ANTIGONE IN THE AMAZON

Danone sweetened natural yoghurt... with palm oil. Extra fine Nestlé milk chocolate, a glass of milk in every bar... And palm oil. Ferrero Rocher has truly got us... With their palm oil. Throughout the pandemic, the Brazilian firm Agropalma intensified their activities in response to their client’s increased demand (Ferrero, Danone, Nestlé...) so that they didn’t go without one of their main raw ingredients. This activity was neither eco-friendly, nor just, nor sustainable. They are Earth-snatchers who violate people’s human rights, destroy the Amazon, industrial exploitation of the land right in Earth’s lungs. All this at a time when we need to be protecting Mother Earth. The thrust of Sophocles' Antigoneis that the burial traditions are the unwritten laws of the gods and are more important than the decrees of one man. Comparisons can be drawn with man’s relationship to the Earth and our capitalist endeavours.

Luckily, there is always an antigone capable of facing up to Goliath forces. For Antigone in the Amazon, Milo Rau and his team travelled to the Brazilian state of Pará, where, in 1996, the locals marched for agrarian reform, but the police brutality launched against them left 19 fatalities. An activist from Movimento Sem Terra (MST), María de Araújo, witnessed the horrific attack on the innocent. It was re-enacted this year at an event in remembrance of the massacre in which 200 people blocked a rural jungle road. Milo Rau’s film crew and the indigenous actress of Tariana and Tukano origin, Kay Sara, were there to epitomise the events of that shocking day. Kay Sara states: “Indigenous people's struggles to save the rainforest has only been taken note of for the past couple years. My people were first oppressed and then colonised, which means that many indigenous people still have no rights to their motherland.”

After the productions Orestes in Mosul in the former capital of the Islamic State and the Jesus film The New Gospel in the southern Italian refugee camps, Milo Rau and his team travelled to the Amazon in Brazil to conclude their Trilogy of Ancient Myths. Milo Rau has created a political Antigone for the 21st century, together with indigenous people, activists and actors from Brazil and Europe. It takes place on occupied land as a bloody clash between traditional wisdom and global turbo-capitalism, humanity's struggle against its self-inflicted downfall through greed for profit, blindness, and arrogance. Not least, as a question to art itself: What can engaged art accomplish? Can art help where politics fails? There is always that niggling feeling of doubt when making a strong denouncing statement. From the moment you have that impulse of solidarity, affection, and respect that, nevertheless, cannot avoid a certain extractivism, a certain vein of colonialism, which is not at all aggressive in this case. But we are white, upper-middle class Europeans who are going to consume these stories from the other side of the world in buildings full of security and comfort, just as we go about our day consuming Danone or Nestlé products. Recognising and being aware of the differences and similarities between these two forms of consumption is, at least, a good reason to continue doing the work that Milo Rau does: politics and theatre. The fusion on stage gives voice to people who put their bodies in front of infamy, who consciously use their bodies as a political and artistic tools.

Milo Rau states: “According to studies from Global Witness and Save the Rainforest, our little chocolate bunnies are ‘fair trade’ made using ‘green’ palm oil. They contain the blood of displaced small farmers and the burnt smell of the devastated Amazon. But if you go to their websites, the first thing you see are long articles about sustainability, fair production, and reforestation. The smiling face of destruction that takes us back to Antigone. Creon is a very interesting and intoxicating character. He is not a mad dictator, but a thoroughly modern ruler who knows exactly how to transfigure exploitation and destruction in a zeitgeisty way. This is where we, together with the MST, intervene. We will rip the mask off the face of corporations in a classic activist way and try to show real alternatives.” Because, as Kay Sara points out in her final statement, “this madness must end.”