“Provincializing Europe? The Migratory Aesthetics of  Milo Rau’s Empire and Orestes in Mosul”

Mobility and migration (within and beyond Europe) have become a central theme of artistic production around the globe and have given rise to performance practices that reflect the changing realities of our lifeworld. This lecture takes Milo Rau’s reinvention of the traditional city theatre at the NT Gent (Belgium), whose artistic director he was from 2018 to 2023, as example to further explore the complex relation between migration, theatre, and (the ethics of) form, by focusing on two of Rau’s productions which address mobility and migration on a European scale. While Empire (2016) serves to introduce and examine the entanglement of ethics and aesthetics in Rau’s theatre that culminated in his Ghent Manifesto (2018), Orestes in Mosul (2019) is explored as a controversial realisation of the ‘city theatre of the future’ and the ‘global ensemble’ that Rau’s manifest outlined. Both works critically scrutinize Europe’s relations to its ‘Others’ and delineate an ethics of acting and spectating that ultimately reveals Rau’s theatre to be 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 24).

Janine Hauthal is assistant research professor of intermedial studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research and publications focus on theatre and migration, intermediality, Anglophone ‘fictions of Europe’, metareference across media and genres, British drama since the 1990s, postdramatic theatre, contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, as well as transgeneric, intermedial and cultural narratology. Her most recent publications include the articles “The Loop as Transmedial Principle in Susanne Kennedy’s Drei Schwestern” (Susanne Kennedy: Reanimating the Theatre, 2023) and “Contemporary (Post-)Migrant Theatre in Belgium and the Migratory Aesthetics of Milo Rau’s Theatre of the Real” (The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration, 2023) as well as the special issue On Readers and Reading (Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap 14, 2023, co-edited with Hannah Van Hove). Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in Twenty-First-Century Black British Women’s Literature” (2021-24).

 

Organizer: Nassim Balestrini (University of Graz)

 

For detailed information, please see the attached document.