Why adapt Sophocles’s Antigone in a contemporary context and transpose it to the state of Pará in Brazil?
Brazilian playwright Douglas Estevam, now cultural director for the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), once worked for Augusto Boal, a major figure in Brazilian theatre. Augusto often collaborated with the MST, one of the largest social movements in the world. And during one of my tours in 2019, they asked us to work with them. We chose Antigone, which tackles the question of modern and rational civilisation attacking traditional civilisation. With Antigone, Sophocles wrote a play with a crystal-clear narrative, which can be adapted in many different ways. In February 2020, MST activists in Amazonia, in the far North of Brazil, organised a workshop with about a hundred people. One group would shoot films, another would work as the chorus. There’s a great tradition of choral work over there. We started rewriting the tragedy with many collaborators: farmers, activists, young people, old people, feminists, experts, professors, indigenous activists… We got caught in a multifaceted movement bubbling with ideas, especially about the questions of women, land, or religion. Then the Covid pandemic struck before we could create the play, and we had to wait until early 2023 to resume working on this project. As a reaction to the 1996 massacre of nineteen landless farmers by military police, activists started occupying land on which they still live today. We designed the scenography on that plantation, which has since received legal status. We therefore worked on the road where the massacre took place, and in the rainforest.
Your “21st-century political Antigone,” a figure of the unequal struggle against exactions in Amazonia, also becomes, thanks to Kay Sara’s performance, a symbol of artistic resistance.
Kay Sara has come a long way over the past ten years. She started as an activist and became more and more of an actress. With the poetry of the texts she performed, the presence of her body on the stage, the exposure she got on tour, she realised that to act as an actress meant being an activist in a different way. Her filmed performances are very popular, she’s become a sort of “star,” an emblematic figure for the indigenous movement. Her speech “This madness has to stop,” taken from our Antigone, was broadcast widely and has led to young people wanting to become Kay Sara, just like others want to be Greta Thunberg. She’s become a role model. And that’s very important in her relationship to Antigone, all too often shown as a lonely character, an almost autistic or Romantic figure, entirely absorbed by her love for her brother, as is the case in Jean Anouilh’s play. But I think there’s a lot of rationality in Antigone, who’s a thoughtful, complex person. I often say that the ancient Greeks invented tragedy to banish it from life, in order to find a way, a path outside of antagonism. The characters of Antigone and Creon show us different paths we could follow, even though the play always unfolds in a tragic manner. The Landless Workers’ Movement immediately wondered, during rehearsals, why the end of the tragedy featured so many suicides. They didn’t see it as an option, because for them, the struggle must continue. So we removed them from the story, which was a way to make the play ours. Writer Anne Carson, who also translated Sophocles’s text beautifully twice, speaks very eloquently of this form of reappropriation of the text.
What about the character of Creon? How did you shape him?
In Creon’s speeches, we find a lot of what former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro could say, very reactionary statements. But there’s also a more modern rhetoric, an attempt to deny antagonisms, the language of tolerance, the greenwashing of capitalism.
In the play, it connects to the idea that Antigone could find a compromise to bury her brother and marry Creon’s son, to continue the lineage of power. She’s smart enough to refuse, she knows that there’s something dangerous in this idea of continuity. This system is broken. It’s the same thing as saying that an eco-friendly company can experience exponential growth while remaining green. But we shouldn’t forget that Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, a hero guilty of parricide and incest: she’s part of that same family of men, there’s no alternative. We have to understand all that and try to find a form of cohabitation outside of extreme antagonism. That’s the lesson I’m trying to learn from this hybrid project, between professional and non-professional actors, activists, the mixing of Brazilian and European influences, the use of video live on stage, the words of Sophocles mixed with new writings… All of that combined with actual situations.
You set up political and social actions in parallel with the play Orestes in Mosul and the film The New Gospel, the first two parts of you trilogy about ancient myths. What is this new opus going to bring along?
In the continuity of Orestes in Mosul, we opened a cinema school with the City Theatre Gent, where I serve as director. It’s a partnership with UNESCO. Since then, nine films have already been completed. For The New Gospel, we conducted a project to regularise undocumented labourers and set up a distribution network of tomatoes harvested in a fair way by those same farm labourers. Here, we’re working on a large campaign called Punish Nutella with the Landless Workers’ Movement. The brand uses palm oil produced in the state of Pará (where we’re creating our Antigone), where human rights are regularly violated (expropriations, forest fires, deforestation). We’re campaigning against the use of that oil which has been deceptively rebranded as eco-responsible, and whose “certified” appellation is accepted by Europe even as its production and exploitation encourages deforestation. In addition to that campaign, our project also includes an exhibition, two music videos, and a documentary film about the creation. It’s another aspect of my work, where we try to create “micro-ecologies,” a way of designing a project not only as a simple play but to create around it an entire parallel economy within the capitalist system, to produce, sell, and consume differently. What we want to do is to continue, past the first performances, to use the tools of artistic creation to build long-lasting virtuous circles of production and distribution. The idea behind “micro-ecology” is to occupy capitalism, like MST occupies the land. With Antigone, we’re using Greek tragedy to imagine a new reading—we occupy the classics, we rewrite them. To what was already there we add new knowledge, new relationships, maybe some new practical philosophy. I'm first and foremost a director; theatre and film remain at the centre, but I try to connect with NGOs, activists, lawyers, movements, and producers. Activism can be seen as targeted and ephemeral, but we have to try to set up alternative and longer-lasting networks. Thanks to those “micro-ecologies,” consumers and simple citizens, when they leave the theatre, must find themselves equipped with simple and practical tools that allow them to participate in this different way of doing, of living. It’s important to me to “criticise” the way theatre is made, to analyse the process in order to be able to transform it. We live in a globalised society, invaded by a few European and Mediterranean myths. It’s an immutable fact, a nature we cannot fight. You have to work with this nature and its extremes. We have to find a way to live better for the eight billion people on the planet, to change our conception of consumption, to build different relationships—but also, we have to find an alternative, brand new way to make theatre.
*Kay Sara’s speech, “This madness must stop”, with which she was to open the 2020 Wiener Festwochen. Posted online due to the Covid pandemic as the opener of Milo Rau’s “School of Resistance”, it has since been translated and published in a dozen languages.
Interview conducted by Malika Baaziz and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach