone and Creon can be read as a dispute be-tween the traditional, divine law and the rational, modern state. To the philosopher Judith Butler, however, Antigone’s destabilisation of the

Plantation ("Acampamento") occupied by the landless movement MST near Marabá, Pará, Brazil Photo: Nieves

Rodrigues, 2019




existing symbolic order is much more radical: she undermines it from its utopian exterior, from a fundamentally different concept of human coexistence, of the living and the dead, of man and nature.

After having realized his political and trial-based projects (“The Congo Tribunal”, “General Assembly”) and narrative and representa-tive pieces (“The Europe Trilogy”, “Compassion”, “The Repetition”), Milo Rau has been focusing on the founding myths of modern society for some time now. In Mosul, which was the capital of the Islamic State until two years ago, last April, Rau and his team created “Ores-tes in Mosul” (2019) in collaboration with Iraqi and European actors based on the “The Oresteia” by Aeschylus. In the middle of the war zone, the ensemble posed the possibly most important question of all civilizations: how to end tragedy, how to forgive and bring about a new beginning. In the “The New Gospel” (2019/20), in which Rau worked in and around the European Capital of Culture Matera with refugees, non-professional and professional actors from the Jesus films by Pasolini and Mel Gibson, he recreated a social-revolutionary message for the 21st century – and at the same time documented the struggle for the rights of migrants who are working on to-mato plantations and being exploited by the Mafia.

The project “Antigone in the Amazon” concludes his work on the great myths and issues of humanity, and just like in the previous projects, the central question is: which actors, what kind of political constellation allows this text to speak to us about the conflict between traditional and modern societies in a new way? That is why, for the production of “Antigone”, the director and his team travel to the Brazilian state of Pará, where state-sponsored mining projects and monoculture soy farming are spreading into the forests of the Amazon, seemingly eating up the nat-ural environment as they do. In collaboration with MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, the world’s largest landless workers’ movement – they are creating an allegorical play about the violent devastations and displacements caused by the modern state, which places private property – and accordingly, worldwide trade and specu-lation – above the traditional right to land.

Kay Sara (Antigone) in a deforested piece of forest in the Amazon 2019




The battle of words between Antigone and Creon, but also the cho-ral passages, which have been reinterpreted for 2500 years, acquire a new meaning: the liberal world order comes into contact with the ho-listic cosmology of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, who cultivate a progressive approach to nature in the age of an impending climate collapse. “Monstrous, a lot. But nothing more monstrous than man”: Sophocles’ critique of human hubris, of the ideology of exploitation and feasibility, the question of the justification of state violence and civil resistance are also reflected in the cast itself, in the personal stories of the actors cast in the play and in the debates that develop amongst them. As in “Orestes in Mosul” or “The New Gospel”, “Antigone in the Amazon” also brings European and local as well as non-professional and professional actors together.

Antigone is played by the indige-nous actress Kay Sara, who grew up in a Tukano village in the Amazon. The role of Ismene is performed by a black activist who grew up in a quilombo, a traditional settlement founded by es-caped black slaves. The chorus is made up of local activists from the landless workers’ movement, who defend their right to the use of the land against the big landowners and speculators in the Amazon. In a parallel to Polynices’ re-volt against the state in the mythologi-cal background to Antigone, “Antigone in the Amazon” begins with the 1996 massacre of Eldorado do Carajas, in which 19 landless persons were shot by police on a highway, with the dead Polynices of the Greek myth finding his counterpart in a mur-dered activist. Creon is played by Celso Frateschi, an established actor, director and leftist politician from the white upper class in Sao Paulo – not by, for example, a right-wing, politically motivated criminal, but by someone who grapples with his own position of power. The production itself takes place in a location where, for many generations, the ex-panding Brazilian state has run up against the indigenous cultures in bloody clashes. Haemon, the son of Creon and Antigone’s fiancé, is played by the Belgian actor Arne De Tremerie, who – as the director’s alter ego – plays the role of the European – prisoner of his privileges – alongside the doomed Antigone. Finally, the blind seer Tiresias, who predicts Creon’s self-destruction, is performed by a living legend of Latin American theatre: 82-year-old Zé Celso, the inventor of a Brazili-an theatre based on indigenous traditions.

Josimar Pereira de Freitas - Survivor of the massacre of April 17, 1996 and member of the choir of "Antigone in the Amazon" Photo: Nieves Ro-

drigues 2019




“Antigone in the Amazon” will be premiered and documented in November 2020 in the Brazilian state of Pará. The production culmi-nates in a re-enactment of the massacre of Eldorado do Carajas, in which the events at the scene of the crime are reconstructed and re-enacted together with the survivors. On May 16, 2020, Antigone ac-tress Kay Sara and Milo Rau will open the Wiener Festwochen with the speech "Against Integration". Parts of the production will be shown for the first time in Europe in January 2021, as a video installation in the exhibition “School of Resistance” at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. The theatre performance “Antigone in the Amazon” will have its premi-ere at NTGent in April 2021, and will then go on tour and also return to Brazil.




