In support of the upcoming performance of renowned theatre artist Milo Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon at the NYU Skirball Center (27-28 September), the Segal will be screening films of the two previous productions in Rau’s myth meets modern-day activism trilogy: Orestes in Mosul and The New Gospel. The screenings will be accompanied by a conversation about art and resistance with Rau and Cameroonian/Italian activist and writer Yvan Sagnet. Check out NYU’s prep-school material here.
Milo Rau is regarded by many as the most significant politically engaged theatre director working today, following in the footsteps of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. In these two Global Realism projects, New Gospel and Orestes in Mosul, Rau asks: What would Jesus preach in the 21st century? Who would his disciples be? Can a Greek tragedy really help heal a burnt city like Mosul in Iraq? What can and does a theatre play leave behind—what impact can it have in the real world?
Orestes in Mosul
2 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Milo Rau traveled to Mosul with his cast and crew to stage his version of Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragic drama the Oresteia. He sought out Iraqi actors, and recorded violent scenes in the war-torn city. An undertaking that sometimes led to fierce discussion. Cameraman Daniel Demoustier followed everything from closeby. His documentary contains footage of the play itself, the rehearsal process in Mosul, and interviews with the actors. Where an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth applies, one irrevocably ends up in a vicious circle of violence. Can it ever be stopped?
A conversation with Milo Rau and Yvan Sagnet, moderated by Segal Center Executive Director Frank Hentschker.
4:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
The New Gospel
5:00 p.m.EDT (New York, UTC -4)
If Jesus lived today, what people would he fight for? In The New Gospel, Rau and his team return to the origins of the gospel. The protagonist of The New Gospel is the Cameroonian activist Yvan Sagnet. In 2011 he himself works on a tomato farm when he starts to revolt against the exploitation of rural workers in the south of Italy.
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Milo Rau, born 1977 in Bern, is a director, writer, and artist in residence at NTGent. Rau studied sociology, German, and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin, and Zurich with Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Critics call him the “most influential” (Die Zeit), “most awarded” (Le Soir), “most interesting” (De Standaard), “most controversial” (La Repubblica), “most scandalous” (New York Times), and “most ambitious” (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002, he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions.
Rau’s theatre productions have been shown at all major international festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d’Avignon, the Venice Biennale, the Vienna Festival, and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and have been touring in over 30 countries worldwide. Milo Rau has received many awards, including the 3sat Prize 2017, the Saarbrücken Poetics Lectureship for Drama 2017, and, as the youngest artist after Frank Castorf and Pina Bausch, the renowned ITI Prize of the World Theatre Day in 2016. In 2017 Milo Rau was voted Director of the Year in a survey conducted by Deutsche Bühne, in 2018 he received the European Theatre Prize for his life’s work, and in 2019 he was the first artist ever to be appointed Associated Artist of the European Association of Theatre and Performance – EASTAP. In 2020 he received the renowned Münster Poetry Lectureship for his complete artistic oeuvre. His plays were voted “Best of the Year” in critics’ surveys in over 10 countries. In 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden and in 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ghent University. Since July 2023, Milo is Intendant of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen).
Photo credit: Bea Borgers
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Stop the Freedom Party of Austria FPÖ! Against a return to the corporate state – for real democracy and true freedom!
An appeal by the team of the production Burgtheater: Mavie Hörbiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Birgit Minichmayr, Caroline Peters & Milo Rau.
In May 2025, exactly eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Elfriede Jelinek’s play Burgtheater, which has been barred in Austria for 45 years, will finally be performed – at Burgtheater itself! Directed by Milo Rau, the production will star Mavie Hörbiger, Birgit Minichmayr and Caroline Peters. The play by the Nobel Prize winner, which resulted in Austria’s greatest theatre scandal when it premiered in Bonn in 1985, describes the shameful role played by the cultural and in particular the theatre scene during National Socialism and Fascism, before and after the war, whether out of indifference or complicity.
Not again, says the artistic team of Burgtheater, and addresses the public on this day, three weeks before the Austrian national elections.
From Hungary to Slovakia, radical right-wing parties are in government and are gradually abolishing civil liberties, freedom of the press and artistic freedom. The general director of Slovakia’s national theatre has just been dismissed—by a minister who wants to replace ‘gender madness’ with ‘national culture’. The Vienna Festival voiced their protest in an open letter to Slovak Prime Minister Fico, which thousands of European citizens have signed to date.
However, what is happening in Slovakia this summer could become reality in Austria as soon as this autumn if the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) comes to power. The Freedom party and its “People’s Chancellor” are calling for an immediate stop to “compulsory state levies” (i.e. subsidies) for “woke events” such as the European Song Contest and the Vienna Festival—this is only one particularly absurd policy in an election programme that, titled “Fortress Austria” allusion to Joseph Goebbels’ “Fortress Europe”, calls for the transformation of the Republic of Austria into a kind of corporative state 2.0 with an authoritarian government and a radical nationalist “Austria first” ideology.
The election program, which focuses on cultural and ethnic homogeneity, leaves typical far-right parties such as the German AfD or the French Rassemblement National looking conservative. In over a hundred pages, the FPÖ openly discusses what their European partner parties hide in secret chat protocols: that “two genders” should be enshrined in the constitution, that the minimum income should only be paid out to citizens, “remigration” should be radically implemented and that a two-tier society should be established in general. In the event of an election victory, the FPÖ wants to “gain full power over the three essential elements—government, space and people.” We say: this is rhetoric that could not be more anti-democratic and openly National Socialist!
But why disguise your intentions? The FPÖ has already achieved a majority in the EU elections, and all predictions for the Austrian national elections at the end of September forecast the same. However, it is not only this expectation that is a cause for concern, but also the indifference with which the art and culture scene remains silent—as if the madness of the election program would not be implemented in the event of a victory on 29 September, as if an EU that has already been shot to pieces and is crumbling before our eyes might still survive this attack. It would not be the first time that we have deceived ourselves with false reason and arrogance about the true intentions of the right.Let’s not allow self-righteousness and indifference to turn – once again – into blind complicity! Because, as has already happened in Slovakia and Hungary, the FPÖ will do exactly what they say they will do in Austria: they will declare millions of people second-class citizens, expel them, smash the republican institutions, “homogenise” a diverse artistic and cultural landscape. In short: to make democracy and a free society disappear.
We say: This far and no further! Not a single vote for the FPÖ!
The team of the production Burgtheater: Mavie Hörbiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Birgit Minichmayr, Caroline Peters, Claus Philipp & Milo Rau