 So, welcome everybody here at the Martin Siegel Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY and really thank you for taking time out of your for sure busy, busy lives. It's 4.30 in the afternoon on a great day and everybody is working and out there. We added this next to this great panel we're going to have tonight about the role of female representation, the role of women in contemporary music, which the numbers are extremely low. We still felt, since Milo is here, we will take a twantage and talk about his new book in Germany. It just came out in September and in the evening Milo will talk about his work which we show some excerpts of him. So if you have the time, please do come and really it's a fantastic audience. You don't know this group Milo so well, but it's a really fantastic sample, I think actually of New York theater makers and theater goers. So first of all Milo thank you for coming and coming back first time in real life IRL as they say here at the Siegel Center. Yes, nice for having me. We had some Zoom talks, no? Many, many Zoom talks, but never live. So thank you and you arrived on Sunday? We arrived on Sunday late night and yesterday if I'm not mistaken we had this presentation of the Academy second modernism and today I'm here and tomorrow we leave. And tomorrow he's even so he's staying just for you guys and to share his work and his insights and I really would like to share what you already know. But Milo is an artist, a theater artist and he's a great artist and his work is influential, it's highly interesting. It has changed the way we look at theater and if we do see how many people work in the world of theater and do great work, we all acknowledge that work that has an impact. And many do say that after the political work of Brechtel, Piscator, perhaps in a way also Nuschkin or others, but this is at the moment an approach, an idea, an exploration that is the most significant and something we have to think about. If we do theater, if we write about theater, if we go to theater, Milo created a world, he found answers or found more questions, but perhaps the right questions and he will luckily share with us a little bit. The book which is about to be translated by Lily, is she here? How here you are, right? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and it will come out when? Yeah, but this year, this year not the beginning of next year and also Jay is here from the Skirball who will present Milo perhaps next year, spring, October this year. Yes. So you also will have some context. So Milo, tell us first why did you write the book? I wrote many books, that's book number 20. You have your own publishing house, right? Sorry? You have your own publishing house. No, no, no, no, no, some people think that, but it's the book were printed in many different houses. Antigant had some? Antigant, yeah, the golden books, that's the golden books, but it's not my publisher which has had one line in this publishing house, which is a term publisher, the Verbrecher Verlag, which is a very nice publisher. So this was published by Robert and it was for me interesting as a structural thinker to see that when I published it in Robert, which is the biggest publishing house, how many copies were distributed and how few copies when I did it in Verbrecher Verlag, you know? And I think it's always, I mean I made 20 books, but I think Lily can tell you a story about it. It's always more or less the same content just in different books. And so this is the newest one and it was, it already had three editions at that moment. Germany is now translating some languages in French and Italian and Croatian, you know, we have all these languages in Europe and in Dutch. And the book was inspired by the fact that I was invited by Zurich, which is one of my hometowns in Switzerland, to have what is called at the university, they are the poetic lectures. And the poetic lectures they normally give them to writers, but they made the next, I don't know, an exception for me. Because I'm not a writer, I'm a, I don't know, an activist, a director, whatever. And then I was speaking in three lessons about my work. So everything I tell here is based on projects I did. The first part is very biographical. So I ask myself how did I come to where I am now? Why didn't I become a writer or whatever, a sociologist? Why ended I in theater or in film? And in part two and three, so that's the past, then we go into the present. So what kind of experiences are important for me? And I talk about people I met. So I made in Russia a project together with, at that time, completely unknown punk group Pussy Riot. That's why I lost the visa in 2013. In Russia we made a nice project together. All the people I met in the east of Congo, we did the Congo Tribunal. So a network cat who is that now? Or Yvonne Sanier, I think we had one talk. Yvonne Sanier was an activist from Cameroon who in the south of Italy. I was playing the main role in my Jesus film that we will, I think, partly project this evening. And in the second part I talk about people that were important to me. And always trying to find out why theater, which is, by the way, the title of another book I did. And because you meet people. So I think you said that you produced the first play by Winnie Polish, who is a German director, writer. Very influential to my generation, by the way. And he wrote one text in my book, Why Theater. I invited around 110 makers from the whole world. And he said, if I'm alone, I can't think. So you need somebody you would speak to. You need a question, you need a situation. Akikawa is Maki, which is another director who was quite influential from Finland. To me he said he wanted to become a writer, but then when he was at the table he couldn't find anything. But then when he comes into a room and there are 30 people there, 20 people waiting that something happens. There is a situation. He would start to think and he would start to interact. And something would be created and nobody knows from where it comes. And this is the, I wanted to write the poetology about how this functions. How out of meetings he would create, I call these microecologies. How is this actually working? And the third part is then asking, okay, of course we are interacting all the time. And we normalize, as we know now as a civilization, deadly ways of interacting. Which are not made for life, but made for doom. So how can we develop together other ways of interacting? And there are my basic ideas that I base myself again on meetings to write this third part. I wanted kind of an activist piece in Switzerland to bring back a mummy that was stolen in Egypt in the 19th century during colonialism. And to bring it back together with a group of 100 Egyptian scientists, which is in the main cathedral of my hometown in Switzerland. It's very known, this mummy. And how to bring it back using all kind of different ways of interacting in our society. And based on this action I try to describe how we can create unforeseen collectives to find other ways of constructing society, of producing goods, of producing art, of course, of having relations of all kinds. And to end this little introductory monologue because I think that you have no idea about what I do. So I think that my whole work is based on finding strange contexts for stories we know. So bringing, for example, the Bible to the south of Italy. And I mixed actors from, because I was invited by Matera, the city which was the European capital of culture. I was invited to do whatever I want and I answered them, I wanted to do a Jesus film because this is the city where, you know, Pier Paolo Pasolini and yeah, Mel Gibson, they did their Passion of the Christ, the second, the Gospel of Matthew, these two films. So I phoned to the Jesus of Enrique Razzocchi of Pasolini and to the Holy Mary of Mel Gibson, Maya Morgenstern, people I knew from other projects and they said, I want to do a Jesus film in Matera. And they said, okay, let's go there again. So Enrique was not there again since the film. The same with Maya Morgenstern, she had a very bad experience with Mel Gibson because, you know, this film for her as a Jewish actor was a bit difficult. So we went back and then we found a situation which you could call ironic because the capital of culture in Europe is surrounded by wild refugee camps of people exploited by the mafia who work on the fields to produce tomatoes who are exported to Africa to destroy the agriculture in Africa and then the people come to work here as slaves and not here but in Europe. We have the same situation in the fields in the U.S., like in Europe or in Spain, in Italy, Germany, everywhere. And then we decided to find a Jesus that is from these, because we wanted to have a big Italian actor in the beginning. And then I told him, okay, you will now be Pontius Pilatus and we have to find Jesus. And then we started to find Jesus. And we found Yvon Sanier, who is a very impressive activist. I write a lot about him in this