Since the beginning of the pandemic, it is not only the political sphere that has undergone massive change. Cultural practitioners have also had to adapt to a new reality. Béton Bleu spoke with theater director, filmmaker and activist Milo Rau about the role of art as a means of resistance and how it will change after the pandemic.

Beton Bleu: Dear Mr. Rau, do you miss the stage? Or has the pandemic inspired you to realize your work beyond the stage?

Milo Rau: I believe that crises, on the one hand, always strengthen the system, but on the other hand, they also reveal new paths. Especially in theater, there are many things that can only be done live and together. A production company like the IIPM [International Institute of Political Murder] quickly gets into trouble if it can no longer tour. In Ghent, where I run a theater company, I have tried to pay the freelancers even if they don't play, and also tried to find other dates so that the downtime is as small as possible. At the same time, it might be a good thing that this urge to return to the halls of the 19th century has been on hold for months and people have been forced to find other ways.

BB: Do you have an example for these other ways?

MR: For the first time I was able to show my works like "Lenin" or the "Congo Tribunal" to an international audience, to those who are directly concerned: the Russians, the Congolese. The distributors would never have been willing to do that before. I will work to ensure that this opening remains. At the same time, we started showing our performances outside and thinking about ways to produce and schedule in fundamentally different ways. With our "All Greeks" festival, we will play all the Greek tragedies outdoors for a month, 32 plays, from 7 am to 9 am or 8 am to 10 am. Why always play in the evening with artificial light? Why always put work before art? Why not just turn everything around? These are things that are obvious, but that you don't think of unless you're forced to. However, I'm a little afraid that theater and debate culture will be more conservative after the crisis than before, because people always feel an urge toward hyper-normality in times of crises.

BB: In the pandemic, art was itself directly affected. In many countries, including Germany, the cultural institutions are at a standstill. In France, we are seeing workers in the cultural industry demanding greater support from the state. Culture is a very direct part of the protest culture around the pandemic. How do you perceive this change?

MR: Theater is a live art, it needs public performance, that has always been its nature. It's different with film. It's true that cinemas are closed, but you can stream anything - for "New Gospel," for example, we built a platform ourselves, with 150 closed cinemas together. For theater, public space and physical participation is central. At the same time, I find these theater occupations almost a bit counterproductive: why do people want to return to these theaters so badly? Why are we holding on to these structures? Why don't we try to use and expand the opportunities we have now as best we can? One should not occupy the institutions in order to play there, but to force them to democratize their means and possibilities. It's a bit like with political parties, where we also noticed at some point that they are not as effective as we had hoped and that extra-parliamentary movements are needed to really change something. That's why art has to hack politics and especially the economic system, you have to find parallel ways to the normal ways of capital. New ways of distribution and new ways of production. And that's where the compulsion to find new ways suddenly becomes very liberating and forces post-capitalist alternatives.

BB: What do you mean by that specifically?

MR: At the beginning of the pandemic, I designed a poster for the Kammerspiele that said: if you're not relevant to the system, then maybe the system isn't relevant to you. This desire to be relevant to the system within the capitalist system, as part of the entertainment industry, is the wrong approach. It's better to create parallel economies. As I said, with my new film "The New Gospel," we also considered whether to go to Netflix or Amazon. But in the end, we decided to build our own platform - and had the best box office results we've ever had, in solidarity with the closed cinemas that receive the proceeds. You don't have to keep telling the same stories over and over again in the same spaces with the same actors.

BB: The manifesto of your playhouse NT Ghent says "It's not just about portraying the world anymore. It's about changing it." Your work has dealt with the genocide in Rwanda and the displacement of indigenous people in Brazil. Your last film, "The New Gospel," was shot in Italy, and the actors were refugees. How do you get people not just to consume art, but to take it as an opportunity to help shape the world?

MR: I was reading a Beuys biography, and Beuys exemplified that, albeit in a sometimes old-fashioned, German way: It's about combining art and capital in a revolutionary way. You have to "hack" capitalism, the economy. Art and engagement cannot function independently of capital, then they are powerless. It's not just about political reach or interpretive power. It becomes revolutionary when you manage to link the economic and cultural system.

BB: How does that look like?

