Milo Rau is undoubtedly one of Europeâs most established, influential, but also controversial contemporary theater directors, who has time and again explicated the clear political agenda of his work. Rauâs main aim is to challenge and expand the European city- and state theater system through a radical opening to the Global South and a break with the European, bourgeois canon and ensemble structure, while at the same time working excusively with and thus maintaining the European canon. He famously expressed his vision of a âºcity theater of the futureâ¹ in the Ghent Manifesto (2019), a set of ten rules published for his tenure as the artistic director of NTGent, Belgium. Among other things, the rules emphasize the âºrealnessâ¹ of the theatrical act and commit to the production of works in so-called conflict zones, to a diverse, multi-lingual ensemble, and to the limitation of pre-scripted texts. True to these rules, Rauâs works often combine the European stage with locations in Africa, the Middle East, and South America, reading European classics through the lens of current struggles for social justice in the Global South, and they include actors from these regions in their ensembles. Rauâs works not only connect different places, but they also span different genres and art forms like film, theater, and opera. Moreover, he has shaped the European theatrical landscapes in different functions: he has established the forum »School of Resistance« that brings together artists, activists, and directors from around the world to discuss theater in times of crisis. In a similar vein, he has established a book series and become a central spokesperson for political theater today. Between 2018 and 2024, he was the artistic director of NTGent, and he currently acts as the artistic director of one of the central theater festivals in the German-speaking world, the Wiener Festwochen. Here too he has started to shape the festival according to his vision of a theater that brings real changes to the world, re-framing the festival as the »Free Republic of Vienna« â inspired by Viennaâs artistic landscape in the early 20th century â and in collaboration with other political artists like Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and choreographer Florentina Holzinger.
Shaped by a background in sociology and journalism, Rau is interested in the past, present, and future of socio-political conflicts. His work focuses on pressing global issues such as migration, war, and climate change, as well as more individual tragedies such as suicide, abuse, and murder. To approach these topics, he experiments with forms like re-enactment and pre-enactment, the trial, the political assembly, and political activism, and he works in and with different media (e.g., film, theater, and photography). His work is often based on historical documents, yet it is clearly distinct from documentary theater. Rather, it takes inspiration from Alexander Kluge and stresses the historical Eigensinn of the materials and the moment when fact and fiction can no longer be separated. Rau himself coined a new term for his theater, speaking of a theater of »Global Realism«1. In doing so, he evokes the tradition of political theater spanning from Brecht to Kluge, while at the same time emphasizing a break with a political theater shaped by poststructuralism and deconstruction. This break is also clearly emphasized in his career: while he started with plays influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, he only earned recognition after he founded the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM), his own production company, in 2007, with which he started to realize works commited to a new realism.
Rauâs theater has become synonymous with a current trend in theater and performance: the attempt to combine art and activism, using art to create new democractic institutions in response to the ongoing erosion of established democratic structures. As such, Rau claims: »One has to create new, utopian institutions.«2 In this regard, Rauâs works are intended to create spaces in which such institutions can be modeled and made thinkable and in which viewers can become participants in democratic experiments. Set up as experiences with the structures of institutional engagements, Rauâs works participate in the »creation of symbolic forms, symbolic practices and solidarities«3, as he formulates it. They create realities in an artificial frame (e.g., stage, film, and book) that did not exist beforehand; engaging with topics such as the so-called European âºRefugee Crisisâ¹ (Empire (2016), The New Gospel (2020)), the wars in former Yugoslavia (The Dark Ages (2015)), the Democratic Republic of Congo (The Congo Tribunal (2017)), Rwanda (Hate Radio (2014)), and Iraq (Orestes in Mosul (2019)) or, recently, the destruction of the Amazon (Antigone in the Amazon (2023)). The question, however, is: What emerges as something âºnewâ¹ in these filmic and theatrical stagings of political encounters that are highly formalized, controlled, confined, and institutionalized? What idea of political or critical theater is inherent in the works? What understanding of world, citizenship, and global community is promoted in the projects?
As Rauâs works have been widely covered in European and international media, critical scholarly explorations have also begun to emerge. While the number of scholarly articles and book chapters on various aspects of Rauâs work (such as utopia, Global Realism, his (p)reenactments, or his Gerichtstheaterstücke) has been continuously on the rise, Lily Climenhaga and Piet Defraeye published the first more encompassing scholarly inquiry into Rauâs work in a special issue of Theater (Duke University Press) in 2021, comprised of scholarly contributions as well as essays by Rau and a number of his contributors. In 2023, Simon Gröger published a first monograph dedicated to Rau, Theater der Realität â Realität des Theaters. Ãsthetik und politische Dynamik bei Milo Rau und dem IIPM (Aisthesis).
Our volume builds and expands upon the questions asked by existing scholarship and brings together central discourses surrounding Rauâs work. It addresses four focal points in Rauâs oeuvre: The first section of the book, Theatrale Praktiken und Ãsthetiken / Theatrical Practices and Aesthetics, is devoted to his aesthetics and practices. Here, the articles discuss Rauâs work with children on stage (Inge Arteel), forms of doubling (Emmanuel Béhague), and transmedial storytelling (Janine Hauthal), and contextualize his work in relation to other political directors (Kathy Pollock). The second part of the book, Dokument und Realismus / Document and Realism, focuses on his engagement with notions of reality, documentary, and utopian spaces. Contributors discuss his complex and sometimes obscure construction of realism (Johann Horras), reality and the documentary (Leonie Wilms), his use of pre- and re-enactment (Eyck Marcus Wendt), and his approach to homosexuality and desire (Piet Defraeye). The third section, Politik und Aktivismus / Politics and Activism, is devoted to questions of the political dimension of his theater. The articles in this section deal with Rauâs affirmative use of propaganda (Claudia Breger), his melancholic politics (Teresa Kovacs), his use of the genre of the manifesto (Thomas Traupmann), and the question of solidarity (Lily Climenhaga). Finally, the fourth section of the book, Globalismus und Kolonialismus / Globalism and Colonialism, is dedicated to (post- and)colonial issues in Rauâs works, which are evaluated from a critical whiteness and post- and neocolonial perspective. The single chapters center on modern forms of slavery and Christianity (Tanja Nusser and Stella Lange), on conflict zones (Anna-Maria Senuysal) and whiteness (Robert Walter-Jochum).
The volume evolved out of a conference held at the University of Cincinnati on October 28â30, 2022. We are deeply grateful for the many institutions that generously supported this conference and in turn supported the creation of this volume; in particular the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as well as the Niehoff Center for Film and Media Studies, the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, and the Department of Asian, East European, and German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
See for example: Milo Rau, Globaler Realismus â Goldenes Buch I / Global Realism â Golden Book 1, Berlin 2018.
Milo Rau, »Man muss neue, utopische Institutionen schaffen â Milo Rau im Gespräch mit Harald Welzer über die âºGeneral Assemblyâ¹Â«, in: Thalia Theater, https://www.thalia-theater.de/beitraege/540, last accessed March 31, 2025.
Milo Rau, IIPM â International Institute of Political Murder: General Assembly / Generalversammlung / AssemblÄe GÄnÄrale, Berlin 2017, p. 12.