book. He was a farm worker and he made the first strike against the mafia, which is deadly in this part of Italy, but he survived. He could change the law. Of course, this law was never adapted. And I met him and I said, okay, Yvon, how did you do this? Because you know capitalism loves identity politics. So when you go on the fields, they would say, you are Romanian. You can't work together with a guy from Nigeria. You are from Nigeria. You can't work together with somebody from Cameroon. You are from Italy. You are from whatever. You are a sex worker. You are a farm worker. And they don't unite. And I said, but how did you do it to connect people? And he said, I searched sub-leaders from all communities. I had 12 sub-leaders. And I said, Jesus had also 12 sub-leaders. So let's do it like him. And then we started to do this project together. And that's how the idea of doing the New Gospel was born. And in this book, I try to understand how this functions, this way of experience. Because what we then did, you just interrupt, Frank. What we then did, we said, okay, we can't do a Jesus film without changing the way how films are done and how the people that are working in this film who are illegal farm workers, legalized by European politics, can change the situation. And then we created together with the Catholic Church, by the way, we gave them contracts. And with these contracts, Yvon Sanier, who is an intellectual and activist, starts to produce tomatoes. And by giving them contracts, producing tomatoes, and through the film as propaganda material, we found like around 150 supermarkets to distribute tomatoes. The people started to buy these tomatoes. The money went there. And now Yvon has around 1,200 people that already have contracts and are legalized. By entering the market, because you have in the European asylum law, you have this, of course, this absurd catch-22 situation. If you don't have a working contract, you can't be legalized. If you are not legalized, you can't have a working contract. So you have to go out by getting a work contract anyway. And that's how we use the film project to change the situation of these people that were in the beginning playing extras in the film. Yeah, I think it's a brilliant, brilliant example of your work. Milo started out as a journalist, by the way, as Remini Protocol often refer themselves also as journalists. This is a work where, I think, he puts into practice what his ideas also in the book are about. He's a philosopher. If you read the book, it's incredibly well read. He went to the Surbanum. He's an intellectual and also someone who is able and also happy to talk about his work, which I think is very significant and important. That's why, also, if you're right at home here. I would say we have to go out, and this is a radical example of it. We have to leave the safe spaces. The safe spaces, which you actually say in the theaters, they're like the minute differences where people are fighting each other, pretending there isn't a real outside world, like an identity politics or other things, but he says ignoring the real horror and the brutal brutality of a naked capitalism, as you said. So we have to go out. You say the new philosophies will not come in the rehearsal rooms. They will not come from literature houses. They will not come from universities. They come from the forests, from the bungalows, from the refugee camps. And it's a radical idea, of course. So tell us a bit more of what you say. We have to leave the place where we are in order to be part of change or be changed. When you look at the literature of the ancien régime, before democracy was created, you have France and France. You have a quite interesting play by Moulier, Le Femme Savant, which is about a group of very sensitive ladies. And these ladies in the salons in Paris under Louis XIV in the time of Moulier, so in feudal times created salons where they have kind of a safe space, where they have purified rhetorics. They don't use anything that could be assaulting sexually. They don't talk about poverty. They are super sensitive and they kind of exclude themselves from reality. But of course they can do it because they can pay their sensitivity because they are the ruling class of this time. And I think we try to normalize all of us this kind of situation. So we try to not confront ourselves to what you call the naked capitalism. I think it was a quote by Karl Marx. He said, if you want to know, if you want to see the naked capitalism, go to the colonies. And of course today these are the ex-colonies. It's the only US because we have inside our societies colonies. As I said, you go outside the capital of culture of Europe and you find half a million of illegalized slaves. And as I slave because they are legally slaves, they have no name. They are not legalized. If they disappear, they disappear. They are as I think in the antiquity you said they are machines used by capitalism. That's what it is. And I think that if we are racists, it is based on the reality we created because we live together with people or we live from people that we treat like machines. And that's why there is racism. And I think overcoming racism is only by connecting these two dots of the reality. I did an opera in Geneva a week ago or 10 days ago, Justice, which was a Congolese-European co-production about the mining industry in the Congo. And the interesting fact is that Eastern Congo is the richest country in raw materials, in cobalt, in gold, in copper, and cocaine, and so on. But these raw materials have no value in the Eastern Congo. But when you bring them to Switzerland, they raise their value like 40, 50 times. And that's the richness of Switzerland. So these are two parts of the planet directly connected. So the reality of Switzerland is Congo and the reality of Congo is Switzerland. And you can't read Switzerland without reading Congo and you can't live Switzerland without living in Congo. So there is only a project that says the reality about Switzerland is a collective made of Congolese and Swiss artists and activists. And they can tell a story about the reality because there are two parts. And none of these parts is the whole reality. And that's what we try to do. And as you say, so exposing yourself to another reality is not that you go there and you watch and then you would learn. It's that you make a project together with a group of people that is completely connected to another reality. And sometimes, let's say in the methodology of liberation, they are of course much further than the Europeans because when you are rich, you don't need to change your way of living. You will be the last one to change. But the French Revolution was not done by the ruling class, of course, because they had no interest in changing the situation. So Le Femme Savant, they would even today continue to talk about their sensitivities, you know? They will forever do that. And a project that for me was formative and I think that's the one we bring to New York is the Antigone and the Amazon project where I met the landless movement or we were in Brazil and we showed some plays and the plays were forbidden to tour and then the landless movement came to us and they said why would we not do a project together? Because perhaps you know Augusto Boal in your studies. Ah yeah, so one of his dramaturgs and they said let's work together and then we decided to use Antigone and to make workshops in the very north of... And the landless movement, just to explain if I understand right, is people who were supposed to get land back through government exchange after also dictatorships who never ever got it, occupied it and created a sensational infrastructure to better their lives in a community. You say almost like a Paris commune sense. Much bigger than the Paris commune. So there are like 100,000 families, millions of people and when you go there you will find the nation inside the nation. It's a bit like when the French Revolution happened they created the parliament and they invented the word of nation and they said we are the nation if you want to be part of the nation join us. And it's really the civil society kind of creating what you call the commune with all sorts of departments in it. So they have independent schools, they have independent everything, legal systems, theatres, etc. By occupying land they create the nation inside the nation bigger than I mean Belgium for example. So really very impressive. So I was of course a bit scared when they invited us to do that and then we started to work together and that's what I tried to in the second part of the book to more or less to tell also the story of this meeting of how for example if theatre is not, you know in Europe theatre is very much an institution so you would do a school when you come from a certain class you would do a school and then you go from that school you go to make plays different from society, different a bit from the milieu you come from but normally you would stage the big classics and you would deconstruct it in the 90s and you would do it in a very realistic way in the zero years and you know and today you would talk about gender and in 20 years I don't know the elite will have another approach to it but it's really the it's just the same again and again and again and when you go to the landless movement you see okay this is a tool of life this is a tool of common understanding of what should be done this is a way for example the use of I wrote another text about the use of the choir which is in Europe lost in Europe there's the use of the choir is a more or less technical thing you do in acting schools so you would talk in a rhythm but for example the landless movement uses the choir for demonstrations of course so they learn to talk in a choir in school and they learn how the choir is a way of liberate every individual act together and for example for me decision making is super interesting with the landless movement because you would fight and go through everything because it's not that that kind of decision making means that the individual opinions are not represented but at one point they would act and we use the choir or we learn to use the choir in Antigone which has this very known choir of many monsters things as monsters as man and all these incredible sentences in the beginning of the capitalist society already knowing that what will happen to all of us and to read this in the north of Brazil in the Amazon together with them to create a new version of Antigone gave back the meaning of it so kind of you know bringing these texts a bit back to where they somehow belong to rewrote the ending because when we arrived the tragic mind is a suicidal mind meaning that sometimes I was asking myself I should have listened to all the others didn't they know how to end play because normally just everybody suicides and even with Shakespeare and perhaps it's really the tragic mind is something very western that the idea that you fight and this kind of this idea of the hero and you can't survive in the end you know and that's what's happening to Antigone and to Haimon and to half of the and when we were reading it together with this group of people from the landless movement they said if we were Marxists we would never suicide this makes complete nonsense this is a story that makes no sense and then of course we wrote what you call the sixth act but you should see the play because it's very hopefully luckily we will just to repeat and I think the same what you say about European theatre is also for here you go to a university and you spend $10,000 a year to be allowed to study art and then you try you write a play at home or with some friends and you try to get it in the theatre maybe even commercial you try to get backers or some others decide it gets in or not and then you hire actors in a certain rehearsal time it gets done of course downtown theatres work differently luckily here but still the model what you have running a national theatre a big theatre we don't have to do it in our space we can do our work in Italy we bring some of our actors but we have an activist we have film actors from different generations we react to the place where we are we look and create something in the space that has a clear I would say political unapologetically political message the idea not only it's not enough to show what is wrong not only it's enough to call for action I think your theatre what you say is you actually have to be part of the action you have to leave something that stays when you go I think it's an extraordinary approach I can only imagine how complex that really is so my question for you is do you think that your theatre is changing are you a part of change or are you reflecting a change that's already going on that's already happening you say in your book that the time of criticizing is over it's time of the revolt it's time of doing things differently so how do you see your theatre I mean there is this film Swiss filmmaker who also suicided some months ago Jean-Luc Godard who was living close to Geneva and made a lot of films and he said you can't just do another film by doing a film you have to change the way how films are made so you have to change the way of producing the way of distributing art and I think this structural approach that he and perhaps his whole generation we talk about the early 60s brought to the table to say we are not representing anymore but now it's about changing reality changing the ideas of course they were very much influenced by the style of their time by Maoism, by collectivism by communism and so on and today it's of course different so I try in every project I do to create what I called before microecology so a way how the people involved in a project would use this project to become producers themselves so as an example when we did Orestes in Mosul the capital of the Islamic state for a certain time in Iraq, north of Iraq close to Kurdistan we made with the arts academy a play called Orestes in Mosul and we toured it in Europe but we knew that for them whatever they produced will never be possible to tour because there are no institutions and they will never get a visa to go outside Iraq because Europe says sorry if you give you a visa you will disappear immediately and then you have more illegal immigrants so it was impossible to get a visa for them so we said and at the very same moment the UNESCO the cultural branch of the United Nations they came to us and said you are in Mosul we would like to recreate what they call immaterial heritage because the whole city was destroyed but all the institutions were destroyed too and then we said okay if you give us the money we would like to create together with the arts academy of Mosul a film school and to bring all the tools to make films there and then we started producing films and then we started distributing these films on European festivals and these films were of course wonderful we were talking about Paolo Pazzolini which were so wonderful and strong films in the 50s in Italy because Italy was destroyed and all the actors they didn't have any actors anymore because they were all fascists and they couldn't work anymore so they worked with non-professionals you know and then they created this incredible style of European art house movie that we have still today just because out of the ruins of the Second World War and out of the ruins of Mosul they created this style I was looking like this and I was saying this is incredible so now I understand why we still do films in Europe because they do really why they need this tool and I also found out that you can learn what we know as filmmakers in three months so in three months they were as professional as I am they just didn't have the tools and they didn't have the distribution ways and when you give them these possibilities they can do what they want and for me this was the meaning of doing OSTs in Mosul of course I have my as an artist or as a I don't know as a eye designer as a technician etc I have my own little nerdy obsessions so I would always do this kind of political melodramas which you like or don't but I try to do more than this around it and this was the reason why we are talking about the theater of Ghent we are in the Vienna festival which is a big crossover festival in Europe the artistic director since a year right? since Vienna festival something like the Avignon festival yeah it's one of the big festivals and the interesting thing of the Vienna festival is that Vienna is full of institutions and full of history and it's the capital of modernism which connected of course to the academy second modernism because it was a yeah but that's perhaps for the second panel and at one point I understood it's interesting to enter institutions and to change the institutions because these institutions produce art art is not coming for I mean theater art of course writing you can do outside institutions but theater is in the end of the day very much in Europe made by big institutions so when you go into a national theater to lead it like in Ghent so then you have three or four big halls and then you program these halls and then you bring what was in the little black box to the main stage and then you change the ensemble which was formed of kind of all the stars of the Dutch and Flemish theater you change it to what you described as a crazy mix what we call the global ensemble of people that have all kind of backgrounds and start to produce a popular art another art that interests everybody in the city or this group and that group and so on and then you start a tour or then you start to say okay one of the production it was even a rule we did in Ghent one of the productions you have to do outside a theater for example rest is in Mosul Antigone in the Amazon or the Jesus film in Italy to create infrastructure where there is not and and these are decisions I think you can I mean this is my decision and it hasn't to be the decision of every