A Prologue: Three years to a premiere – A Brief Retrospective
On May 13, 2023, the long-awaited premiere of Milo Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon, the final installation of Rau’s Trilogy of Ancient Myths, finally came to pass at NTGent. The production, initially planned for 2020, was delayed in a very dramatic fashion in late March of 2020 when Rau and his team found themselves stuck São Paulo for a few days as flights were cancelled and the world locked down for the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rau and his team flew home to Europe (Germany and Belgium), the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) sheltered in their occupations (never stopping the fight, but changing strategies for a pandemic era), and Kay Sara – the Indigenous (Tariana and Tukano) actor and activist from Lauaretê, a tiny community in the Amazonas province on the border with Columbia, who was to portray Rau’s Antigone – returned to her home village and her people.
As the first COVID wave subsided in summer of 2020 and Rau’s The New Gospel premiered at the Venice’s 2020 Biennale (a surreal event in the near empty streets of the usually overcrowded tourist hotspot) hopes were high that Rau and his team could return to Brazil and continue Antigone rehearsals for a 2021 premiere, only for another, even worse wave of COVID accompanied by another wave of lockdowns. NTGent and theatres across Europe and the globe again found their doors closed.
In April 2023, Rau and his team finally returned to Brazil (specifically the massive country’s northern province of Pará) to continue and conclude their work on Antigone in the Amazon – a project three years in the making. Yet the world is a different place in 2023 than it was in the infinitely more complicated yet simultaneously simpler, more naïve, less traumatized pre-lockdown days of 2020.
In February 2020, the wave of populism marked by Trump’s presidency in the United States was at what then seemed to be a crest, Brazil’s president was Bolsonaro: a dangerous, populist, far-right figure who opposed LGBTQ+ rights, rolled back Indigenous and environmental protections, and advocated to treat members of the MST movement as terrorists to be banned or eradicated entirely. But, in 2020, Trump lost the US elections and, in 2022, Bolsonaro lost his bid for re-election to the left-wing candidate and former activist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula). This loss was accompanied with Brazil’s own version of the 2021 Storming of the Capital in Washington, DC, with a storming of Brazil’s National Congress on January 8, 2023. When Rau and his team first arrived in Brazil in late February 2020, Brianna Taylor (murdered by police on March 13, 2020) and George Floyd (murdered by police on May 25, 2020) were still alive, and the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020 that responded to these and many other murders and a longstanding history of police brutality against African Americans had not yet become the global call for justice, protest, and the defunding of police that it would in summer 2020. When Rau and his team arrived in Brazil to work with Kay Sara, the 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the site of Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada – a number that has increased to 2,472 since this initial (re)discovery in May 2021 at the sites of former residential schools across Canada – had not yet been found.
All of this doesn’t even mention the increasingly grim realities of climate change and the now annual natural disasters it causes across the globe.
All of this is to say that the world we find ourselves in today and in which Rau’s Antigone in the Amazon inevitably finds itself is drastically different than that of late February and early March of 2020.
“Much is monstrous,” Sophocles writes in Antigone (as quoted by Rau’s actors in Antigone in the Amazon), “yet nothing more monstrous than man.”
Antigone in the Amazon is perhaps the most hyped piece of theatre Rau has ever produced. It has been included in various lists of the most anticipated theatre productions of the year. It is also Rau’s final production as artistic director of NTGent before he moves to Vienna as the new artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen. Meeting the expectations and hype surrounding Antigone was a near herculean task for the director and his team at NTGent.
Theatre is inherently subjective. The context of the play and positionality of the spectator is key to spectator experience and reception. How we read a performance text (i.e., the performance as a whole) is inherently connected to the experiences that have shaped us as individuals. Bearing this in mind, I truly cannot say how anyone else responded to the play, but for me Antigone in the Amazon is the most significant piece of theatre that Rau has created to date.
Why Antigone? Why the Amazons?
Antigone in the Amazon opens as many of Rau’s plays do: the audience enters the space and the actors are already onstage. A clothing rack is visible stage right and Pablo Casella, who provides the astounding live musical underscore for the evening, is seated stage left with a guitar in hand, surrounded by other musical instruments, and a microphone. Unlike many of Rau’s previous productions, there is no obvious screen hanging above the stage for the projected videos that accompany the piece, and the entire stage is covered in a thick layer of rich, reddish-brown dirt. Three long narrow screens are lowered and raised like banners at various moments for the videos of what Rau and his team filmed in Brazil. The onstage actors either re-enact the scenes in front of the screen – like pared down shadow cast of the original – or simply watch alongside the audience sometimes commenting on the video as it plays.
As was also the case with the two other projects of The Trilogy of Ancient Myths – Orestes in Mosul (2019) and The New Gospel (2020) – Antigone in the Amazon uses a minimalistic version of Sophocles’s Antigone (c. 441 BCE) as a frame through which to explore a contemporary conflict. Unlike the two previous installations of the trilogy, Antigone is already a single story united in time and space (the actual onstage action takes place in a single day and a single place with a limited number of characters) rather than an extended Biblical story with multiple parts or a trilogy. Thus, this final installation of the trilogy feels far more united than the previous projects. What we see in Antigone in the Amazon is interhuman conflict. And while Antigone is a play about violence – following the tradition of ancient Greek theatre – the violence takes place primarily offstage. Rau and his team use the basic dramaturgical form of Sophocles’s original text: a prologue, five scenes, and an epilogue. Each scene is marked by a single, essentialized conflict and, building on the traditional timeframe of ancient Greek theatre festivals, is assigned a time of day: (1) Morning – The conflict between Ismene and Antigone, (2) Afternoon – The conflict between Antigone and Creon, (3) Evening – The conflict between Haimon and Creon, (4) Sunset – Teresias’s prophecy, and (5) Night – The death of Eurydice and her curse on Creon.
Antigone is thick with the familial conflict of the surviving family of the disgraced, exiled, and dead former king Oedipus: his and his mother-wife Jocasta’s two daughters, Antigone and Ismene; their two sons, Eteocles and Polynices; and the family of Jocasta’s brother (now the king of Thebes) Creon, his wife Eurydice and son Haimon. Their conflict – which begins with a civil war where Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other in battle – pollutes and dooms not only the family but the city of Thebes itself: The killer and killed are all the same family. It is a conflict about the dead that is both familial and societal: is one’s responsibility to one’s family (and the gods) or to one’s city, one’s society? It is about whether one faces the past or ignores it for the present and by proxy ignores the future.
Rau’s is an Antigone set among apocalypses: An apocalypse already (repeatedly) enacted upon Indigenous peoples; an apocalypse of a Capitalist existence in which 1% of the population owns 45% of Brazil’s land, leaving nearly five million families landless; an apocalypse of an uncertain political future in a land whose political history is marked by dictatorships, corruption, and populism; and a climate apocalypse where the rainforest burns and ash rains on São Paulo.
The central conflict of Sophocles’s Antigone is created by a civil war that resulted in the deaths of the titular character’s brothers Eteocles and Polynices. Eteocles dies defending Thebes and Polynices trying to invade the city (the actual Greek myth is much more complicated, but for Rau’s adaptation what is important is the two brothers fighting on opposite sides). Thus, Creon – now the ruler of Thebes – decrees that Eteocles will be honored and buried within the city, and the body of Polynices, a traitor to the city, will not be sanctified, given funerary rites, and will be left unburied for birds and other animals to eat.
As Rau did throughout the Trilogy of Ancient Myths, Antigone in the Amazon ties the central themes and conflicts of the myth to concrete, ongoing conflicts. It ties the lived experiences of the four onstage actors to the play and their on-site experiences in Brazil (both as Brazilians and European visitors to Brazil). It also uses the creation process to introduce off-stage players like members of the MST movement they met while working in Brazil, to explain their ongoing struggle, and their connection to Antigone’s central themes of resistance and tyranny. The production is closely aligned with Brazil’s MST movement, whose members make up the project’s Greek chorus. Antigone’s civil disobedience is tied to the MST movement. The divide between natural law and contemporary legal institutions is extended to include the struggles of the MST (their questioning of how it is be possible that five million families have no land in a massive country like Brazil and their campaign of occupations), as well as the divide between the environment and the destructive industry of capitalism.
