Trailer(s) for the show, and interviews with the artists.
In this rendition of Antigone by Sophocles, director Milo Rau uses the play’s original framework to shape an allegory of present day resistance. In 1996, 19 members of the Brazil’s landless workers movement (MST) were murdered and dozens of others were injured by police during a protest in Eldorado do Carajás municipality. The producers of this play designed the scenography on the site of the protest, and survivors of the attack form the play’s Greek chorus, in order to viscerally overlay art and activism.
Learn more about the production and its various cultural and historical contexts.
Office Hours: Coming Soon
Get Into It
Get Thee to the Library
Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show… or to get your research into a higher gear post-show, when you can’t stop thinking about it.
Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos (editors). Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage (2020).
Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (editors). Vulnerability in Resistance 2016).
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro. Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality, and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (2021).
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy (2002).
Stephen Zepke and Nicolás Alvarado Castillo (editors). Violence and Resistance, Art and Politics in Colombia (2023).
Read All About It
Antigone in the Amazon at NYU Skirball is a US premiere. The world premiere was in 2023 at NTGent in Belgium.
Laura Cappelle for The New York TImes | May 15, 2023
‘Antigone in the Amazon’ Review: The Drama Is Brazil’s Land War
“Rau has turned his focus to Brazil and the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers Movement in which farmers have been occupying unworked fields and growing crops there.”
Malika Baaziz for Festival D'Avignon
Interview with Milo Rau
Why adapt Sophocles’s Antigone in a contemporary context and transpose it to the state of Pará in Brazil?
History Lessons and Current Events
Learn more about the particular time, place and politics that ground this reworking of Antigone – the Landless Worker’s Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), which was formed in the 80s in Brazil as a social movement working toward land reform, and is still active.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi for the Boston Review | September 5, 2019
Apocalypse Now
What Brazilian conservatives gain by letting the Amazon burn.
Julia Landau for Civil Eats | November 8, 2011
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement in New York: From the UN to Zuccotti Park
“The ultimate goal is agrarian reform: Brazil has alarmingly high levels of land concentration, and a simultaneous abundance of latifúndios–large land holdings–sitting unused, almost forgotten.”
Antonio Pele for Columbia University | October 17, 2003
BRAZIL’S LANDLESS WORKERS’ MOVEMENT AS RADICAL COÖPOWER
“In the countryside, less than 1% of the landowners control 46% of Brazil’s farmland.”
Jack Nicas for The New York Times | April 30, 2023
If You Don't Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It
“They arrived just before midnight, carrying machetes and hoes, hammers and sickles, with plans to seize the land.”
From the Archives
Milo Rau’s controversial Five Easy Pieces was onstage at NYU Skirball in 2019 – which was based on a true story of a serial killer who targeted children, starring seven children and one adult – can also be seen to grapple with the ethics of storytelling, the power of theatre and the relationship between audience, actor, and director.
Prep School: Five Easy Pieces
Readings, interviews, previews, and more.
Office Hours: Five Easy Pieces
Debra Levine interviews Hendrik Van Doorn and Kristof Blom about CAMPO & Milo Rau’s “Five Easy Pieces.”
Mar 7 - 9, 2019 | #theater
CAMPO/Milo Rau: Five Easy Pieces
Carol Martin on Five Easy Pieces
For Rau, while changing the story may be impossible, changing the world is not.
Extra Credit
If you missed NYU Skirball’s Book Club the first time around, this is a great opportunity to pick up Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (originally paired with JoAnne Akalaitis’s contemporary riff on the Greeks, Bad News: I was there). This novel is a modern take on Antigone, through the story of two British Muslim families, and their respective relationships to the British state.
“In the stories of wicked tyrants, men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on skips, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the prime minister: Let me take my brother home.”
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
A contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone”