A Timely Reflection
In November 2023, the Swiss-German director Milo Rau remounted his 2017 production Die 120 Tage von Sodom [The 120 Days of Sodom] in Liege under the new title The Last Generation, or The 120 Days of Sodom. On December 8, 2023, it arrived at NTGent. The Last Generation sees Rau return to a production that first premiered nearly seven years ago in February of 2017 with an all-new cast that sought to relocate the production within the Belgian context. This is only Rau’s second true remount of a previous production, after the 2018 Dutch production of Compassion: The History of the Machinegun (first produced in 2015 with Berlin’s Schaubühne).
Remounting a past production is always difficult within Rau’s specific form of political, (auto)ethnographic, documentary theatre, because Rau creates productions that, while they tackle what the director describes as universal themes, they do so through the microscope of a hyper-specific context: in the case of Die 120 Tage (referring to the Zurich production), Switzerland. Thus, it feels impossible to respond to this new Belgian iteration without looking back on its inaugural Swiss staging.
I also have to say that on a personal level, Die 120 Tage marked a very specific moment in my career: the beginning of research process and journey that really started a career. The first Milo Rau premiere of my research and the last production before I started this blog.
On February 10, 2017, I travelled from Bochum (Germany) to Zurich (Switzerland) to see the premiere of Die 120 Tage von Sodom (The 120 Days of Sodom). The production was a collaboration of Schauspielhaus Zürich under the artistic direction of Barbara Frey, Rau and the IIPM, and Theater HORA, a theatre troupe made up entirely of actors with mental disabilities.
Several months prior, in November 2016, I travelled to Zurich to watch a live conversation between Rau and cultural commentator/journalist Stefan Zweifel, part of the series Zweifels Gespräche. During the conversation, the two men discussed rehearsing Die 120 Tage von Sodom and what it was like for a director like Rau to work with Theater HORA. This was my first “research trip” to a Rau talk, the first step in a practice of following-listening-collecting (what has since been jokingly referred to as “a Milo Rau groupie” and “academic stalking”).
Thinking back on the premiere nearly seven years later, it was my first Milo Rau premiere and came just one year after first discovering the name Milo Rau, roughly six months after first meeting him, and maybe three months after I decided to write a dissertation solely about the director (somewhat dramatically switching gears from a dissertation that was supposed to be a comparison of Canadian and German dramaturgies). Rau had not yet been named artistic director of the Belgian institution NTGent. Instead, he was a frontrunner for the role of artistic director at Schauspielhaus Zurich, a role eventually taken on by Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blumberg. In hindsight – while at the time I felt very established in Germany and very confident in a halting, heavily accented German – I was still extremely fresh to German/European theatre. I was completely unaware of the budgets offered by city-subsidized institutions like Schauspielhaus Zürich, of the freedom (although not unlimited freedom) such institutions offered artists, and very naïve about the internal and structural problems of such theatres.
From 2017 to 2023
Returning to the present, 2017 was a different political moment than 2023. Die 120 Tage von Sodom premiered just a few months before the MeToo Movement spread across Europe and into European theatre houses. The original production thus narrowly preceded numerous conversations that occurred within and around theatre houses about the politics of representation and creation.
In the German-speaking theatre – where, at the time, Rau was primarily based – the debate surrounding the MeToo movement was all-encompassing. It looked at issues concerning the exclusion and treatment of women and of BIPOC artists within theatre spaces, the abuses within these spaces by people in positions of power, and uneven distribution of power. Suddenly, theatres and performance festivals were no longer merely spaces for discussion, but they became spaces of discussion. A particularly noteworthy example was Theatertreffen, one of the German-speaking realm’s biggest theatre festivals, which in 2017 featured only one female directed production and in 2018 had only three female-directed out of a possible ten productions and one of these ten were directed by a BIPOC director. In her 2019 reflection on the event, German theatre scholar Azadeh Sharifi noted that the 2018 Theatertreffen revealed that the arguments employed against female and artists of colour remained firmly embedded as an essential troupe of the German theatre world, “where the (white) male artist is ultimately perceived as a genius and where the male gaze dictates what is considered to be ‘aesthetically inspiring’ theatre.”[i]
Although often invisible – a point that is itself presented in both versions of Rau’s 120 Days of Sodom – the representation and employment of disabled and differently abled actors in theatre goes hand in hand with these MeToo era discussions. Indeed, when talking about Theater Hora, particularly with Rau’s collaborative and collective creation process, we must be careful not to minimize the role of its members in the creation of Die 120 Tage in favour of the easier reading of Rau as the brains and sole creative force behind the piece (a phenomenon that has plagued Theater Hora in other collaborations such as that with Jérôme Bel for Disabled Theater[ii]). Zurich’s Die 120 Tage was a very specific project that constructed its dramaturgical structure around an existing mise-en-scéne employed in other Theater HORA productions during the 2014 to 2017 period, which the company’s website refers to as “Disabled Theatre und die Folgen II: Geburt der freien Republik Hora/Disabled Theatre and the Consequences II: The Birth of the Free Republic of Hora.”
By 2014, Theater HORA had already gained national and international attention through its 2014 collaboration with Jérôme Bel for Disabled Theater and the publication of a book from Theater der Zeit celebrating and reflecting on HORA’s first twenty years of existence. During this period, HORA’s oeuvre was marked by three types of projects: (1) partnerships with national and international partners in the dance and performance landscape, (2) in-house projects under the artistic direction of Michael Elber and Nele Jahnke (the company’s former artistic directors), and (3) educational productions with acting students.[iii] One of the most significant partnerships from this period was with Das Helmi, a Berlin-based puppet theatre collective. With Das Helmi, HORA created Mars Attacks! (2014) – a production based on a sci-fi classic – as well as a series of short plays based around films: American Beauty (2015), Hunger Games (2015), Titanic (2015), and Jurassic Park (2015).
Die 120 Tage used reenactments from two films by the controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) to reflect on the treatment and experience of disabled persons (particularly individuals with down syndrome, like much of HORA’s ensemble) within contemporary Swiss society. It explored issues of representation, isolation, infantilization, and what eugenics looks like today. Together with four actors from Schauspielhaus Zürich (Matthias Neukirch, Michael Neuenschwander, Robert Hunger-Bühler, and Dagna Litzenberger) and the Theater Hora ensemble (Noha Badir, Remo Beuggert, Gianni Blumer, Matthias Brücker, Nikolai Gralak, Matthias Grandjean, Julia Häusermann, Sara Hess, Tiziana Pagliaro, Nora Tosconi, and Fabienne Villiger), Rau and the IIPM created a multi-abled production that mixed reenactments of scenes from Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1974) and The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) with real-world reflections from both the able and disabled cast about life and theatre.
From a 2023 perspective, Rau using an existing cultural text (specifically a work of art like Pasolini’s films) as a point of departure to examine present socio-political issues and exploring how these issues intersect with the politics of visibility and representation isn’t anything new. Rau’s work at NTGent since 2018 have been marked by projects like Lam Gods (2018), Orestes in Mosul (2019), The New Gospel (2020), and Antigone in the Amazon (2023), and non-NTGent productions like Wilhelm Tell (2022) and The Clemency of Titus (2021/23), all combine the performers’ lived experiences with reenactments of fragments from classic texts.However, these lived and personal experiences – their real-world veracity – are often blurred in these projects by subtle references to and quotations from other existing cultural scripts like Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) and Pasolini’s own writing in The 120 Days of Sodom. Prior to 2017, Rau had never worked with a (pop) cultural text in this way.
Previously, his repertoire productions worked exclusively with recent historical events, specifically events from within the audience’s lived memory. Prior to 2017, the closest the director came to staging classic texts was with his Europe Trilogy, which also usedfragments of classic texts (significantly smaller fragments than in later productions) in relation to the autobiographical and career experience of the actors involved.
Thus, Die 120 Tage at Zurich marked something new for Rau, as I excitedly noted at the time. It was an expansion of the director’s concept of reenactment that built off the pedagogical elements and staging innovations of his previous production, Five Easy Pieces (2016). Both Die 120 Tage and Five Easy Pieces engage a reflective, pedagogical dramaturgy – a signature of Rau’s partnership with his then-dramaturg Stefan Bläske – that uses smaller reenactments to enter into larger meta-discussions about theatre and society. It was a clear a departure from what could be described as Rau’s forward-facing, real-time reenactments like The Last Days of the Ceausescus (2009) and Hate Radio (2011), and the monologue productions of The Europe Trilogy. Yet despite earlier textual and stylistic references to Pasolini and Rau’s obvious obsession with him, Die 120 Tage was Rau’s first formal foray into working explicitly and at length with the Italian director’s work.
Die 120 Tage at Schauspielhaus Zurich was a theatre of cruelty. It identified the inherent voyeurism and violence of theatre that becomes multiplied when staging a production featuring actors with mental disabilities for a primarily able audience. It highlights both Rau and the spectator’s voyeurism – an extension Pasolini’s own – as well as the voyeur’s complicity in the violence represented. It identifies how even the portrayal of violence in art – in the violent performative and thereby fictive gesture – there remains the traces of real violence. The production was provocative and unexpected, although perhaps not quite as controversial as it believed itself to be (as evidenced by largely positive reviews).
It was hard to watch. At times even excruciating. But it also pointed to an uncomfortable reality about the existence of contemporary eugenics, specifically regarding prenatal diagnoses of fetal abnormalities like an extra chromosome. This is where the title of the remount comes from. We are perhaps seeing the last generation of people with down syndrome and other prenatally diagnosable conditions. However, this is not to say that the original staging was not without issue, and these issues have since become more difficult to set aside in the intervening seven years.
“Collaborate or die” – A Borrowed Dramaturgy
The program for The Last Generation asks two provocative questions:
“Are we, apparently more tolerant and sensitive than all previous societies, perhaps the real fascists? Why do we preach diversity while continuing to exclude diversity?”
It must first be stated that I’m not sure if The Last Generation succeeds in answering these questions, or if it ever – in good faith – asks them. There is certainly an important conversation to be had surrounding diversity (real versus performative) within the performing arts and about the uncomfortable legacy of eugenics in the present, and while Die 120 Tage began this conversation seven years ago, The Last Generation doesn’t extend it or expand upon it in any way. Perhaps for a spectator encountering the production for the first and only time this issue won’t be so evident, but the whole production feels disconnected from the present. A time capsule of a discussion that has since progressed beyond what it says.
Both Die 120 Tage and The Last Generation are confrontational productions. They confront the audience with a series of violent images taken from Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom and The Gospel According to St. Matthew, restaged by some of our current societies most vulnerable and underrepresented members. The great strength of both iterations of this piece is how it engages actors from both Theater HORA and Theater Stap as professional actors at the same level as the four non-Stap/non-HORA actors. Rau and his team cut no corners with the actors in staging technically difficult scenes and engaging them as exactly what they are: professionally trained and experienced actors. However, this doesn’t mean that the production doesn’t draw a distinguishing line between the “city-theatre actors” (Jacqueline Bollen, Koen De Sutter, Robert Hunger-Bühler, and Olga Mouak) and the Stap actors. Whereas the city-theatre actors are all named figures from Saló, members of the unscrupulous, perverted elite; the Stap actors belong to an unnamed mass of young men and women brought to the Republic of Saló. However, this can also be read as a commentary about how disabled actors and people are portrayed not as individuals, but as part of a homogenous mass. Yet, without commenting directly upon this phenomenon within disabled theatre produced by non-disabled instigators, it isn’t so much a commentary as it is a reproduction. However, it is important to note that each of the actors are introduced to the audience and given a chance to briefly introduce themselves as unique human beings who work within Stap.
The remount lacks the novelty of the original. The violence feels more normal and less spectacular now than it did then (although this is also a commentary on my own increased engagement with theatre). Even looking at violence from a societal perspective, as French actor Olga Mouak states in her opening monologue, when we consider Pasolini’s Saló, or The 120 Days of Sodom through the lens of a generation inundated with sex – in terms of the accessibility of pornography and more commonplace (pop) cultural depictions of sex – and a culture that frequently conflates sex and violence with love, Pasolini’s film has also lost its bite, almost vanilla in terms of what one can find in a five minute Google search. Unlike much of modern pornography and pop culture, Pasolini very clearly separates and distinguishes sex and violence from love in Saló. There is no room for love in the perverse Fascism and violence of Saló.
And this marks the first roadblock for The Last Generation. In the last seven years, depictions of sex and violence have become even more common and mainstream. Disabled theatre and what has been called Crip Theatre is more mainstream than it was seven years ago with more state-subsidized theatres cooperating with disabled theatre companies and artists to create mainstage productions. In 2021, Rau’s own NTGent partnered with the German company Monster Truck (who frequently create multi-abled productions) and Platform-K (an inclusive Flemish multi-abled dance company) to produce Het Narrenschip. Accompanying this turn towards (although, as of yet, not a complete entrance onto) the mainstage, is an increased academic/scholarly interest in disabled and Crip theatre.
Seven years later – when we consider the dramatic push of the MeToo Movement, the paradigm shift of the Trump presidency, a swing towards right-wing populism, and the ensuing covid pandemic, and everything in between – neither the world nor the theatre is quite the same as it was.
But let’s turn more concretely to the issue of remount: In terms of actors, the evening is beautifully performed. Mouak, De Sutter, Hunger-Bühler, and Bollen are generous in sharing the stage. These actors and the ensemble of Theater Stap wonderfully perform their roles and despite the hardness of the material, there is a lot of softness to be found over the course of the evening between the real actors and their roles in Saló.
Yet despite some beautiful moments, and some unbearable ones, the production feels a bit lost. Something doesn’t quite click. There is a lot happening, but it doesn’t always fit together or flow together. Even with the original Zurich production, after the premiere significant cuts were made to tighten the production. The definitive clunk one feels in The Last Generation seems to be rooted in three central, interconnected issues: (1) The Last Generation’s borrowed dramaturgy, (2) its breadth and depth, and – most troublingly – (3) the fence it sits upon throughout the 100 minutes of performance.
The Last Generation attempts to bring its discussion into a Belgian context. It does so by beginning with a reflection on Belgium’s WWII collaboration. De Sutter and Bollen both comment on coloration in Flanders and Wallonia: Who were the better collaborators as a group and as individuals? “Collaborate or die,” Bollen summarizes – a statement that appears throughout the evening as a sort of catchphrase. Here is where the issues begin to emerge, any conversation about the representation, rights, and treatment of people with mental disabilities and down syndrome as well as a broader discussion about the termination of fetuses with prenatal abnormalities is necessarily extremely complex. And, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 100-minute production, there is a notable superficiality in The Last Generation’s exploration of these issues. It hits the talking points – how people question the validity of disability, the infantilization of people with disability, the vulnerability of people with disability to different forms of abuse, the often-isolating complexities of navigating life as a person with mental disability (particularly down syndrome), and an increase in medically terminating fetuses with prenatal abnormalities – but it also inserts a meta-commentary about the representation of violence in theatre. A pedagogical commentary on the representation of violence within what is understood as the fictional space of the theatre. Unsurprisingly, while the production touches upon these issues, it simply cannot dedicate significant time to any of them.
Instead of taking on such a broad approach to a huge issue, The Last Generation needed to reflect more concretely either on what it means to be mentally disabled in Belgium, because even after watching The Last Generation, I’m still not sure how Belgium supports or fails to support disabled persons and their families, or violence (both real and performative) within theatre institutions. There is a really interesting conversation to be had about the legacy of National Socialist eugenics programs and the current policies surrounding disabled people. Likewise, there is another interesting and troubling historical connection between white, first wave feminists (namely the suffragettes) and early eugenics. Yet these elements were never mentioned or discussed, and instead – for those aware of it – hangs over the production unrealized.