MR: When we shot "The New Gospel" in the refugee camps in southern Italy, we said: everyone who plays here will have papers afterwards and will become a citizen. We began to link the distribution channels of the film to those of goods, in this case tomatoes. And then, all of a sudden, it's no longer about a film and about image politics, it's no longer just about fair production conditions, but about a whole alternative system. If you don't get the fairly-produced tomatoes to the end consumer, you have a problem. If hashtags and campaigns don't end up making money for a particular cause and that cause is not sustainable, then it doesn’t help anyone. You have to bring about change within the system by occupying the distribution channels. It's no longer about just occupying images, but also land, distribution channels, political decision-making positions.

BB: How does art help with that?

MR: By understanding each project as a microeconomy. There are huge collective efforts like the new distribution system for "The New Gospel" or bringing the tomatoes promoted in the NoCap project to supermarkets all over Europe. But small projects are also important: fundraising campaigns to buy land for the production of alternative goods. Every act, no matter how small, counts: I tie all interviews - including this one - to a donation to a campaign that works to integrate refugees in southern Italy. In this way we can get maybe one person per day, ten per week, 1000 people per year out of dependency and slavery, all through the means of art, because these are the only means I know and can use. Of course, it's also important to cast a black or female or Muslim Jesus or apostle, as we did in the film. But you have to ask yourself: who gets the money when people go to the movies? What becomes of these people afterwards? How do we fundamentally change their circumstances? You have to change the way film, literature, how conversation, how all this is produced. We have to think and act fundamentally and structurally in solidarity. It's no longer about creating perfect bubbles, the ideal art festival with the ideal program brochure. It's about changing the world for the very people who for centuries were only the objects of these artistic discourses. That's what I mean when I say culture and capital must be linked.

BB: Isn't it important for art to maintain a certain distance in order to be able to observe developments, or is interference necessary in order to be relevant?

MR: Distance is a statement in itself in a world where everything is linked down to the smallest detail, in an economy where there is no outside. The so-called "outside," the "distance," is another word for privilege. In other words, every human action is political, therefore I do not believe that there is an apolitical space. If you perform a play by Chekhov or a symphony by Beethoven in Germany in 1944, then you are apolitical in the sense that you are creating a pure artistic space within the act of murder of millions, supporting the fascist regime. We create our economic system every day through our actions, we keep it going, but we also change it. It is a big mistake to think we have to strive for the world revolution overnight. Rather, it's about the small acts. To paraphrase Brecht: I don't try to look at the factory from the outside, I am immersive, I go into the factory, I stand at the workbench, I try to create a local, real solidarity and then gradually globalize. The distanced view, the fear of making mistakes, which is very widespread today among the privileged, ultimately supports the status quo.

BB: In European countries such as Poland and Hungary, we are currently seeing restrictions of basic rights such as freedom of the press, of assembly and human rights, discrimination against minorities and immigrants. What role can art play in the resistance movement in Europe?

MR: What has always helped me a lot is solidarity, showing that you are not alone. State power always works with essentialisms, people are racialized, essentialized according to their origin, their gender, their religion. So that it appears as if they are being singled out precisely because of this quality, their skin color, for example - and they look for the fault in themselves. The Holocaust and processes of desolidarization in society in general worked because people no longer felt affected by what happened to others. Hate campaigns always work through stigmatization, and in the end everyone thinks that the oppressed, the marginalized are to blame for what happens to them - or at least people stand by in silence when someone is framed.

BB: What role does art take on in preventing these tactics?

MR: Art can create solidarity and identification through image politics. With the help of general concepts, through images and stories, for example with the Jesus story, one suddenly realizes that this is an all-human story, this is a story of the oppressed - and it is taking place today, it affects us all. So you don't think that what takes place in Poland takes place in Poland, what took place in the forties only took place there. Time and space do not exist as artistic topography. Art can be counter-historical, art can make contact with the dead, art can speak about what has not yet happened. Art can be utopia, and art can let this utopia take place in the absolute, emotional and collective reality of a theater project and a film evening. Art can directly affect us and at the same time is absolutely fictional. Bringing together reality and utopia, practice and hope - that's art.

BB: Do you see a danger in the fact that in a time like now, when art doesn't take place in the same way, when stages are closed, when people can't go out into the streets and come together, it becomes easier for dictators and autocrats to influence systems?

