Antigone in de Amazone Milo Rau / MST & NTGent

For Antigone in the Amazon, Milo Rau and his team traveled to the Brazilian state of Pará, where the forests burn due to the expanding soy monocultures and where nature gets devoured by capitalism. On an occupied piece of land, in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the world’s largest landless workers’ movement, they create an allegorical play about the violent devastations and displacements caused by the modern state, which places private property above the traditional right to land. 

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 in Brazil to conclude their Trilogy of Ancient Myths.

This performance has been highly praised by critics:

✒ "Not one video that doesn't hit the mark. Not one word that does not enhance the images. Not one movement on stage that does not resonate with the images. The realisation sets in that theatre, when it moves so far out of its comfort zone, makes one experience and understand something that is so much bigger than itself, and than we are."
--- Le Monde (FR)

✒ "It is much, full, inventive, at times radically political and activist theatre, and finally quite depressing (...) Rau has brought the Greek resistance fighter of the past to the present, and turned it into uncompromising theatre art."
--- Volkskrant (NL) ****

✒ “While in circles with politically correct rubbish and cultural segregation, Rau's Antigone in the Amazon  is scorned as culturally imperialistic, the evening plunges one into a strangeness that defies any accusation of cultural appropriation. Here, as with Montaigne, it is a matter of self-criticism in conflict. With Rau, this means: art can transcend violence, no matter where.”
--- Die Welt (GER)