2. INTERVIEW WITH KAY SARA AND MILO RAU

Eva-Maria Bertschy: The myth that forms the background to

Sophocles’ Antigone tells of the rebellion of Antigone ’s brother, Polynices. When he falls in the civil war as an enemy of the

state, he is denied a burial. With that begins the tragedy

around the tyrant Creon – who seeks to maintain his power at

any cost – and Antigone – who wants to bury her brother. How

do you deal with this conflict in “Antigone in the Amazon”?

Milo Rau: For our version of “The Oresteia”, we travelled to Mosul, the former capital of the Islamic State, and collaborated with local actors and activists. At the heart of the project was the question of the possibility, or impossibility, of forgiving: how can you forgive the jihadists? For “Antigone in the Amazon”, we’re also going on a journey – to northern Brazil, where last summer the forests burned, where the indigenous cultures clashed with the predatory capitalism of the big agricultural corporations. As always, we’re going about it very concretely, adapting the project to the conditions on the ground there. Together with indigenous people, activists and actors from Europe and Brazil, we’re going to film Sophocles’ Antigone on an occupied beef plantation over the next few months. Our adaptation puts in the place of Polynices’ rebellion a big 1990s massacre of landless farmers by the Brazilian police. On 17 April, as the climax, we’re going to re-enact this with hundreds of activists on a blocked-off federal highway in the location of the actual massacre. A young indigenous woman, Kay Sara, is playing Antigone, and the chorus is made up of survivors of the massacre. For “Antigone in the Amazon”, we’re working closely with the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). What is it about this collaboration that interests you? What are the parallels

between Sophocles’ Antigone and the current political and

social conflicts in Brazil?

For over 2,000 years now, Sophocles’ Antigone has been the play about the question of the justification of resistance against the abuses of a bureaucratic and, in extreme cases, dictatorial state. Our

»In this new ‘Antigone’, a power struggle becomes a class struggle – a fight be-tween big landowners and landless workers, but also between indigenous tradi-tions and neoliberal capital-ism.« Eva-Maria Bertschy




collaboration with the MST is a clear statement, of course: the Bolsonaro government has labelled the movement a “terrorist” association multiple times, and the conflicts have intensified since he took office. The MST stands for civil, unarmed resistance. And in addition to that, there’s a strong, long-standing theatre tradition in the Landless Workers’ Movement: choral speaking is a true speciality of the MST, an established part of their training. In the last few decades, a lot of plays and major political – and also artistic – events have been held, some using the methods of the “theatre of the oppressed” of Augusto Boal, who worked closely with the MST. So there are a lot of points of connection, including in the MST’s attempt to conceive identity politics and class struggle, the emancipation of minorities and distributive justice, as a whole. But we also avoid clear attributions. For example, we didn’t cast Creon as an extreme right-wing politician, but as someone who clearly has his doubts, and who fails in the end. Creon’s son, however, is played by a Belgian actor – he reflects our own position in a sense. We also focus less on the dictator’s conflict with Antigone than on the various questions and figures that this conflict illuminates: most centrally, the clash between capitalist state logic and the utopia of a holistic life in harmony with nature and traditions. We’re staging the piece on the “Assentamento 17 de Abril”, a

settlement of the MST that was founded by occupiers in the

immediate aftermath of the massacre. The state has meanwhile

expropriated the property from the previous landholder and

legalised the settlement. What made this particular place such

an appropriate site for the production of “Antigone”?

The setting is part of a region that’s been one of the focal points of the Brazilian land conflicts for decades. When a dam was built in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of farmers and workers from north-eastern Brazil were resettled to the region. This mass migration was intensified by the Serra Pelada gold rush – the gold mine that was made famous through the photographs by Sebastião Salgado, which attracted a half-million landless farmers in the 1980s. The displaced farmers pushed into the territories of the indigenous people who lived in the region and came into conflict with them. The activist Douglas Estevam Da Silva, who has worked with us on the project from the start, said to me: “The MST was founded out of respect for the heritage and the rights of the indigenous.” Instead of fighting against the indigenous people, they worked with them to organise the resistance against the big landowners. Out of respect for the differences in their world view and their strategies of resistance, they

»Our collaboration with the MST is a clear statement, of course. The MST stands for civil, unarmed resistance.« Milo Rau

