Forschungskolloquium Detail

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Moderation:
N.N.

Zoom-Link
Meeting-ID: 915 3170 7702

Mobility and migration within and beyond Europe have become a central theme of artistic production around the globe, giving rise to intercultural and/or transnational performance practices that reflect the changing realities of our times. This paper concentrates on Milo Rau’s internationally acclaimed, yet controversial reinvention of the traditional city theatre at the NT Gent (Belgium) by exploring the complex relations between migration, theatre, and (the ethics of) form in works from his Europe- and Ancient Myth-trilogies.

Focussing on Empire (2016), Orestes in Mosul (2019), and Antigone in the Amazon (2023), the lecture shows how the three works critically scrutinize Europe’s relations to its ‘Others’ and ‘provincialize Europe’ in the sense of Dipesh Chakrabarty through their use of intercultural adaptation and multilingualism. Combining intermedial, metatheatrical and documentary modes of representation, Rau’s works reveal spatial interconnections that are based on the construction of cultural alterity but also fundamentally question the latter. In so doing, they delineate an ethics of acting and spectating which ultimately reveals that Rau’s theatre is not just about migration but itself migratory as it is ‘anchored in movement, not just of people, but also of media, of images, and of voices’ (Bal 2007, 24).

Contact: zkf@uni-konstanz.de