“This madness must stop”. Testimony and Resistance of Milo Rau’s Amazonian Antigone

Abstract

“This madness must stop.” “Let’s stop being Creon, let’s be Antigone. Because when anarchy becomes law, resistance becomes duty”. These are the words of Kay Sara, indigenous actress and activist chosen by Swiss director Milo Rau to play his Amazonian Antigone. In his new multilingual creation (English, Portuguese, Tucanese, Flemish and French), Antigone in the Amazon (2020-2023), Milo Rau takes as his point of departure the massacre of of landless peasants in Eldorado do Carajas, on 17 April 1996, to denounce injustice and repression that have persisted for centuries. At partnering with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), the director and videomaker builds a new Antigone who fights for another possible world through alternative collectives. Through videos on three screens, the scenography integrates the singing of tragic chorus, formed by members of the MST and indigenous activists who survived the massacre in dialogue with the Brazilian and Flemish actors and musicians on stage. This work proposes to unscramble the modalities of transposition of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Brazilian state of Pará, in the confines of the Amazon, where Brazilian agribusiness plunders and destroys both the forest and the people. This new Antigone of the resistance reactivates the confrontation between the traditional divine law and the rational modern state in Greek tragedy in a clash between global liberal order and indigenous holistic cosmology.