The Belgian production felt too tethered to the dramaturgy of the Swizz production, making some changes to integrate a few personal details of the new cast (although even this could have been expanded), but doing very little to the actual content and filmic reenactments. One of the few notable differences between the production is rather than casting two male and two female “city-theatre” actors in The Last Generation, rather than three male and one female in Zurich. Adding another woman to the cast doesn’t add female gaze or perspective to the production, both Die 120 Tage and The Last Generation have a definitively male gaze. It is more striking now than seven years ago, probably because of the attack on women’s reproductive rights in the United States and increase in an anti-feminist rhetoric across the globe in recent years. But when Jacqueline Bollen states, “Collaborate or die,” it feels odd… almost accusatory. More than in the original Swiss production there is a strange, almost conservative, conversation about the place, responsibility, and agency happening around female bodies. It is also worth noting that in Pasolini’s film – which offers its own complex readings of sexuality and violence that Rau isn’t necessarily interested in here – the four elites of Saló are all men and their four daughters, who are brought into Saló and married off among the men, are also victims of extreme sexual and physical violence. While Mouak (Litzenberger in Zurich) play Suzie, an amalgamation of the four daughters, Bollen simply replaces one of the male actors from the original production.
But let’s briefly (briefly-ish) concretely look at a few scenes:
First, “The Rape Scene”: This scene was changed for the Belgian production, but not necessarily to its benefit. In the original, “The Rape Scene” was both contextualized and performed by Michael Neuenschwander. He broke down the mechanics of how to perform a rape in theatre as enacting such a performance with Dagna Litzenberger as the HORA actors watch. But first, he situates the performative representation of sexual violence within a theatrical and filmic tradition (which he is also part of) discussing films like Dogville and the controversial “Butter Scene” in Last Tango in Paris. The discussion of Last Tango in Paris highlights the inherent violence of such performances and how close representations of sexual assault to real sexual assault, always on the cusp of passing into reality and thus real assault. In the Belgian production, it is Bollen who describes the mechanics of performing rape standing coldly to the side while De Sutter and Mouak demonstrate. Instead of historically situating the onstage or filmic performance of sexual violence and problematizing its fictionality, Bollen instead talks about her time in drama school and how her and her female classmates were all more interested in the mechanics of such a performance rather than the act itself. “Collaborate or die” as a moniker added by a woman when describing the theatrical performance of a non-consensual sexual act is deeply uncomfortable. But it also does something strange. It’s like it becomes the woman’s responsibility to go along with the mechanics of the act. It is on the actress to recognize its fictionality. It makes Bollen a collaborator in a very odd and I don’t think necessarily intentional way that wasn’t present in the original production.
Second, the “Marius scene”: The “Marius scene” is identical in both productions. It is a monologue performed by Neuenschwander in Zurich and De Sutter in Belgium, in which the actor describes a third trimester abortion (a late termination of pregnancy) of a fetus with a genetic abnormality by the character’s partner following a prenatal diagnosis. The monologue describes an abortion happening at seven months, the actor even saying that had his wife delivered the baby at this point, he would have lived. Here is the problem: first, third trimester abortions are extremely rare, with (in the US) less than 1% happening after 24 weeks (ca. 6 months) and is most often related to the viability of the fetus as well as the danger the pregnancy poses to the mother.
It is not insignificant that right-wing and conservative pro-life rhetoric frequently uses third trimester abortions as ammunition to overturn policies surrounding reproductive rights. It is also significant that Roe v. Wade was overturned less than two years ago, and the repercussions of this are not limited to the United States. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a direct attack on female reproductive rights and autonomy (and there is a lot more to be said here). It is striking that in the in-production discussion – a discussion surrounding choice and autonomy – does not include a female voice and, considering everything that has happened in the past seven years, this monologue feels almost irresponsible. The Marius monologue must be looked at through the lens of 2023. It is based in the spectacular rhetoric employed by pro-life Republicans and while the intention is vastly different, we cannot ignore the similarity. It is unclear whether this is a true, invented, or adjusted story. Hearing it for a second time verbatim makes the issues present in its first performance more pronounced because this story definitely doesn’t belong to De Sutter and it is unclear what or who is based on or taken from. If it is adjusted from a real experience than it is also important to identify what elements were adjusted, because regardless a third trimester abortion is not a neutral image. Two parents deciding for the termination of a pregnancy with a fetal abnormality is also not a neutral image and it is not an easy choice for anyone involved. This is a scene that is meant to generate an emotional reaction from the audience, but what reaction and for what purpose? And this is the issue that weighs on the production, it never quite manages to take a stand on the issues it deals with and its messaging is muddled by its broad approach to the issue.
Other issues emerge when the borrowed dramaturgy has very evidently not been adjusted for the new cast: two members of Theater Stap are introduced as an engaged couple saving money for their coming marriage to perform the “Sex Scene”, only for the male part of the couple to later be asked if he was ever lonely. These two concepts can co-exist (you can be both lonely and in a relationship), but the conversation about loneliness in the production has more to do with the difficulty of mentally disabled persons in finding love and relationships (as well as society’s discomfort in talking about sex within disabled relationships). Likewise, other moments created specifically for HORA actors – such as a scene between a HORA actor and Hunger-Bühler formed specifically around the HORA actor’s interest in karate – doesn’t work with Stap actors who have no connection to the original text and action. Rau’s is a theatre of personal connection between actor, text, and action, and when you lose that, you lose something pivotal to the work. More than that, The Last Generation felt more uncertain than most of Rau’s political theatre projects, almost tentative in its messaging.
Hell’s Vestibule
Unlike many of Rau’s productions, which so clearly know where they stand, The Last Generation chooses instead to sit on the fence: never taking a side or firm stance on its subject matter. It feels at times oddly pro-life and weirdly rooted in traditional gender roles. For those perspectives it does present, it never interrogates these perspectives or pushes deeper into their complexities. When we look at the issue of abortion and prenatal diagnoses, yes, this practice is becoming more normalized and, yes, it is part of a history of eugenics. However, we are also seeing people with these conditions living for significantly longer (even visible in the average age of the actors in The Last Generation versus Die 120 Tage) with a higher quality of life and being given a greater voice and autonomy. However, what The Last Generation misses is the complexities and elements present in the decision to abort a fetus with abnormalities. Here, the female perspective would have been helpful in facilitating a more nuanced discussions of choosing to give birth and raise a child with a disability like down syndrome: the added financial strain, the caregiver role taken on by parents and relatives that doesn’t stop as that child grows into adulthood, the way that household work like childcare still frequently falls onto women in heteronormative relationships, and what that child’s life might look like.
Along these lines Mouak’s final monologue – about the emptiness of meaningless sex and how the best thing a woman can do is have a baby – sits awkwardly uncommented upon within the production: What is it trying to say? Why is this her final monologue before she jumps from the roof of the theatre she stands upon? But this monologue is taken verbatim from the character of Veronika in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, a very important piece of French cinema that comments upon the then ongoing women’s liberation movement. However, the audience is never given this citation. It is also unclear what this film can tell us about the present or this context. While it juxtaposes the libertarianism displayed in Pasolini’s film, but also oddly repositions women within the overarching narrative and seems rooted in the Madonna or Whore binary.
The thing that keeps drawing me back to Rau’s work is how he engages with the core questions:
Why this? Why now? Why with these bodies on stage?
As a director and playwright, Rau spends a lot of time on these questions, which is why I think The Last Generation feel so muddled. The refusal to move away from the existing dramaturgical framework, to substantially add or subtract from the original, hampered the production.
Rau’s productions provide a reflection of a very specific historical moment, but The Last Generation feels disconnected from the present and everything that has happened concerning issues of bodily autonomy, disability rights, and questions of consent and violence in and outside the arts. There is an important conversation to be had here, but it needs a different and clearer vocabulary that is more grounded in present politics. Even beyond this, the production doesn’t seem to know where it stands and so many of my issues with the remount concerns the question: “What is the production trying to tell me?”
Pasolini used Dante’s Devine Comedy – specifically Inferno – as a structure within the film. Devine Comedy describes the author’s decent through the nine circles of hell. But before entering hell, Dante and his guide (the poet Virgil) pass through Hell’s Vestibule. Hell’s Vestibule is inhabited by the uncommitted, those who never took a side in life. This, for me, is where The Last Generation sits, in Hell’s Vestibule (which is perhaps fitting for a production of Saló, The 120 Days of Sodom). It remains perched on a fence, almost afraid to take a side because of the possible repercussions of doing so in such a heated and complex issue.
[i] Azadeh Sharifi, “German Theatre: Interventions and Transformations,” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, December 2019, No. 20.
[ii] Stephen Fernandez, “‘Ich bin ein Schauspieler’: Making Crip Perfomrance in Toronto with Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater,“ Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (2018), 1-30.
Lost Dramaturgin International 