Milo Rau as Influencer

Helen Kraft considers director Milo Rau as an influencer. Kraft places Rau within a subcategory of influencer identified by economist and psychologist Robert Cialdini as intellectuals who are “well-connected, create an impact, have active minds, and are trendsetters.” She argues that Rau fills that role in the theater and positions the director in relation to other postmodern thinkers and theater artists. According to Kraft, Rau actively courts controversy with his work as a means of drawing attention to conflict and corruption around the world, but, despite frequent comparisons to Bertolt Brecht, Rau is not an idealogue, exposing inconsistencies rather than promoting any single ideology in his work.

A Theater of Documentation

In this critical introduction, Lily Climenhaga offers an overview of the work and career of director Milo Rau. Climenhaga looks at Rau’s work across his career, beginning with early projects as a playwright working with director Simone Eisenring, through the creation of his company, the International Institute of Political Murder (iipm), and on to his work at ntgent where Rau has served as artistic director since 2018. Climenhaga identifies many of Rau’s collaborators and artistic inspirations, as well as the criticism of his practices. While all of Rau’s work is political, Climenhaga places the pieces into four distinct categories—reenactment, recollection, reactment, and reclassification—each of which allows for a kind of questioning of and engagement with history and the present.

Play with Consequences?

Andreas Englhart examines the aesthetics of evil, particularly extreme evil, in the work of director Milo Rau, focusing on Five Easy Pieces. Englhart considers the ways in which postmodern aesthetics are beginning to turn once again toward the ethical and how this turn is both reflected and problematized in Rau’s “theater of the real.” The analysis includes aesthetic consideration, an examination of Rau’s rehearsal and creation techniques, and the ways in which audiences and critics have responded to these provocations in different performances.

A Tale of Truth

Laurens De Vos examines the ways in which director Milo Rau incorporates the poetic and aesthetic techniques of alienation theorized and pioneered by German director Bertolt Brecht for purposes similar to but distinct from Brecht’s. Like Brecht, De Vos argues, Rau exploits the “cesura between actor and character” to highlight the nature of the theatrical event for purposes that are largely social, drawing attention to systems of power, privilege, and violence. De Vos posits that unlike Brecht, however, Rau does not use these techniques to draw attention to the constructedness of the theatrical event—instead, Rau seeks to make the representation itself real, blurring the line between fiction and reality to trouble and implicate the audience.

Milo Rau’s Work as Artistic Director of NTGent

Peter M. Boenisch and Lise Sofie Houe survey the 2018–20 tenure of Swiss director Milo Rau as artistic director of ntgent, the city theater of Ghent, Belgium. Contextualizing his role and actions within the European city theater system, the authors also examine his artistic programming and output in the period, personally and institutionally, with particular emphasis on works produced at ntgent. The authors focus especially on Rau’s efforts to produce work with global collaborators, as seen in his Orestes in Mosul (2019) and other works. Boenisch and Houe additionally summarize critiques of Rau’s practice from other thinkers and artists and Rau’s response to these critiques.

Milo Rau in Africa

Piet Defraeye explores Milo Rau’s work in Central Africa, focusing on 2011’s Hate Radio and 2015’s The Congo Tribunal. Defraeye suggests that while Rau’s interest in Central Africa is not based on any personal connection, it began before the founding of his company, the International Institute of Political Murder (iipm), and has been something of a through line for the director. In analyzing both projects, Defraeye traces their development and provides the historical and cultural context of the events presented. In the case of Hate Radio, this involves looking at performances of the piece around Europe and on-site in a radio studio in Kigali and explaining the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. With The Congo Tribunal, Defraeye identifies several of the many global ramifications of what is often referred to as the African World War and summarizes the three cases that made up the three-day imagined trial in Bukavu, Congo, which, along with the follow-up presentation in Berlin and a wide range of ancillary materials, was the centerpiece of the project. Defraeye contextualizes The Congo Tribunal within both Rau’s oeuvre and the larger ecosystem of Central African activism, identifying Rau’s utopian goals as well as the criticisms leveled against him.

Affective Dynamics of Excitable Speech in Milo Rau’s Breiviks Erklärung and Mitleid

Robert Walter-Jochum reflects on the successes and failures of Milo Rau’s stage explorations of hate speech, investigating what Judith Butler terms “restaging and resignifying.” Walter-Jochum references two of Rau’s performances: Breivik’s Statement and Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun. Both pieces highlight the hypocrisy and similarities of rhetoric from right-wing terrorists and liberals with seemingly good intentions. Breivik’s Statement restages hate speech with an actor of color inverting the meaning of the speech, while Compassion restages a woman of color refugee reflecting on her childhood, while a white woman contemplates her time volunteering in the Congo. Walter-Jochum dissects each monologue, analyzing deeper meaning in Rau’s projects.