artist and I don't try to pray this kind of structural approach in my book but I I think at this very moment you know we come out but this is a European story of a very long phase of of a very long phase of deconstruction of a very long phase of irony and minimal dissent and you know this kind of mechanism and I felt at one point this modernist constructive need to say what is an institution what is a popular theater in the 21st century in a globalized world who are the actors what are the topics what means to stage a classic today you know and who can give meaning to these classics how can a global realism be constructed who has to work together to talk on the level of global economy for example how can you tell the global finance market what are the words you know and the collectives and what is the public and for to find this I needed to invade institutions at one point like 6, 7, 8 years ago a bit by accident and since then I'm very much interested by institutional work somehow and I think what is so remarkable and I think even you said it would like to repeat it again that Mido says we do live comfortable lives but the brutality of the world is there we don't see it perhaps we don't see them or they are in New York or as you said in Madeira but they are in the south and the global south and I think he says we have to leave those spaces where we are in we have to go to these spaces we have to not just bring them to us we have to go and we have to listen he says one of his big chapters is which means really listen to what the world has to say and to interact with it it's not only a suggestion he says we do have a suggestion to do that it's important and you still also makes great theater we all know that ideology normally doesn't make great theater I don't think Milo's pieces are ideologically they are chaotic they are well thought through they have a dramaturgy but they are also open you will see it's a sensational I think very important comment perhaps when you ask why writing books why doing campaigning so much why working in institutions why working together with activists what you said that I think there are things that you have to export from art and when I'm teaching at universities what I do less and less but what I always said to the directors or the actors or the stage designers perhaps you learn stage designing or you are an actor but every project needs another tool perhaps it's a book, perhaps it's a film, perhaps it's a campaign perhaps it's a play but when you decide to do a play and you see that there's a lot of things in it that is ideological teaching and you feel the need then write the manifesto write the book you know sometimes you don't have to pack everything into the play but there are books that I can kind of bring this into books or that I started to create institutions to bring it into institutions when we did Antigone and the Amazon which is an activist play but the real activism we did in a campaign so this again screenwashing campaign because of all the European and North American big companies that are destroying the Amazon they found out that they used the word sustainable and diverse but they are not diverse and not sustainable and if in the Amazon somebody hears the word diversity or sustainability they run because they know they will be killed by the white men because these are the new terms of capitalism and I remember that we had the term sustainable in the first manifesto and Alton Crenac who is a bit the leading philosopher let's say from indigenous Brazil we had to to throw this term out of it because he hates that and it was all the things to learn that what we think is right to do is deadly for others so that's the point I had you wanted that I read out the little part and perhaps you can take this one but I can why not so I quote Bourdieu and Nicolas Boucharin if it's absolutely unclear you will explain everything I think Frank I know that so it's the part number three and there you have the rules of the coming uprising and the third rule is you are the problem this point can be summarized relatively easily with simple one liner so I'm discovering the translation of Lili never make a project that doesn't also implicate yourself recently perhaps one word of the Congo Tribunal we did with because I'm talking about this now in the next lines it's a project we did in the east of Congo together with advocates from Congo and from Europe to put in trial the big European companies for example Glencore the operas about Glencore two of the biggest raw material company of the world which is a Swiss company but there is no I mean the strange fact is that we have a globalized economy but we don't have a global economic economical law or Tribunal it doesn't exist so whatever they do in the east of Congo there is no possibility for the people thrown from their lands from the victims of whatever to put them on trial that's why together with the House of Lawyers of Congo we created what we call the Congo Tribunal and we did a film about it and it's existed since ten years but yeah and you showed it okay cool yeah I remember recently a group of activists reproached me in an open letter stating that the Congo Tribunal was in truth little more than an act of appropriation how could I presume to be able to talk about the problems of the Congolese about their misery about their problems to in a manner of speaking steal their thunder that's right why do I do this I don't believe that the fact that the Congo Tribunal as in every respect collectively developed global or at least the national project is sufficient the principal investigators are Congolese and the truer kind of genre mixed consisting of national so Congolese and international mostly Belgium and Swiss lawyers and NGOs this has been the case in all four major installations of the Congo Tribunal since 2015 at the last Tribunal which was in December 2021 organized film and stage by a Congolese production company at the parliament of Colvesi the world capital of Cobalt I only said in the chouri but this is just one point because the letter means something else with the word appropriation maybe something like this the consequence of a crime whatever they may be the victims not the perpetrators and the perpetrators as members of a group are responsible not in a subjective sense for this crime this is of course a very Bordurian concept because on the one hand it is based on the idea of symbolic possession and on the other on a collective idea of history and historical action someone who understood this painful objectivity of circumstance was Nikolai Bucharin a brilliant intellectual of early state communism he was charged in one of the most absurd trials in world history the so-called third Moscow trials of 1937 the accusations brought against him collaboration with fascism plans to overthrow Stalin and so on are so utterly loathable that they are not even worth mentioning not least because they were brought by Stalin who just a few years later would himself enter into a pact with Hitler naturally Bucharin denied the accusations articulated in this memorable utterance subjectively speaking I am innocent but objectively I know that I am guilty because as a political caterer he was partly responsible for the deaths of millions in the civil war for the great Ukraine famine for the misguided foreign policy of the etc etc etc so what I want to say here is that objectively as the ruling class here in the US in Europe we are guilty anyway so what is our possibility of collaborate with the Congles mining workers for example and that's what I try to develop in this third rule and I think your theater clearly shows that we are implemented as in Carol Martin wrote that in her piece in TDR about you where she said why your theater is so fascinating that the viewer even gets implemented watching the interviews for the acting so that you also are able to stage the contradictions we live in the worlds that don't really mean that we live perhaps as you write we try to live the right life in the wrong age so it is a really an attempt as he said to radically demonstrate what's wrong in the world to really have a fundamental difference with what is what is accepted as something that cannot be changed for a moment on stage there's so much more we can talk about but I think one of the interesting I think very surprising things in your book you open up with quoting the four writers of the apocalypse and you write about the pitfalls in a way for making art when you make art what are the complications and what do we have to think about what do we have to take into account and I think you give some help of the way the apocalypse in the greek sense once was on the panel that it reveals something it comes only like the eucalyptus plan but apo means it opens something it was not just the apocalypse the kind of doomsday apocalypse it means also the renovation of something but so maybe we don't have to go through all the five one you added another writer as you call them