Re-enactment e Bildung: il caso etico de La reprise di Milo Rau

Abstract

Milo Rau is considered one of the most provocative directors currently. Rau is the artistic director of the NTGent theatre, an activist intellectual, but also a politically engaged sociologist and journalism expert. The director acts in the current discrepancy of performance practices. He reconfigured theatrical aesthetics according to that “global realism” for which “theatre is nothing other than a very concrete return to this simple Aristotelian lesson: everything we consider as real is nothing but a social convention” (M. Rau) . The study investigates the epistemological principles of the re-enactment procedures that characterize Rau’s world theatre. The work analyzes the practices and knowledge that differentiate re-enactment from the reality trend (“It’s not about truth in the technical sense, but about the truth of ‘repetition’ in Kierkegaard’s sense” states the director). The case study is the show La Reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I) of 2018, in which there is the reconstruction of the homophobic murder of the thirty-year-old Belgian of North African origin Ihsane Jarfi, which took place in Liège in 2012. The study traces the writing process linked to the show, conceived as a struggle against dominant discourses and the bias imposed by the Law on the subject. The study analyzes in particular the methods of reconfiguration of the signs of the theatrical medium (the event/document relationship, also in relation to the media modeling of the performance) and the relationship of the device of La reprise with the spectator. Starting from the hermeneutic legacy of Butler’s thought (in particular the post-Hegelian ethics of the recognition of Precarious Life), the study analyzes how Rau brings to the stage a social sculpture that questions the demarcations between ethics and politics, between life private and public sphere. The thematization of the principle of vulnerability of the body, placed in the normative excess of “social temporality” and in the performativity of legal and moral action, shows how La reprisedescribes the opaque (ir)responsibility of the spectatorial subject, summoned into a public space which becomes a civil agora. The death of Ihsane Jarfi is not an example of “false moral orthopedics”; the assassination can perhaps become the beginning of a theatrical educational project that aims to make the spectator an active and aware citizen.