Defund the Police – A Reenactment as Prologue
After a short introduction to Antigone and the MST movement in Brazil, Antigone in the Amazon opens with a video of a reenactment of the Eldorado do Carajàs massacre, a clash between the MST and the Pará state military police that took place on April 17, 1996. Along the S curve of highway PA-150, twenty-one activists were killed and sixty-nine injured by the military police. Frederico Araujo, a Brazilian actor now based in Belgium and one of the four onstage actors in the production, plays one of the protest leaders killed at Eldorado do Carajás: Oziel Alves Periera – an influential young activist in the local MST movement with long, dark, curly hair like Araujo’s own. Araujo – who everyone tells looks like Pereira (a technique also seen in Rau productions like La Reprise) – also plays Polynices in Antigone, whose death begins the tragedy. The reenactment of the massacre is projected onto the stage on the three large screens. Araujo also embodies Pereira on the stage in front of the screen, Sara De Bosschere (who portrays Creon in Antigone) and Arne De Tremerie (who portrays Haimon) – the two white, Belgian actors in the production – darn the uniforms of Pará’s military police. They are also visible on the screen among the police reenactors.
I was surprised how emotional I found the reenactment of the Eldorado do Carajás Massacre. Initially, when I saw the spectators in the background (surrounding the reenactment, smartphones at the ready) and the visible camera and sound persons, I anticipated that a sense of distance would inevitably accompany this performance. But as the violence began, as the police began shooting and beating the MST reenactors – who screamed, cried, panicked, fell, begged, and fled – any distance disappeared. Even with the mediating distance of the screen (the pre-filmed event), doubled by the simultaneous, minimal onstage reenactment of Araujo, De Tremerie, and De Bosschere, was gone. My hands shook and it felt – in a surprising, what can only be described as full body sensation – too real. The image of a group of BIPOC actors being dragged – kicking and screaming – by police shook me. It could not be a neutral image. Not now and maybe not ever. This massacre, this act of police violence, that happened in 1996 was too familiar, and always encountered in exactly this way… on a screen.
From here Rau moves, with his usual aptness, through the five scenes and central conflicts of Antigone. The production osculates between live, onstage performance and pre-recorded footage from Brazil. And with that classic Rau aesthetic, onstage actors converse with those in Brazil: Araujo stands in for Kay Sara on the stage (a point I will return to shortly) as Gracinha Donato towers above him as Ismene on an remote, empty, red dirt road surrounded by large black birds (maybe vultures?). De Bosschere as Creon helpless watches the screen as Eurydice’s curses him, exits, and commits suicide off screen and off stage. Sometimes we see the initial performance of a scene in Brazil – like Creon and Haimon’s fight, which was enacted for a remote Indigenous community – or a figure like Indigenous activist and philosopher Ailton Krenak as Tiresias (the blind prophet who warns Creon of his folly and his coming downfall) who looms above the stage like a giant, projected on a single screen through the fog that fills the space. Within this dance of the live and the lived (i.e., the intermedial), the production also dances between a performance of Antigone and a discussion of the creation process, the lost years of the pandemic, the strangeness of being a European in Brazil (a strangeness that mirrors Kay Sara’s decision to leave Europe), and the Brazilian actors’ connection to the MST and the inherent violence (colonial and capitalist) of their home nation.
As always, because Rau works with both professional actors and non-professional actors, there is a discrepancy between the performances of the two groups (one performs better than the other in a way that can feel awkward or cringey). Yet this discrepancy – whether it is because of the gap in language caused by the Portuguese, or my own (excessive) familiarity with Rau’s work – didn’t bother me. In truth, it didn’t even register. More important than their acting style was what these bodies meant in these roles, projected into this space, and given a voice here. With the MST movement, De Bosschere, Casella, De Tremerie, and Araujo explain in the prologue, everything members do is in service of the organization’s political struggle. This commitment is visible even in the performance by the chorus of MST fighters, who, at times, are carried away by their own songs and verse, wiping away tears as they sing.