but tell us a little bit what you think we have to be careful for what you learned in your work how we can avoid these writers which is very surprising and I think interesting great open it's the first chapter actually what I call the biographical approach for my generation which somehow invented what we call today the identity politics or the deconstruction of what was before like you know I think the generation before us I don't know they thought humanity from objective forces you know I was talking about which is of course a very far away but which class do you belong to and how this class can be organized that you overflow for example the ruling class how would you take state power how would you use the term of heroism to adapt it to a little group of guerrillas and so on and so on so very much is somehow very you know very old European style of thinking the world that was exported in the colonies and used by Che Guevara and all these figures and then came a generation it was it was even on my generation but it was the generation of my professors that everything we did when we started and I was in school and I started finally I started this quote I started to go to high school in 89 so when the wall fell in Germany so the cold war was over and I was finishing my studies in 2001 when here the the attack happened and in these years so what was called the years of the end of history before another history start in 2001 it was this kind of deconstructing times so I remember that when we were staging Shakespeare it was deconstructing Shakespeare when we were talking I don't know about philosophy then we were talking about topics of philosophy don't talk about reality and reality is not touchable I remember that when we started the professors were saying what you learn is not are not facts and is not acting it is how you have approach to information and what you do is collecting information and when we were writing articles we had to collect information about when I wrote my first seminary in Paris and it was about the use of subtitles in the films of Godard so very specific absurd things and we had a lot of moral discussions about it so it was this time when we started to question the canon and I think all the things were super super important but I describe how this whole action was leading to this situation that I described in the in the film Savant by Molière that the ruling class was created that was only interesting their own sensitivities and in their own knowledge and in their criticism of almost everything and in this book I in the first chapter I describe this movement and then the four writers or the five I don't remember over information you think this is one of the complications of our time? I read hundreds of articles to write a little article about Godard and in the end I start criticizing the articles because I'm kind of paralyzed in this action of reading all these articles another one is I think moralization I don't know the translations perhaps you wrote it though you say critique, the critiquing of course since we had a university I liked what you wrote I thought made me releasing tell us a bit your critique of critique where you say why is it complicated, why is it standing in the way of acting? I mean you always have times of I mean the very old book I wrote was called to be done critique of postmodern reason and I do a bit the same like in the first chapter here to talk about a certain time in intellectual history of the West to say okay there was the time when we deconstructed what we called objectivity, what we called social class what we called even the socialism in itself and everything was deconstructed gender was of course deconstructed and it was good to do so but next what kind of collectivity can be reconstructed out of all this how can civil society which was completely deconstructed of course by liberalism but also by trying to emancipate all the minorities how can there be a collective force again and that's why then after this the second chapter comes and I start meeting people and movements that are already I mean the landless movement is three generations ahead to the European left because they occupy and not like some students that occupy a house and make a big story out of it they occupy land they create a nation they produce they are the biggest producer of rise of Latin America so this is really a but in a biological sense and to learn from this objectivity is because when you then look at the landless movement you have many people coming from I don't know people like us from the white middle class from the cities then you have people from the black movement then you have people that is interested that is from the indigenous movements and they all came together to create out of this difference a new collective mind and how does this work in a not destructive sense how can this kind of you know identity politics bring together with a Marxist idea of becoming I don't know ruler of your own history all together the idea of the choir is very much based for me this idea how can you bring all the identities together to have one voice at a certain point when you need it and then you don't need it anymore for another moment and you don't use it and then you need it again so how would this shift in between identity and collectivity work and what is the way of living and what is the rhetorics and what are the institutions we need and so I think your call out we have to be part we have to change the world we critique the world and then we exchange our critiques what is news thing what is he say so a critique between Chris is not changing anything it's no it does not leave any trace there has to be something radically different and then you I think I like very much also your thoughts on the morality he says the complexities you know we are encountering in the world of art by source in writing for universities that you say you know there is what you think there you're right now going also through it and you work so tell a little bit because I think also for the American context it is of significance what you say I mean there is a there is in sociology there is a there is a rule that the less for example inside the society there are differences the more you would feel every difference the less you are the more you are in a group where everybody is the same you would feel the little difference in this group so you are a bit older than me you are I don't know coming from another part of the German speaking world you have a and so on and then we could moralize it and we could start to discuss it because we stay in this little group you know and we don't open it anymore and I think that is what happening what is happening in a lot of parts of our institutions of our way of living and perhaps always was I don't know how much this is this is only for now and and so my question always was how can we open it in a way that we don't do that anymore that we don't search for this pure spaces where we meet the same people to then find out that we are different at all you know how can we produce art out of difference how can we not make a problem out of it but really say okay we are in the end of the day confronted with the same problems and I think this is the the big question since not 89 perhaps since 1960 perhaps even since Dalinism perhaps since the second world war perhaps even before perhaps communism was always only a crazy idea never happened and the class never existed but the big question of humanity was always how can we understand ourselves and perhaps even further than humanity when you think with Alton Krenak who thinks the whole living system of the planet as one big complex but one big network how can we start to act and to understand how this whole thing works how can we overcome I don't know individualism and I mean mass movements were more or less multiplicated individualisms so how can we overcome this how can this change and I think this is the this is the question that was asked after the construct you know was at that yeah so this is I told you that I had in my festival this little problem let's say the last days that I wanted to do a project with Ukrainian and Russian artists and it was problematized in such a fight there is a war as you know in Europe between Russia and Ukraine and the whole west of Europe is for mostly for Ukraine but for good reasons because it's an invasion and Vienna is very close to Ukraine so and is full of Ukrainians of course and also Russians and it was problematized in such a fast way by media and by by journalists and by artists that the trying to do that exploded more or less immediately so we announced it I think three days ago four days ago and already it completely exploded of course in the end you say because of mistakes of communicating because of this because of that because you are you always know better afterwards but you just find out that we find ourselves in a situations where the contradictions are so fast moralized are so fast I don't