Thursday, 15th September | 18.30
LA PELANDA | SALA 2 | 1h 40′

theatre

Milo Rau

Five Easy Pieces

within the frame of Finestate Festival
national premiere
in Flemish with English and Italian subtitles

Concept, text and direction Milo Rau
Sets and costumes Anton Lukas
Video Marc Stephen
Music Herman Dune
Dramaturgy and production Stefan Blaeske
Direct assistance & performance coach  Peter Seynaeve
Child care & production assistant Ted Oonk
Research Mirjam Knapp & Dries Douibi
production management Masha Euchner – Martinez & Eva Karen Talbot
Production FIELD & IIPM
Co -produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels 2016, Münchner Kammerspiele, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, Kaserne Basel, Gessnerallee Zürich, Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), SICK! Festival UK, Sophiensaele Berlin & Le phénix scène nationale Valenciennes pôle européen de création

How do we learn to be human? What are success, love, desire and hate? How do we learn to live? And how do we learn to die? The IIPM – International Institute of Political Murder – will stage a theatrical investigation of these questions in “Live. Five Easy Pieces” using its aesthetics of reenactment and cruelty. Together with CAMPO, a production house with a long history in creating performances with children on stage for an adult audience, such as “That Night Follows Day” (Tim Etchells, 2007) and “Before Your Very Eyes” (Gob Squad, 2011), “Live. Five Easy Pieces” investigates this kind of production process through 5 scenic, short reenactments: children enact scenes from adult life and question our private and political lives and the taboo patterns that often underlie them. How bound are we to the unconscious and often cruel rituals of our society? How can the individual distance themselves from these rituals? And how can we speak at all about cruelty, passion, death, and impermanence?
“Live” also directly explores the boundaries of what children know, feel, and are allowed to do – and what is forbidden for them as actors and for us as the audience. What happens to us when we observe children playing at intimacy and violence? What do we learn from this about our own fears, doubts, and hopes? And what does the old social ritual of theatre “show” us? Where does it take us?
“Live. Five Easy Pieces” is a simple but at the same time universal experiment in five approaches, accompanied by new interpretations of classical children’s songs by the French cult band Herman Dune.

BIOGRAPHY

MILO RAU (born 1977) is a Swiss theatre and film director, journalist, essayist, and lecturer. Rau studied sociology, German and Roman studies in Paris, Zurich, and Berlin under Tzvetan Todorov and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. In 2007, Rau founded the theatre and film production com­pany International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) which he has been running ever since. His productions, campaigns and films (Montana, The Last Days of the Ceausescus, Hate Radio, City of Change, The Moscow Trials, The Zurich Trials, The Civil Wars, The Dark Ages, The Congo Tribunal) have been invited to some of the biggest national and inter­national festivals, including the Festival d’Avignon, the Berliner Theatertreffen, and the Kunstenfestival Brussels.
For the first time in his career, Milo Rau will – in response to arts centre CAMPO’s request – work with children on stage, thus creating a next step in CAMPO’s series of theatrical works with children.