Unlike Orestes in Mosul, which at times fell into an uncomfortable sense that the Europeans had come to teach the Iraqis how to make good, proper, European theatre, Antigone in the Amazon learns and is bolstered by the passionate activism and message of the MST and Brazil’s Indigenous population (who they can only engage with in a limited capacity). Neither the MST nor Indigenous participants in the production particularly care about Antigone but engage to take the opportunity to have their story told.
To be Indigenous, we are told as a clip depicting the team’s visit to a remote Indigenous community – a community that invited the team in – home to friends of Kay Sara, is to be an activist by birth. It means being born into a fight that has been raging for over five hundred years and with the trauma of this fight. It means to never be given the rest of a neutral existence. To always stand in rejection of the colonial project, to five hundred years of continuous, systemic, colonial violence and oppression, to always be engaged in a struggle for land and space. And to leave this community means to often be alone.
Kay Sara – The Absent Antigone
In the prologue we are told that Kay Sara never felt comfortable in Europe. For her Europe was a void, an abyss where she was alone. She could not find her place. So, on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 – three days before the premiere – Kay Sara went home. She left to be with her people. To make projects with and for her people. And to fight with and for her people.
Antigone can be read in many ways (there are literally hundreds of books and dissertations on the subject), but at its core it is a play about resistance, justice, and absence. The absence of Antigone and Ismene’s brothers, the absence of rites for Polynice in his death, the absence of power for the titular character, the absence of future, and ultimately – in Antigone’s suicide – her own absence, accompanied by the sudden absence of Creon’s own wife and son. The absence created by the death of each character in Antigone is countered by the extreme presence of characters in the series of conflicts that make up the text.
Kay Sara’s decision to return home is a radical act within theatre. The irruption of the real that, within the instability of theatre as an industry, feels impossible. What actor would or could walk away from the lead role of a play days before the premiere? It is also an act of radical power and agency. The act of an actor who – in a play that is so much about the titular character’s lack of free will – retakes this will and makes a decision that is best for herself and her sense of self.
I think that it is impossible as white Europeans (and white, settler Canadians) to understand what it is to be the only Indigenous person in the room, maybe in the theatre, or the entire space. I think that this is something that BIPOC people can understand, even – depending on the situation – LGBTQ+ people. I think to truly be alone in a space where almost no one speaks your language or understands your history or context must be unbareable. The weight it must carry to have to represent not just yourself on stage, but your entire community. To be in a production that discusses and lays itself on five hundred years of personal and intergenerational trauma created by colonialism. To return – day after day – to this trauma without your community there to bolster you.
Kay Sara remains a spectre in the production, a medial absence. It could almost be said her absence is the most powerful aspect of the production. Her simultaneous absence and influence is deeply felt. She appears only on screen in the film created in Brazil with Araujo standing in for her on stage.
It is a strange dynamic, the body of Araujo, standing in Kay Sara. Yet his body also bares the marks of colonial and governmental violence: a queer person whose ethnic background is, like many Brazilians, mixed. He – like Kay Sara – is a dangerous body and a body in danger in Brazil.
In moments, he and Kay Sara’s rage come together. The most powerful example is when Antigone discovers her brother’s body has been unburied – her work undone. Kay Sara, dressed in her red dress as the titular character on the screen above, and Araujo in this red dress surrounded by the red dirt that covers the stage below. They scream, sob, and rage against this injustice. Kay Sara – almost prophetically for her leaving the production – screams, “Leave me alone! Go away!” Araujo convulses, throws his arms and self around the stage, heaving the dirt in the air and towards the audience in an emotional, all-encompassing anger (“The life expectancy of a trans person in Brazil is 35, why am I 36!”). It is a heavy – almost overwhelming – display of loss and rage by the two actors.
The Highway as a Site of Colonial Trauma
Antigone in the Amazon begins with a massacre that happened on a highway that cuts through vast regions of rural Brazil. Highways like the PA-150, where the Eldorado do Carajás Massacre took place, are often only partially paved – a reminder of Brazil’s past (the military dictatorship and financial crises). Unpaved sections of these highways are compact red dirt, tightly packed down but turns to thick, red mud when it rains.