know I mean used in a way and introduced in a in a in a media system that you are lost so you could say that my work is turning around these kind of questions how can artists and activists from Brazil from the Amazon, from Europe, from Flanders and so on work together how can we kind of bring groups together that are so extreme in their differences and even in their let's say interest in the specific project that this kind of collective is exploding all the time but still becomes what you could call a choir so how is this working and the normal answer is let's try to find safe spaces let's try to be more or less the same that these problems will not arise arise in the first place I think also very interesting in his book Mido was almost as the French was a critic that you say don't be afraid of contradictions really don't fall into that if you don't have this you can't do that or the moralizing in that what you say in the way that stands in the way of creating something you're going to quote a Pasolini who said only when I'm deeply conflicted I'm deeply contradicted I know my work is consequential something will happen and I think to even live with contradictions this is beautiful for example really a very well functioning activist action always is super contradictory so for me I remember when we were I don't know how much this action is known in the US but Pussy Riot is grouping in Russia happened to be there the evening before the famous I was church concert right? many months before because we did a project and this group they were playing in all kind of contexts so they were playing on the Red Square and they were playing in the McDonald's and they were playing and so on and nothing happened and then they said ok tomorrow we play in the holy saviour cathedral and everybody was like ok yeah why not we can play there too so they did it and it became a huge scandal because Putin or Medvedev at that moment and then I think Putin they used it to kind of connect the orthodox church to the state power by saying ok this is western liberal shit we don't want this and Pussy Riot said as the orthodox church goes together with the state power and the orthodox church was always independent by invading the church we are the real saints and then even the orthodox intelligentsia was dividing and one was saying Pussy Riot is the real saints and the other one said no they are against the church because it was disrespectful it was they invaded the space of the church and it was completely contradictory and then we made what we called the Moscow Trials around it so we brought everybody included in this process that two of them were already in the camp and one was still out so we made it together with her and other people and it was super interesting to see how in the Sakharov center a civil rights center he created a trial you know putting them really on trial following the procedures of a real trial and again with the advocates and with everybody included in the first trial it was very interesting to me to see because we formed a popular jury just out of people from Moscow to see how they were completely divided by looking on this action and of course I came from western Europe and for me these artists they were right you know and I was against Putin etc but then when you looked from all these perspectives it was very different and then I found out that this was now it became a landmark in art history if you want this concert in the in the holy savior cathedral but I found out and I think it's kind of a rule because it was so contradictory because it was aggressive it was invasive it was destroying the safe space of these believers it was completely I mean for many, many points it was the first time it was decided and on the other side it was occupying the holy space it was occupied by state power at that very moment when the orthodox I don't know the English word but the chief of all the orthodox believers in Russia officially started to support Putin so it was and that made that project so interesting it's of course completely different from ten years ago but still today when you would go there you would find a division inside inside intelligentsia about this about this crystallize what was hidden or what people normally maybe don't want to talk or think about but it was already coming closer to the end and we will also take some questions but we couldn't have this talk about talking about the idea of the real the theater of the real as Carol Martin says and there is an obsession of course in our times with realism, with facts, with data someone said you know if you want to look for spiritual meaning you go to the Wall Street pages of the economy section and then the market will do this and the market will do that and almost got like you don't know what will happen but it's all based on data in fact which is somehow a reality a reality as you point out in your book that is without ideas, without vision with just facts and information your idea to turn it around the idea of a global reality the poetics of a global reality as a counter model to that I think is also fundamental, a great contribution to the discourse so tell a little bit what does it mean to you the idea of as you call it the poetics of a global realism it's again connecting people or connecting organizations that are disconnected in the globalized economy for example I talked about the eastern Congo when you connect east Congo and Switzerland and you bring these two realities for example the market of raw materials together so the mines on the one side and on the other side the big refineries the banks and so on you will find the reality of the system of the whole reality of the raw materials market because it's not tangible and I do it by bringing people together for example when we do the Congo Tribunal we bring together mining workers people from the militias people working in the big companies NGO workers, people from the UN employers etc etc in one fictional Tribunal which becomes the stage of the world market but very real, very realistic inside the same what we did in the Moscow Trials when we were in the Sakhov Centre and we did this trial it was extremely real because everybody was there and at the same time you're super surreal because this space doesn't exist because the world economy would bring the Orthodox people here and push you right there and the mining workers here and so on and so on so creating this melting pot and seeing what then this melting pot creates as a rhetorics, as a story perhaps as a reality you know perhaps it becomes a lot, it becomes an institution it becomes a new reality so this is what is global realism and what we call realism until now was always local realism and I was always asking myself but why information, the market, the climate the history that you know the whole planetary organism is of course in a global way real but the rhetorics of the art for example for me in Europe when you go from Germany to France and you know it perhaps better than me you find a completely other theatre you cross just the language border and you come to another system with other classics other acting style there is no global exchange about it it's a bit but not really I mean exchange by inviting so this is this is what I try to do and I think changing this is only possible by bringing people together or creating institutions that bring these people together to work together that come from all kind of different places from the system and I liked very much also what you said it has to be real or look real or a copy of a reality the way of making it the production, the rehearsals the making of it becomes reality when you can demonstrate something you say it also shows you can change it because you capture something you can demonstrate it you can change something and it becomes real through the act on stage and at the very end you are a director of course it's a book talk but all these ideas you have ultimately you are in a rehearsal space how do you work then with your actors do you improvise the scene I know Kastor often puts a video camera on says actors improvise that scene he has like 10 days recorded and then they have to redo what they did and that's the show as a radical idea how do you implement how do you put these ideas I think are remarkable ideas there an answer perhaps what theater can be and should be one of many answers of course like in a museum we have many styles but how do you put it on stage how do you work your ideas on acting on working with texts it's a complex question but what do you think is different from other directors it's a different question because it's a difficult question because it's it's very different from one project to the other for example I do projects that are happening once and of course I would there I would have some rules everybody knows these rules and these rules are based in the space what are the rules in the Congo Tribunal Tribunal formats the rules are the the rules of a fictional tribunal