»We focus less on the dicta-tor’s conflict with Antigone than on the various ques-tions and figures that this conflict illuminates: most centrally, the clash between capitalist state logic and the utopia of a holistic life in harmony with nature and traditions.« Milo Rau




never tried to integrate the indigenous people in the movement. There’s a whole range of movements in the region that pursue common interests, but that are very different. These include the quilombolas in the autonomous communities founded in remote regions of the Amazon by escaped slaves beginning in the 16th century. And a new movement has just been launched in the region, one that’s fighting for the sovereignty of the people in mining and against the destruction of the living environments of disparate population groups by the gigantic iron mines in the region. Representatives of all of these movements are taking part in our production. We’re telling the shared story of their resistance. In this new “Antigone”, a power struggle becomes a class struggle – a fight between big landowners and landless

workers, but also between indigenous traditions and neoliberal

capitalism. On our first trip, the activists from the MST pointed

out to us another very direct parallel between Antigone and

today’s Brazil: after occupying big landowners’ estates, they often discovered anonymous mass graves of slave labourers

and insurgents who had been denied a regular burial. The

history of Brazil is full of anonymous deaths, of people who

were abducted and disappeared.

And Antigone isn’t just defending her brother’s right to a burial. She’s also defending a human right that must remain sacrosanct. Whenever rulers have denied people their right to a burial, whether in the times of slavery or under modern dictatorships, they were elevating themselves above the gods. Antigone is at the same time a play about the origins of the Western ideology of the domination of nature. The most famous choral passage of the piece says: “Much is monstrous, but nothing more monstrous than man.” But the hubris of the ancient Greeks, who sailed the Mediterranean in wooden boats and tried to fend off death with rudimentary medicine, looks almost childlike from today’s perspective. In contrast to that, a cosmic horror grips us when we think about how in the Amazon all of humanity is stumbling towards its own doom – just as blind as the self-righteous heroes of the Greek tragedies. Next door to the occupied estate where we’re staging “Antigone”, the biggest iron mine in Latin America is eating its way into the forest, huge dam projects are drying up the rivers and Bolsonaro’s militias are murdering environmental activists every day. Last August, it rained ash on Sao Paulo. It was like night-time in the middle of the day. The winds that have brought rain south from the Amazon forests from time immemorial brought darkness and fire. We’re at a watershed moment. In unusual agreement, traditional

»Antigone is at the same




Western science and the sages of the indigenous peoples both give the Amazon ecosystem ten years. Failure to achieve a fundamental reversal by then will bring its collapse. Irreversibly. Which at the human scale of time means forever. The biggest, most complicated and most important coherent ecosystem on the planet will disappear. Casting an indigenous actress as the lead character of Antigone

of course means positing the indigenous population of the

Amazon as a counterworld to the liberal, modern state, whose

chief purpose is to protect private property.

The cosmology of the indigenous peoples is a holistic counterdraft to the “monstrosity” of predatory Western capitalism. For the indigenous people, there’s no such thing as a person owning land, forests or animals. While Westerners live in a sort of all-encompassing present, consciously wiping out traditions and future possibilities for the benefit of a total exploitation of what we have at hand, in the indigenous cosmology there’s no such exanimated disposability of the world. Rather, nature spirits and ancestors preside over the human scope of action; everything – all times and things – is interconnected with everything else. Re-establishing this coherence in a third, holistic modernity would of course be a dream. Marx Sauvage, “wild Marx”, is the title of a book by a Brazilian intellectual and friend of mine – a re-reading of the great Marxist tradition of resistance from the perspective of indigenous cosmology. “In southern Brazil, they take us for savages from the jungle – but now we’re shooting a film,” one indigenous activist said to us, laughing, during one of the discussions. Because in the hands of these “savages”, who Bolsonaro mocks in every one of his speeches, lies the future of humanity. Kay Sara, you grew up far away from the city, in the endless

Amazon rainforest. When you were seven years old, you moved

with your family to Manaus, the state capital of Amazonas.

What motivated your family to take this step, and what did you

learn from it?

Kay Sara: I was born in Iauaretê. Our move to the capital didn’t come suddenly. My mother had eleven children. One died and the five older children were already living in the city. My father divided his time between Iauaretê and Manaus, and my sixth brother had graduated high school and wanted to go to university. My mother had found a house in the city for us to move to. So she made the decision with this assuredness. In the city, I learned a lot of things. Most of all, I learned to defend myself, to resist certain things and demands, to be proud of

»A cosmic horror grips us when we think about how in the Amazon all of humanity is stumbling towards its own doom – just as blind as the self-righteous heroes of the Greek tragedies.«

»The cosmology of the in-digenous peoples is a holis-tic counterdraft to the ‘mon-strosity’ of predatory West-ern capitalism.« Milo Rau

»In the city, I learned a lot of things. Most of all, I learned to defend myself, to resist certain things and demands, to be proud of who I am and where I come from. I learned that the world is big and that I’m an indigenous or native person. I learned that there are social inequalities, that prejudices are cruel and that they kill people.« Kay Sara




who I am and where I come from. I learned that the world is big and that I’m an indigenous or native person. I learned that there are social inequalities, that prejudices are cruel and that they kill people. In the year we moved, I made my first film. I come from a family of artists and artisans. We have a long tradition of this work – only a few of us chose other occupations. In his book about the cosmology of the Yanomami people, the

indigenous shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa writes that the

spirits of the Yanomami’s ancestors live in the forests. Where will they go when monoculture and mines swallow up the

forests of the Amazon?

Among my people, we believe that our ancestors don’t need the forest so very much for their continued existence. What they need most are their descendants. In fact, as soon as we’re born, we’re given the name of one of our ancestors, who then lives on through this name. So we, who still have this human body, are the subject of the greatest concern. We need the ecological balance, in order to live and for the survival of the generations to come. We have to stop thinking that only we native people need the forest for our continued life, because it isn’t true. All of us human beings need the ecological balance if we want to continue to exist. We believe that everything has life – trees, rivers, mountains, rocks – and that all of this disrespect for the beings of the forest brings an ecological imbalance. People need to quit being so blindly ambitious and begin to open up their perspective to include everything else, especially nature, which has to be protected. At the moment, as indigenous peoples, we’re the most important representatives of this resistance, but when it comes to nature, we all must fight for it. My ancestors are with us, wherever we go. But the creatures in the forest have a life of their own. What does it mean to you to play the figure of Antigone – as an

artist, but also as an indigenous woman? What do you think

about this woman, this “terrorist”, possibly the most famous in the history of literature?

Interpreting a figure means giving life to her, and I feel honoured to have the opportunity to breathe life into this Antigone, who in her time was so militant. And because she is in a position to speak about such important questions of the Amazon region and concerns of the indigenous people of Brazil, “Antigone in the Amazon” will demonstrate the strength and power that we women have. As a person and an artist, I have to fight my own battles. I see this engagement as an

»We need the ecological balance, in order to live and for the survival of the gen-erations to come. We have to stop thinking that only we native people need the forest for our continued life, because it isn’t true. All of us human beings need the ecological balance if we want to continue to exist.« Kay Sara

»We believe that everything has life – trees, rivers, mountains, rocks – and that all of this disrespect for the beings of the forest brings an ecological imbalance. People need to quit being so blindly ambitious and begin to open up their perspective to include everything else, especially nature, which has to be protected.« Kay Sara




opportunity for more people to hear about my struggle and understand how important it is that there are indigenous people with traditional and mythological knowledge – people who know their culture and make a difference in the world with their projects. My whole life, I’ve grown up surrounded by strong women who make things happen. At some point, I understood that the women have long fought battles and wars without showing their faces. It’s time now to proclaim our truth. In this battle, four women will speak through me – the figure of Antigone, me as a person and an artist, as a woman and as a native. We all have our ways of pursuing what we believe in to the end. It just depends on where we stand in society and before the law.

»Interpreting a figure means giving life to her, and I feel honoured to have the opportunity to breathe life into this Antigone, who in her time was so militant.« Kay Sara




3. MST

The MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) was founded 30 years ago in response to Brazil’s rural exodus and the nation’s extremely unequal land distribution. About 10% of the population owns around 80% of the land, and 20 large landowners possess 20 million hectares of land – the same amount as that held by 3.3 million small farmers. From the mid-1990s, and increasingly after the financial crisis, large landholdings passed from big Brazilian landowners to international banks, pension funds and other companies. Approximately half of the country’s agricultural land is held by speculators and isn’t farmed.

Since 1985, the MST has been occupying unused or illegally cultivated land, thereby putting pressure on the state authorities, who under the constitution are obliged to guarantee the legally defined “social utility” of agricultural land. The MST brings lawsuits against the landowners with the aim of exposing the illegitimacy of their holdings and transferring title to the land to the people on the occupied estates. Through its actions, the MST has so far won official land titles for over 400,000 families. On their properties, the new owners now have innumerable cooperative farms, their own clinics and over 3,000 schools. They have also established higher-level educational facilities for children and adults, including their own university, where their activists are trained. The MST also has a long theatre tradition. For many years, it has collaborated with the Brazilian director Augusto Boal to further develop his “theatre of the oppressed”.

The overriding objective of the MST is the democratic development of Brazil, which is marked by stark class disparities. It fights for a land development model based not on the ruthless exploitation of human beings and nature, but on social justice and autonomy. The indigenous cosmology and traditions of coexistence figure just as prominently in this as do socialist cooperative models and the ideas of sustainability of contemporary ecological movements.

Conflicts around land in Brazil frequently lead to violence. On the one hand, the landless face direct state repression. On the other, they are at the mercy of the big landowners’ brutal private militias, the




“jagonços”, who largely enjoy impunity from prosecution. In 1996, a confrontation arose on the federal highway BR 155 between the military police and activists from the MST, who were marching in protest on Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, to fight for the expropriation of a cassava farm – 40,000 hectares of land that had lain fallow for decades and that they had occupied. Nineteen landless persons were shot to death in the clash and more than 70 were injured. The massacre of Eldorado do Carajás set in motion a worldwide movement of solidarity which induced the Brazilian government to expropriate numerous occupied estates and make them available to the landless.

During his presidential campaign, Jair Bolsonaro made multiple references to the MST activists as “terrorists” and promised to arm the big landowners to enable them to take action against this threat. In the first months of his presidency, he announced that all MST activists would be cleared from land they had occupied.




4. MILO RAU/IIPM

Critics called him “the most influential“ (DIE ZEIT), “most awarded“ (Le Soir), “most interesting“ (De Standaard) or “most ambitious“ (The Guardian) artist of our time: the Swiss director, author and artistic director of the NTGent Milo Rau (born 1977). Rau studied sociology, German and Romance philology in Paris, Berlin and Zurich under Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Since 2002, he has created over 50 plays, films, books and actions. His productions have been invited to all of the major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d'Avignon, the Venice Biennale Teatro, the Wiener Festwochen and the Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and have toured more than 30 countries worldwide. Rau has received numerous awards, including the Peter-Weiss-Prize 2017, the 3sat-Prize 2017, the 2017 Saarbrucken Poetry Lectureship for Drama and, in 2016, the prestigious World Theatre Day ITI Prize. In 2017, Milo Rau was voted "Acting Director of the Year" in the critics' survey conducted by the Deutsche Buhne. In 2018 he received the European Theatre Prize, and in 2019 he was awarded the honorary doctorate by the Theatre Department of Lunds Universitet (Sweden), and in 2020 by the University of Ghent. Rau is also a television critic, lecturer and a very productive author.

»Theatre innovator« Der Spiegel

»Milo Rau is currently the most influential director on the continent.« Die Zeit

»Where understanding ends, Milo Raus' work be-gins.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Scandal lover« La Vanguardia

»Milo Rau is one of the most ruthless and intelligent critics of our time: a visionary.« Jean Ziegler

»Milo Rau is currently the most interesting artist in Europe.« De Standaard




5. ACTORS

Kay Sara – in the role of Antigone – (born in 1996) grew up in Iauaretê in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, on the border to Colombia. Her father belongs to the indigenous Tariana people, her mother to the Tukano. At the age of seven, she moved with her family to Manaus, where she made her first film in the same year. Ever since, she has dedicated herself as a young activist and performer to the worthy representation of the indigenous – her own – way of life and its mythological basis in the public sphere and the culture of Brazil, as well as to the preservation of its living environment against the threat from mining companies and agribusiness. Acting is a central means of Sara’s political involvement. There is a tradition of acting in her family dating back to her grandparents, who played in the feature film “Brincando nos campos do senhor” (1991) by Hector Babenco. Since then, her parents and family members have appeared in many films about the indigenous people of the Amazon. Sara has performed in numerous feature films and television series, including “Un giorno devi andare” by Giorgio Diritti (2013) and “Antes o tempo não acabava” by Sérgio Andrade and Fábio Baldo (2016). In 2018, Sara left Manaus in search of new opportunities and experiences. She currently lives in Sao Paulo. In addition to her work on camera, Sara is active with various theatre collectives. She mounted her first solo performance, “PÊ'TÍA'NÃWE-EXTERMÍNIO”, in 2018.

Celso Frateschi – in the role of Creon – (born in 1952) is a Brazilian actor, author and director, as well as a politician affiliated with the Workers’ Party (PT), the party of former president Lula. Frateschi co-founded the groups Teatro Núcleo Independente and Teatro Pequeno and for years has headed Ágora – Center for Theatrical Development in Sao Paulo. He began his acting career in 1980 at the Arena Theatre in Sao Paulo in a production by Augusto Boal. Frateschi has worked with the most important directors in Brazilian theatre, including Enrique Diaz, José Possi Neto and Domingos de Oliveira. He is a professor at the School of Dramatic Arts at the University of Sao Paulo, and has served as municipal secretary of culture of Santo André and Sao Paulo and as president of Funarte, Brazil’s national cultural foundation.