MR: Yes, in crises rights are rolled back, crises are regressive. The confusing thing is always: the most conservative, the most destructive is brought into play against the destruction that is experienced. Crises and war dehumanize the way people treat each other. The problem right now is that art is detached from the context of life. Watching a theater rehearsal, a play, being together afterwards and talking about it, that is the actual process that interests me. It's not just a check-in, where you go in with a mask on your face, consume the thing, and leave, all while making sure you don’t get too close to anyone. Separating life and art is one of many capitalist strategies of alienation that have been going on for centuries, so it's really nothing special - but at the moment we're seeing it in its purest form, so to speak: you buy a ticket, enter a chat room, and look at other people who are sitting somewhere else. As I said, this is capitalism in its purest form: art becomes a consumer good, the body of the other person becomes an object of distanced observation. However, theater consists precisely in bringing bodies into a living, utopian context of practice. That is what has been brutally missing for the last 13 months. One only grows and changes in relation to and together with others.

BB: Are you currently experiencing greater solidarity across national borders?

MR: Yes and no. Especially in the beginning, there was a strong tendency toward nationalization, and even now there is still extreme federal fragmentation, even within Germany. There has been a desolidarization, not as a conscious political decision, but simply because the long-term solidarity structures - unemployment benefits, health insurance - are national. And this is a general problem, which can also be seen in the fight against climate change or in the commodity industry: the long-term costs are outsourced to the Global South, where these systems do not exist. The people at the beginning of the production chain can't suddenly stop producing cotton or coltan for a few months just because the t-shirts or computers aren't needed. They don't have a processing industry and can't do anything with these raw materials if they aren't bought by others. On the positive side, we also saw how powerful these nation states can be, what extreme demands a nation state can make on its citizens and also on its economy. It sounds a bit strange, but this discipline of the citizens, this ability to think in larger contexts and to show solidarity, reassures me in the age of climate change, where it takes collective action.

BB: Do you see that in art and culture as well?

MR: The problem in art is that many intelligent, but also narcissistic people get together, with a strong tendency to minimal dissent. If I organize a panel of ten artists and have them discuss the very issues we've just addressed here: global solidarity, changing the world. After ten minutes nobody listens anymore and the essentialism starts: who speaks, why, with which words. There is an urge to be right and to dwell on certain phrasings that are ok or not ok. Anyone who has ever written an open letter together with five NGOs knows how long it takes to agree on the details. That's the problem with the cultural industry, that we deal with universal issues - of memory, tradition, and possible utopias - but at the same time, like any gathering of people, we are a club of small minds and narcissists. This is what we suffer from. We do not have the "coolness" of scientists and researchers who accept a bacterium as a fact and do not insist on interpreting or determining it. In art, solidarity that does not have negative connotations, where you don't oppose something with an open letter, but that has positive connotations, where you search for solutions together and passionately, is difficult to establish. That's what I suffer from a lot, from this aggression that is often completely destructive. That's why working in solidarity is actually the only thing that still interests me.

BB: And the art scene hasn’t learned anything from last year in that regard?

MR: I wouldn't say that, there were initiatives, there was also pressure on the state. Artists are very good at that, because they are heard, because they know how to influence public opinion and the media. I think that, structurally speaking, there is solidarity in the arts. There's a willingness to care more about certain social aspects in the niche than there is in other professions where you don't have the luxury of making these detours.

BB: Do you think the importance of culture in the public's consciousness has increased during the pandemic?

MR: I haven't given much thought to that; I have a somewhat too holistic concept of culture to answer that. I danced at home with my daughters, of course, we read books at home, we saw plays. We did other things in our lives that we didn't do before, the private space became very rich again. A lot of things that had been outsourced were sort of brought back into this private sphere. That's good and bad. If you don't have a family or close friends, there was a lot of loneliness. Going to the movies, for example, which is no longer possible, is perceived as a great loss. I felt the decoupling of the various processes myself, consumption, private life, the public sphere, the complete digitalization. If these links are so weak, so unstable, and can be so easily undone by this pandemic, then now is the time to work on alternatives that are worth living.

BB: Thank you for your time, Milo Rau.

Interview: Thorsten Schröder

About Milo Rau:

Milo Rau is not easy to categorize. The Swiss native has published more than 50 plays, films and books, has twice been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen and has received an honorary doctor of the Universities of Lund and Ghent. At just 41, Milo Rau received the European Theatre Prize for his life's work. In 2007 he founded the IIPM - International Institute of Political Murder. Since the 2018/19 season he has been artistic director of the Belgian NTGent. In his new film "The New Gospel," which won the 2021 Swiss Film Award, he asks: what would Jesus say about today's refugee crisis? In the livestream discussion series "School of Resistance," he discusses art as a transformative, reality-creating practice with activists and artists.

Mehr Informationen zu Milo Rau gibt es hier.

(C) 09/05/2021

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