but everybody who is there is real and everybody what is said is real but you only know that you have 10 minutes for example for your speech or for this interrogation but you don't know what will be said but you know perhaps or the prosecutor knows what he wants to find out and it happens once you also didn't know you just gave the structure of the trial I remember when we did the Moscow trials and we were judging again Pussy Riot and two were in the camp and one was in my trial and it was not clear if they would be judged again for what they did because this popular jury was just like half of them were on Putin's side or not even on Putin's side they were just against these kind of of western liberalism in their eyes and I remember that I was there and I was saying okay but now they are judged again in the Sakhov center it's closed since then but which always was the iconic place of freedom in Russia and Pussy Riot is judged in that place by me in the Sakhov center what have I done then I can suicide and this is one way of doing theater that you're completely panicking and exposed to a machine much bigger than everybody and and then there are other place that we somehow chaotic way would develop so we when we did until in the Amazon it was from 2019 to 2023 and it was meetings and working here and there and in the Amazon and rewriting and filming and doing this and that and everybody writing and then somehow bringing it together but then comes the point when you have a touring plane you know you will play it in I don't know 20, 30 countries you have to kind of empower four or five people that are on stage that they really have it in their hands it's kind of a psychological acting in a way you would say the use of stage acting almost as if it is a state theater or is it different I think I mean in the way of acting I try to always work together with actors that come from very different acting schools so or non-actors and for example now in this very moment I do a play called Medias Children and I work with children to stage media about aripides because I was always interested by the Greek tragedies but especially by display but you know the psychological I mean nothing against aripides but the psychological level of display is very low and but then I was interested in saying okay if this is a metaphor of you know because I was the sad thing just very short then because it's based on that I was the story of Medias she falls in love and it doesn't turn out to be a good situation for her because Jason under the influence of Creon gets another wife and she kills her children and she lost everything behind she went out of her family to find love and then she becomes unhappy and this is of course the story of getting old you leave your family behind you try to be happy but then you don't become happy I mean in short and then I was talking to children they were saying you know Milo we know the best would be if we all would disappear because humanity the planet this doesn't fit so humanity should disappear but we would propose that we are the last generation so we live and then we stop it but we would like to live we would like to have a career we would like to have children and love and I thought this is interesting it's a very vitalistic concept of the tragic you know so we should do media with children because they know exactly what it means to move out of the family they know exactly what all these is and and then you start working with what they tell you and at the same moment they have their ideas of acting you know and these ideas are very absurd of course often but also very nice and so you bring this together and then you have some actors on stage that are real actors in the way that they know to use the space and you mix it and at one point you find and that was yesterday in this Taylor Mack show and what I like very much about this show and what I try to do too is to see how a group of people forms a community and they sing or they do Shakespeare or they do or they do deconstructing whatever or they just hang around or they play music but that you feel the parallel existence of loneliness and of coming together and loneliness coming together and bringing this space to visibility and share it with the public this is what I think is theater about and I think it's a very very successful one maybe we'll open it up to a couple of questions and I will come down and also bring you the mic first of all really thank you Milo for coming and taking the time and answering and thanks to all our viewers also and Hal round so anyone has a question or comment here we go so one two thanks so much for this rich exchange I was curious to learn more about the dynamic between your writing process and your other work by definition at least usually unless you let AI write your book it takes a while you have to really engage with your own thinking and it's a very lonely process for most people which is not what your other work is which is very dialogically centered and I'm wondering how you shift gears between a project of writing this book and engaging with your other work do you keep them separate and do you let them connect and is it a fruitful collaboration or is it just a very productive contradiction as you discussed and bringing the dialogical element in I'm curious about your collaboration with your translator thank you I you know theater and this is perhaps an answer to your question how to write because theater is a very nice work because you always have the premiere and you know that on the premiere it has to be theirs whatever and writing for rehearsals is very nice because you know on Saturday at 9 starts the rehearsal and then you have to deliver the text and perhaps you write it at 6 in the morning on Saturday you know but at 9 you have to deliver it and I think this idea of delivering is very very helpful and it's my model for almost everything I do that I know that this is the moment I mean this seems now very practical but in the end of the day that's what it is and the difference between writing and improvising is that you are right to say that when you're together with other people to come into the state of acting in the way of not of acting like an actor but acting like a human being is very simple you know if what I say now would have to write in my room in the hotel would be much more difficult than tell it here and everybody knows that and that's why we are searching for these moments to overcome the loneliness and to create and to do it together is very simple to do it alone is difficult and I think perhaps there are other people and it's the other way around but I always try to transform the solitude of writing to a process that is that is collective so that I know I have to write this because we need this text or we and then it goes very fast and I think the second thing which is super important is is the acceptance of imperfection that you know that you write it like this that's why I write many books because I know this book is okay for now but in a year I need another one and in two years it's another one and now the interaction with Lilly who makes translation is a quite long one since years we are not on this book but on many topics we are in exchange so and sometimes she likes my work and sometimes she criticizes it and because I was reading it the first time she was translating I just felt okay I have to read it first for myself because reading it out loud was a bit strange not because it's a bad translation of course it's much better than what was written in German so it becomes sense now in English but it's it becomes in a nice way appropriated by Lilly and I feel when I read it every translation it's now not a critique about the concept of translating by Lilly but it's just I feel that okay that's her perspective that's interesting and I I see it with for example one other dramaturg I'm working together now to translate because my Flemish is very bad and more or less non-existent comparing to French or German or English even so I would write it in German and she would translate it into Flemish and while she translates it I I see how she distorts the sense and often it becomes better and often I think she loses something then we would talk about it so translating is perhaps a bit like like improvising on on a on a text or I don't know situation that you would give and you would improvise in that direction or in that direction it for me is I mean there's a big theory about translating but for me it was always interesting and even a bit shocking how crazy this process is of translating and how different the outcome can be I just wanted to talk for or ask you a little about the idea of institutions given the promise that they're creative their creation of new institutions but here you are running another institution in Vienna and I wonder how are you unpacking it how are you helping them unpack it how are how are you living with the structure of that institution given your desire to create brand new ones