The spectre of the highway looms over and through the production in an interesting way because of the ways in which highways – in colonized nations like Brazil – are themselves acts of colonial expansion. They allow regimes, governments, and colonizers to expand outwards, to access formerly distant (nearly always Indigenous) spaces, often cutting through, dividing, and destroying Indigenous territory in the process. They foster a sense of ownership, where those formerly remote and impossible regions can now be reached by militant power structures: police and military, the clenched fist of the government. They are also vehicles of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, the carriers of Capitalism that allow for the exportation of consumer goods (trucks pulling resources out of the region), and destroyers of local environments – tearing up the land in their construction, creating an expedited pathway for resource extraction, pumping exhaust into the atmosphere, and allowing the movement of goods beyond national and continental borders.
Highways (particularly transnational highways that cut through Indigenous and rural areas) are also frequently sites of violence against women. Particularly violence against Indigenous women who live in remote communities along or just off these highways – a violence that can be connected to environmental violence as well. One famous example – and one that sat at the forefront of my mind throughout the evening – is Canada’s infamous Highway of Tears, a 725km stretch of highway in British Columbia where over eighty women (primarily Indigenous women) have disappeared since the early seventies.[i]
While much of the Antigone enactment in Brazil seems almost purposely not to be shot on the highway, roads are often visible in the projected videos. Polynices’s body lies beneath what appears to be a highway bridge, Ismene stands on a deserted dirt road; the red dirt of the regions unpaved roads play a significant role in the visual dramaturgy of both the projected images and the reddish-brown dirt that covers the stage in Anton Lukas’s scenography. There, in the midst of this, stands the towering figure of Kay Sara – powerful in her recorded performances and powerful in her absence that refuses to have violence acted out against her night after night in performance – dressed in a long, red dress.
There is something to be said about the way that lightening sometimes strikes, seemingly by accident, in theatre and performance.
Rau and his team may have known about the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States, but I doubt it. I can’t image they knew about the symbolism of red dresses for the missing and murdered Indigenous women.
They wouldn’t have known that in 2010 Métis artist Jaime Black started her REDress Project – a project where she displays red dresses in public spaces across Canada – as a vigil and recognition to these women.[ii] Black explains that red is a sacred colour for many Indigenous groups across Canada and that, in some cultures, red was considered the only colour spirits could see. Thus, the red dresses in this project call back the spirits of the missing and murdered Indigenous women. Red is also often present in the Indigenous activism that identifies the connection between the exploitation of the earth and violence against Indigenous women. Water protesters and land defenders like those at Standing Rock frequently use red dresses or red handprints across their mouths as a symbolic part of the protest action.
Here, in Antigone in the Amazon – towering on her screen above the stage – is the image of the physically absent Kay Sara. Her red dress the totem that transforms Araujo into an evocation of Kay Sara as Antigone.
The absent, unapologetic Antigone in her red dress, who, even in her absence, refuses to disappear.
It is wildly affective, but also totally accidental but also, for much of the audience – I think – invisible: an inadvertent triangulation of meaning that looks like genius. In this production, we find a story of Brazil and of generations of resistance, struggle, and survival, but also something larger about Indigenous experience and existence. About the intergenerational traumas of colonialism’s bloody legacy as it continues to appear in the violence of industrial and corporate expansion, neoliberal regulations, land grabs, and the destruction of the environment. We find that in this resistance and activism, the seemingly simple act of existing often requires constant and exhausting acts of resistance and appearance.
Now, I am aware that I am perhaps seeing the shadows of something not really there. Finding an ocean in a lake. A reading deeply influenced by my own, culturally and contextually specific, knowledge that has perhaps created a mirage.
But that is, after all, the nature and danger of theatre spectatorship, it is inherently subjective. Beyond the control of the theatre maker.