José Celso Martinez Corrêa – in the role of Tiresias – known as Zé Celso (born in 1937), is a director, actor and playwright, and one of the most important names in Brazilian theatre. In the early 1960s, he founded the Teatro Oficina, which became a regular source of political controversy prior to and during the military dictatorship before being forced into exile due to intensified repression. His staging of the play “O rei de vela” by Oswald Andrade, whose “Anthropophagic Manifesto” of 1928 had a lasting influence on the work of the Teatro Oficina, is legendary. The manifesto’s famous opening line, “Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question,” celebrates the indigenous ritual form of cannibalism, while at the same time “eating up” Shakespeare. In Europe, Zé Celso first caused a sensation with his almost 24-hour staging of Euclides Da Cunha’s non-fictional Os Sertões (“Rebellion in the Backlands”) at Berlin’s Volksbuhne theatre. The account of the occupied city of Canudos, where the itinerant preacher Conselheiro founded an autonomous community at the beginning of the Brazilian republic, is a central historical motif for many left-wing movements in Brazil, in particular the MST.

Arne De Tremerie – in the role of Haemon – (born in 1992) is a Belgian actor. He appeared in the feature films “Coffee” (2016) and “Bastaard” (2019) and in the television series “L’aquila – grandi speranze” (2018) and “Black-out” (2020). In theatre, he has performed in productions by, among others, Lies Pauwels, Berten Vanderbruggen and Siona Houthuys as well as the young collective Camping Sunset.




6. APPENDIX DOUGLAS ESTEVAM DA SILVA & MILO RAU IT’S COLLECTIVE ACTION THAT WILL HELP TO OVERCOME DIFFER-ENCES INTERVIEW IN PREPARATION OF “ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON” | NTGENT 2021 GOLDEN BOOKS, VERBRECHER VERLAG BERLIN 2020


210 IV. DISOBEDIENCE AND SOLIDARITY | FOCuS BRAzIL

douGlAs esTevAM dA silvA & Milo rAuIT’S cOLLEcTIVE AcTION ThAT WILL hELP TO OVERcOmE

DIffERENcES

Interview in preparation of “Antigone in the Amazon” |

NTGent 2021

MIlO RaU: Douglas, you work in the cultural sector of the Landless

Workers' movement (mST), mainly in São Paulo. you worked together

with Augusto Boal for a long time for his “Theatre of the Oppressed”,

and now you are one of the dramaturges of Antigone in the Amazon. Now we're in the state of Pará, near marabá, one of the Amazonian

states of Brazil. Where did this movement come from? Who founded

it and why?

dOUGLAs EsTEVAm dA sILVA: The Landless Movement was offi-

cially founded in 1984. It was the result of a series of land occu-

pations and agrarian conflicts in the late seventies, during the

dictatorship. Military repression against the peasants was very

strong after the coup d'état in 1964. But at the end of the seven-

ties, there was a resumption of the struggle for land, it started

to grow stronger. Many national organisations were being estab-

lished and the worker’s unions began to gain more and more au-

tonomy. It was at that time when Lula became president of the

Steel Workers' Union in 1975. And that was when CIMI was cre-

ated, the Indigenous Missionary Council. It was the church that

– together with the organisation of the indigenous people and

the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the peasant branch of the

church – had also begun to help this peasant movement even

more. The occupations started to take place all over the country.

RaU: And that’s how everything started?

dA sILVA: Yes, these first occupations, carried out in 1979, were

at the origin of the Landless Movement. There were occupations

in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and land conflicts in the state

of Pará. For the construction of the dams, the state had displaced

211IV. DISOBEDIENCE AND SOLIDARITY | FOCuS BRAzIL

peasants and put them in conflict with indigenous people. And

there was already a strategical reflection at that time. First, one

observation was that... one way to stop the military reaction

would be to take massive actions. We have seen that huge ac-

tions, with hundreds of citizens, were more difficult to dismantle

for the state, for the military. And later, there was also the percep-

tion that it was necessary to build a national aggregation of all

these struggles that existed everywhere. Gathering each protest,

each individualised occupation, was needed to have more polit-

ical power. During the first 5 years, from 1979 until 1984, there

was a process of meetings, organisations, occupations that led

us to the idea of this movement, with these conceptions of mass

action, of national aggregation, to find a form of organisation.

Already early on, there was also this spirit of international ac-

tion, a certain hope for the Nicaraguan revolution, and even at

the very beginning, in 1984, there were already representatives

from other countries, other peasant organisations, who took

part in the first national meeting of the Landless Movement.

There was also a very strong influence from the peasant popu-

lation with their religious traditions and the movement initial-

ly had a powerful presence among people linked to the church,

who came from the CPT (Pastoral Commission for the Land), or

people who were part of the liberation theology that came from

this more progressive conception of the church.

RaU: That's something I'd like to explore a little bit more, the idea of

liberation theology. As you know, I shot a Jesus film in South Italy the

last months, and I see a book here on the table, called Ocupando a

Biblia, that you read in the schools of mST. What's the impetus for this

theology and how does it relate to the protest of the Landless Workers?

dA sILVA: Well, liberation theology started in the late fif-

ties, early sixties. It was a theology that had developed a prin-

ciple of social justice, bringing the social question to the


centre of religious reflection, to the centre of the notion of re-

ligion, and it began to influence many branches of the church.

During the dictatorship in 1974, there were even a few priests,

a few branches of the church that went into the armed struggle.

The collective way of organising was also a method that came

from liberation theology, which had a great impact on the

movement.

Liberation theology was also very critical of the institutional-

isation of religion, there was the side of social justice, but there

was also a profound criticism of the institutionalisation of reli-

gion, the Church, the Vatican, all that. A concrete example:

conservative priests from the city didn’t want to go to the coun-

tryside, because this wasn't something that could strengthen

their power. And because of that, people who were in the coun-

tryside couldn't carry out the religious services. So, local reli-

gious authorities were created, autonomous groups that began

to study, and read the Bible in relation to reality, to life, in this

principle of social action.

Later on, there was the case of several people who were

excommunicated, like Leonardo Boff, and they began to recog-

nise indigenous cosmologies, they began to recognise the roles

of women. “We’re going to sit down and we're going to read the

Book together, and we're going to think about this collectively,”

was the idea and they had a principle, a motto consisting of three

words: see – you have to see reality, you have to see what's going

on, judge – you have to judge, you have to think about what's

going on, what you see – and finally act. Those were the three

words of the church’s principle. See, judge and act.

And then of course there were other influences as well, more

in the Marxist field, people who had other experiences. But the

majority of the militants came from the church, some came from

the union who were already not happy with the union, either

through state control, military control, or through the bureau-

cracy of the union itself.


RaU: But I guess there were also conflicts: between a purely theolo-

gical and the marxist perspective?

dA sILVA: Of course. There were people who wanted to radicalise

against the church. The church was very advanced, but even so,

there was a limit, it didn't want to go further in certain areas. The

movement was a way of moving forward, further than where the

church had arrived: it needed to become more independent of the

church. Because sometimes the church also wanted to determine

the strategies of the movement.

RaU: There are two things that I would like to explore further. During

my research for Antigone in the Amazon, I had the impression that the

role of women, ecology, and indigenous cosmologies are important

factors in your movement, more important than in, let’s say, classical

leftist movements as we know it in Europe.

dA sILVA: Oh yes. Women's participation in particular, it's de-

veloped a lot, since the beginning of the movement. Because

the main action, the base of the movement, is the occupation

of land, and it is a political action that is done by the family, by

all social subjects. Not only the man who works in the company,

who joins the union, who goes on strike, and his children and his

wife stay at home or elsewhere. For the land occupation, we all

go together: the man, the woman, the children, the whole family,

all are involved in the political action.

And at the same time they all become political subjects in the

action. It's no longer just the man who will decide what to do, the

woman is also starting to take her place, and many times women

have pushed men to take the decision. As a result, the women

were there on the territory, on the field, and they began to organ-

ise things, to organise themselves, and this is something that has

developed continuously, until it took on a form of organisation

itself. There is always this parity of people, that distinguished the

movement. But you had another question, too?


RaU: The other question is about indigenous cosmology.

dA sILVA: In terms of indigenous cosmology, there's always been

a relationship with the natives. These occupations I mentioned

from 1979, this land conflict, the land conflicts in Pará, it was be-

cause of the construction of a dam. The state displaced the peas-

ants. It's important to understand that it was the state that creat-

ed this conflict because they expelled the peasants and put them

on a territory that was the indigenous peoples’ territory. And

there, the peasants said: "No, the indigenous people, they have

the heritage, they have seniority, we're going somewhere else".

And that's when the Landless Movement started, out of respect.

The main issue is that there still is a cultural difference

between the peasants and the indigenous people. It's differ-

ent from other Latin American countries where it's much more

mixed. To give a very concrete example: the conception of agri-

cultural production is different. The farmer, he will assemble,

he will have a production planning. The indigenous people, they

are more aware that there already is another relationship with

nature itself.

The movement understood that there was a common sub-

ject, the struggle for land, there was a common unification, the

colonial heritage, slavery, all the issues around the land that

have been constituted since colonisation, since these models of

production for export. And the indigenous people had a differ-

ent conception of social struggle as well. We said to ourselves:

"We're going to fight together. But we're going to respect the par-

ticularity of each group, the cultural particularity, and the par-

ticularity of political notion, and mainly the particularity of the

way of life, the way of living and all that."

In the Amazon especially, it's a way of life that could not be

linked to the organisational form of the movement as it was

in the beginning. And that's when we said: "We're not going to

impose, we're not going to say, we have the model, you have to

fit us." No, we said: "There are differences, we're going to do


things together, but we're going to respect the differences”.

Today in the countryside, there are several movements that have

been inspired by the Landless Movement itself, but they are inde-

pendent, there is the quilombola movement for example, for the

black communities. And there are the communities that live, for

example, next to a river with their own movements, linked to the

Landless Movement. You have to respect each one, and at the

same time try to bring all these organisations together.

RaU: And this is perhaps one of the key questions for the whole

movement: how can we respect differences but still have universal

solidarity? how do you do that?

dA sILVA: Yes, I think the basis of everything, from the begin-

ning on, was the respect for differences. Not wanting to impose,

not wanting to be a hegemonic force, not wanting to use the oth-

er movements as mass-of-maneuver. There are two approach-

es. One is the continuous process of dialogue, of exchange, of

meeting each other, of trying to envisage collective and common

strategies. There are organisations like Via Campesina, the large

international peasant organisation, that tries to unite landless

movements in all different countries. There are indigenous or-

ganisations that even at the international level have begun to un-

derstand the indigenous people as peasants too, with their spec-

ificities, their particularities. So there is dialogue, exchange. And

the other, the main strategy is to do actions together. It’s collec-

tive action that will help to overcome differences.

RaU: That’s the most interesting question, as we are discussing practi-

cal strategies of resistance: how does a concrete action take place?

What is the reaction of the state, how do you react to this reaction,

and so on.

dA sILVA: The occupation of land starts with what we call the

groundwork. That means it's the members of the movement who


will start meeting people, who will organise several meetings. At

each location, it depends on the local reality: we will hold meet-

ings at the church, at the premises of a union, with a political

party, at a community centre, in someone's home. There, we will

explain to people what the agrarian reform is, what the struggle

for land is. We will tell them: “This is not an outlaw action. We

don't want to steal from anyone, it's not about private property,

it's about public property. We are going to carry out an action of

land occupation to push the state to implement the law of the

agrarian reform.”

RaU: What's this law?

dA sILVA: It's the legal framework of the constitution, sections

184 and 186. These are the sections of the constitution that ad-

dress the reorganisation of the land. The articles say that un-

developed, unused land should be used for the efforts of the

agrarian reform. That was part of the 1988 constitution, the con-

stitution that was made at the end of the military dictatorship.

And then, we are going to explain to people: "We do not know

how it will be done. The land occupation can last six months, it

can last 10 years." The preparational work starts, it can take a

year or six months, it depends on the maturity of the group, how

it develops and the numbers of people too, because it has to be

an action of the masses.

And that's it, we're going to prepare people, we're going to

organise all that. The main thing is to already make them under-

stand that they are the ones who are going to conquer the land.

No one is going to do that for them. They're the ones who will

be the subject of their conquest. And meanwhile, we're already

starting to do some research to see where we could occupy the

land: “Well, in this region, there are such properties with these

irregularities." And then there’s the preparation of the security

measures.


And one day, we go and do the land occupation. The first thing

to take care of is to organise the work teams, which then become

the sectors. There is the security team, the infrastructure team

that will help with the construction of the tents, there is the team

for children, for health, for education. And all of a sudden, all

the people who are doing the occupation are involved in a col-

lective. That's where all the organisational processes start. We

also have legal support, because the police, either the state army,

or the police, can come and try to expel us. And that's when the

moment of resistance begins.

There's this song, which was also a watchword, called: "Occupy,

resist and produce". That means we're occupying, now we've got

to resist the expulsion. The "see, judge, act" from the church

became: “occupy, resist, produce.” Because we are peasants.

RaU: how do you convince people – who were perhaps never involved

in political actions – to take part in these occupations?

dA sILVA: We don't hide the risks involved in this action. We don't

hide the failure that can happen, the evictions and all that. We

don't hide anything from the people. And then we go in, we do

the occupation, and we start the organisation of the communi-

ty, together with everybody involved. In order to resist, we have

to organise ourselves. When the occupation is ongoing, it be-

comes more visible to people, people start to get interested and

as a result, the camps start to grow. And the regularisation of the

land begins. Again: these are not outlaw actions, it’s about push-

ing the state to implement the law of the agrarian reform. It’s

like in your film about Jesus, like in this very well-known phrase

in Matthew's Gospel: "I have not come to abolish the law; I have

come to fulfil it." And that is what resistance means: to fulfil the

law, to humanise society.

Transcription and translation (from French): Kaatje De Geest

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