or to work with brand new ones I mean my experience with Vienna is still young and perhaps I talk better about Ghent which was an institution we for reasons a bit unknown the theater of Ghent completely collapsed at one point because of struggles of the team because of financing because of many things and when I arrived we always made the joke it's like Germany 45 so everything is destroyed and it was very nice to build this institution up together with the survivors but also together with a lot of new people so this was an institution that was very open to change because it was everything was better than what was there somehow and I mean I'm exaggerating to make it a bit shorter but at one point there's this beautiful quote by Bertrand Precht he's saying that if there's a city A where they love me and the city B where they need me I would decide to go to city B and at one point I felt that in this institution everybody would love me and everybody would love each other and it was really a super nice way of working and this was the moment when I thought okay perhaps now another group of people should see how they can develop it further we did what we can and we could now stay for a long time and be and continue the circle of what we created and arrange it a little bit but it should change and now it was I think a week ago there are now new artistic directors and they are introducing a lot of ideas about working with AI and working with rituals and stuff that I was I don't know I don't know so much about what they do and I said I looked at it and said oh I'm so happy I went away because what they do is is completely unforeseen and I would never have done it and yeah I think an institution is always stronger and bigger than and this is nice than everybody of us so this is the crazy thing of it but at the same time it's also very nice to see that you come somewhere and you go and you change an institution and then you somehow leave yeah I mean as a general idea and I think on the next panel we talk about a lot about institutions because when we talk about institutions it's the way how our society creates and changes structural structures actually it's done into institutions just another word for for changing society or maintaining a wrong way of producing art for example a wrong way or a good way but however you do it you do it in institutions and I think for a long time I was also obsessed by this kind of avant-garde philosophy that you should act outside the institutions and the institutions are bad but I think that I was really wrong and I think that everybody of us should go into the institutions and change them if they are fine why would you change it but I think you should work into inside the institutions I don't know what is the meaning of institutions in the sector of arts and theater here but in Europe they are big, they are strong they have a lot of money but they are led by complete idiots and this is problematic and it's also a self-critique of course because others would say it's about me I know but I think if you have enough nice people going into institutions that at least try to change a little bit how foreseeable it is what comes out of these institutions then it's fine one last one I'm currently researching the intersectionality of journalism and theater and I feel like a lot of your work has done like with documentary theater with Laura Priest and I was curious about how with your work the journalistic inquiry is sort of if at all if it's fed into the work that you've done and I guess this is sort of an aside a world in which journalism can be I suppose pushed forward by the work that theater can do I don't know if that makes sense journalism yeah I mean, you know, when he was saying that there was a journalist, this is a myth I was never a journalist and perhaps because I have really a big respect for this it's a profession and I never you wrote, right? I mean, it was more a trick to work on things that I'm interested in so I was of course doing film and theater and you know, partage in countries I wanted to know I was not a real journalist like I would I don't know, for me real journalism means go to a newspaper try to transform the way how a newspaper works or is it online, is it printed what exactly is it, what does it mean as a journalist, how engaged are you by doing investigation do you try to change society through journalism so and I always knew that I would do this in theater and in film because it's just the place, it's my place but I know and I have good friends that are doing what I do in film and theater they do it in journalism they become, you know concerned of how stuff work in my newspaper are we independent from this and from that how long time do we have to write a reportage how do we find the money to give to this person because we know he wants to investigate, I don't know the company of Glencore or whatever so we give this person like three months, four months, five months time like in some crazy idea of the sixties, you know that you would have all this time so and and I think these are I mean in this of course I think the logical allies for me it's also the whole institutions of justice that I'm super interested in then journalism of course or media and the arts so these are the three sectors that are I'm always trying to link because I feel that these are the institutions that change and think and transform society by representing distributing reality you know by declaring I don't know something for interesting or not for visible or just invisible and when you would tell a story of the western mind you could tell it through important moments of journalism somehow I mean photojournalism of course that's the most significant but you and yeah so I think it's a very close and it's a bit by decided by the accidents of your character where you would start to act a very last short period. Thank you so my name is Susan Buck Morris and I was involved in one of your projects during during COVID and I just want to ask you when one sees so much of politics today politics rather than art that is performance and even legal performances including this very moving way that South Africa has made a claim on the world court how would you how do you think about the difference between the performance of politics in a different sense from the performance of art there was there was a when I was listening to you I was thinking about one anecdote of the Moscow trials because the the advocate of Pussyright in my fake trial was of course the advocate of the real trial of Pussyright and she lost the real trial and I remember when I was close to lose again the trial but now the fake trial and it was the same advocate and I saw that if this would happen this is really tragic and in the in the beginning of the trial there was a journalist coming I think it was Masha Gessen from the from the US and she was there and she was asking her but why would you do this fake trial this theatrical trial she said when you did a real trial and she said you know what this is the first trial that is absolutely not theatrical for me this is real but what I do in politics or what I do in Russian justice this is theater and perhaps the role of artists to the theater lies if these words exist reality you know and to confront it in what it is and to change it because I mean there is this beautiful quote of change everything so that nothing is changed from Ilgato Pardo from this novel so the conservative mind talk all the time about change but don't change anything this is the theater of politics and to find a basic way of real change of real representation of real justice of real being together and beauty and all these kind of things but also of real sadness and of real melancholy so to stop perhaps the theater of being and to confront the fact of dying for example I mean many plays that are about the fact of dying seems a bit old style to do so but you know and and I think that's what art should do and what theater should do and what of course journalism should do or what justice should do so really again thank you all for coming taking time out but I think really our thanks and for taking the time and taking this so serious and for answering and I think you really make a great very significant contribution in the chorus also you know of world theater makers global theater makers you are part of it a lot of people talk about the community we have to bring them in it means they are not part of it you are part of it and through you we also are so it means the world to us and thank you all for coming at 6 30 we talk about what he calls beyond the 2% the incredible small representation of women composers women musician on the stages in Europe especially and at 8 o'clock Mila will show 4 5 of the trailers of work he talked about and then get a little bit more into detail and also I think it will help us to visualize and to see because so very few I think one show has come here so in case you can come back thank you and again Mila