How could Rau or the NTGent team know or understand the colonizing legacy and violence of highways? Highways in the South or North America are I think impossible to comprehend in a Western European context. The massive space (socially, culturally, and economically but also cognitively) between those people living in colonizing nations, formerly colonized nations, or settler-colonized nations, the paradigm through which different groups encounter each other in these spaces (and the tensions that arise from these encounters), and what it means to live and exist in these spaces is geographically unique and nearly impossible to translate. So much of what moved me in Antigone in the Amazon was something that Rau couldn’t have known or intended, yet for me was so present and so seminal that I felt it in my core.
An Epilogue: The Sixth Act
“Much is monstrous, yet nothing more monstrous than man,” is an odd translation of Sophocles’s text. The more common translation of this line is something more multifaceted than monstrous: wonderful, wondrous, or miraculous on the one side and daunting or strange on the other: “There is much that is miraculous and daunting, but nothing is more daunting or miraculous than man” (English translation by David Stuttard). With this line, the chorus reflects on the duality of man for better or for worse. That it is possible to do both good and evil, be both right and wrong, and even with the best intentions make terrible decisions that that ultimately leads to one’s own destruction. In the word monstrous – a decision that the actors actually discuss in the prologue – some of the complexity of the clash of the daunting with the miraculous, the old with the new, is lost even though it is precisely this struggle that sits at the heart of Rau’s production.
Antigone in the Amazon is about Brazil, a country caught between the violence of its past, the violence of its present, and its uncertain future. In this way there is a certain universalism in the production. All nations – colonized or colonizer – are caught between the violent past and violent present, and only in how they eventually come to terms and deal with these two conflicts will determine the future.
In the epilogue, Rau returns to a motif first employed in 2018’s La Reprise: the sixth act. Antigone – the four actors explain in the prologue – is a five-act play. It ends with the death of Antigone, Haimon, and Eurydice, and Creon leaving Thebes in disgrace (wishing for death) to go into exile. Yet, as Pablo Casella explains in this epilogue, the magic of theatre is that it can transcend drama: it can bring the dead back to life. Here the production returns to the highway and the Eldorado do Carajás Massacre. We again see the reenactment, but this time we see how the reenactment was interrupted by real police and almost not allowed take place on April 17, 2023. It was only because of the intervention of one of the MST’s leaders (another powerful woman) that the reenactment was allowed to take place. But the real regional police stay and watch the reenactment. They watch their colleagues beating and murdering the activists (again). With this second strange interruption of the real, the reenactment stands between past and present, demanding to be witnessed. Demanding some sort of recognition from all sides.
Then – as the reenactors lie dead in the red mud – the miraculous (but also absolutely mundane) happens. Those killed in the real massacre received no real, official funeral, no real justice (Bosonaro made fun of the dead activists when he visited the site during his campaign), and they died without land (in geographical, landholding terms, for nothing). But the reenactment ends and the reenactors – survivors of the massacre and current members of the MST – get up from the mud.
They are brought back to life.
This is not the end…
As the play’s end credits begin to roll on the screen at the back of the stage, a surtitle declares that “This is not the end”. For a play that discusses the concept of apocalypse so intensely, there is a sense of hope here. There is also something to be said here about how the fight against neoliberalism and neocolonial is cyclical and ongoing. The MST’s fight did not end with Eldorado do Carajás Massacre, or any of the other massacres that have taken place since the group formed in 1984.
It continues.
Thus, this surtitle suggests, we – as spectators to this play and actors in the global economy – should not accept things as they are.
Ailton Krenak states we are already in the apocalypse. He explains that this does not mean the end, but a point when life continues as something else. Indigenous people, he states, have lived in the apocalypse for over five hundred years after all. Thebes continues without Creon, just as it did without Oedipus. But we must go on, listening to warnings for the future, remembering and learning from the past, and fighting in the present.
Antigone in the Amazons is a beautiful, powerful, and perhaps accidental piece of theatre. Perhaps one of Rau’s most significant to date.
A beautiful conclusion to five years at NTGent.
[i] For more information about the Highway of Tears: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Tears
[ii] For more information about REDress Project and Jaime Black see: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/03/21/red-dresses-a-visual-reminder-of-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women.html & https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/red-dresses-seek-to-draw-attention-to-missing-murdered-aboriginal-women-1.2593772
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