"Antigone in the Amazon" de Milo Rau, extracts

“There are monstrous things, but nothing is more monstrous than humankind.” On a screen, the chorus begins its tragic song. A song that doubles as a fierce diatribe against the protagonists standing on stage. Filmed passages and live sequences respond to each other in a most eloquent dialogue. We’re at once in the heart of mythical Thebes and in the Pará Province in Brazil, where the Amazon rainforest is disintegrating, plundered and irremediably destroyed by industrial conglomerates. It’s on this land that has been bled and dried that Milo Rau gathered Brazilian and European actors, musicians, indigenous activists, and members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). And it is through their lived experience and their knowledge, added to our Greco-Roman culture, that the Swiss director, artistic director of NTGent and upcoming director of the Wiener Festwochen, ends his “Trilogy of Antiquity” (after Orestes in Mosul and The New Gospel) and revisits the tragedy of Antigone. An Antigone played by Amazon indigenous activist Kay Sara, standing alongside a Greek chorus made up of the survivors of the worst massacre the military police committed against the MST movement in 1996. An allegory for political struggle and fierce resistance against the implacable greed of a modern, devastating world.