RESISTANCE NOW!
by
MILO RAU
September 2, 2025
Milo Rau will travel to New York and join the DOWN TO EARTH Festival on Tuesday, September 2nd. As part of his RESISTANCE NOW! project Rau will be part of a panel with Tania Bruguera and Richard Schechner and in two conversations, one with Frank Hentschker and one with Carol Martin. Following will be a reading of Elfriede Jelinke’s Endsieg: The Second Coming, with actor Nicole Ansari. As an internationally recognized theatre director and artistic director of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna, Milo Rau along with Frank Hentschker will lead a day-long symposium that will connect political developments in Central and Western Europe and Latin America with those unfolding in the United States and their impact on the cultural sector. The symposium will introduce attendees to Rau's School of Resistance, a project that fosters international collaborative solidarity in the face of global threats to artistic freedom. DOWN TO EARTH will bring artists, activists, researchers, philosophers, politicians, and local guests into the conversation to share their visions of how to participate in a global, solidarity-based response to this charged contemporary moment. The symposium will be accompanied by a reading of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s play ENDSIEG: The Second Coming featuring Nicole Ansari-Cox. The staged reading serves as an example of how artistic intervention works within the RESISTANCE NOW project. The day's events are free and open to the public. It is co-produced by the Martin E. Segal Center and Milo Rau’s Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna and part of RESISTANCE NOW TOGETHER.
AGENDA: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm TOWN HALL New York theatre artists, producers, students and festival makers will discuss the state of theatre and performance under the new government. 3:30 pm Milo Rau in conversation with Frank Hentschker 4:00 pm RESISTANCE NOW! Political Theatre Today Panel with Tania Bruguera, Milo Rau and Richard Schechner. 5:00 pm Theater of the Real Carol Martin in conversation with Milo Rau. 6:00 pm Reading ENDSIEG—THE SECOND COMING, by Elfride Jelinek in a translation by Gitta Honegger. With actor Nicole Ansari. Directed by Milo Rau, followed by Q & A with the director.
About The Artists
Milo Rau
Milo Rau (1977, Bern) is a director, author and lecturer and was director of the NTGent (Belgium). Rau studied sociology, German and Romance languages and literature in Paris, Berlin and Zurich. Critics have described him as the "most influential" (Die Zeit), "most honoured" (Le Soir) and "most scandalous" (New York Times) artist of our time. Since 2002, he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions. His theatre productions have been shown at all major international festivals and have toured over 30 countries worldwide. Rau has received numerous awards, including the 3sat Prize 2017, the Saarbrücken Poetry Lectureship for Drama 2017 and the prestigious ITI Prize of the World Theatre Day in 2016. In 2020, he received the prestigious Münster Poetry Lectureship for his artistic oeuvre. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund in Sweden, and in 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Ghent. He currently serves as director of the Vienna Festival – Wiener Festwochen.
Tania Bruguera
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University. Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. Bruguera's work pivots around issues of power and control, and several of her works interrogate and re-present events in Cuban history. As a result of her artistic actions and activism, Bruguera has been arrested and jailed several times by the Cuban authorities.
Carol Martin
Carol Martin is Professor of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Director of the Honors Program and an affiliated faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her books include Theatre of the Real (Palgrave, 2012), which explores international iterations of theatre about real events; Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (University Press of Mississippi, 1994), a study of the development of dance marathons in the U.S. that received the De la Torre Bueno Award; Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (Palgrave, 2010), which examines how the notion of the “real” in theatre is both asserted and challenged; A Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 1996); and, co-edited with Henry Bial, Brecht Sourcebook (Routledge, 2000). She has guest-edited special issues of the leading international performance studies journal TDR: The Drama Review and published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary theatre, which have been translated into French, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Turkish. Martin is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a fellowship at Tokyo University, two Fulbright U.S. Scholar Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the De la Torre Bueno Award, and invitations to deliver keynote lectures internationally. Martin is also the Editor of the book series “In Performance” (Seagull Books, 2007-) devoted to anthologies of international plays and performance texts including the recent Oblivion and Other Play from Post Revolutionary Iran (2025) edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi and Made in China 2.0 and Other Texts (20260 by Wang Chong edited by Tarryn Chun. Her current research explores the staging of the spectator in relation to the intersections of memory, performance, architecture, objects, and cultural identity in historic house museums.
Richard Schechner
Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at New York University. As an experienced theatre director, scholar, and researcher, he pioneered the field of Performance Studies, which has opened spaces for deepening the confluence between social performance and artistic performance. He worked closely with anthropologist Victor Turner, from 1976 until Turner’s death in 1983, in the development of questions around ritual and performance. Schechner’s books include Public Domain (1968), Environmental Theater (1973), Performance Theory (1976, 2003), The End of Humanism (1981), Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), The Future of Ritual (1993), Performed Imaginaries (2015), and Performance Studies—An Introduction (4th edition, 2020). Many of these publications were developed in dialogue with performances and plays with groups Schechner founded, co-founded, or with which he was deeply involved: East End Players, The Free Southern Theater, The Performance Group, and East Coast Artists. A way of working emerged, seen in works, such as Dionysus in 69 (1968), Commune (1970), and Imagining O (2014), as well as the street “guerrilla theatre” Schechner staged in the 1970s that drew spectators into a more immersive and participatory experience of theatre. Schechner also created a singular relationship with the classic repertoire in pieces, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, Oedipus of Seneca, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, and The Oresteia. Schechner edits the TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press) and the Enactments book series (Seagull Books).
Elfriede Jelinek
The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek received the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature and many other prestigious literary and theatre awards. She is best known in the US from Michael Haneke’s film The Piano Teacher based on her novel Die Klavierspielerin. Since the Nobel award she has written only one novel, but many plays addressing urgent issues of our times. Her themes include the politics of memory and guilt (Rechnitz); the 2008 global financial crisis, (Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns); the rapidly escalating European refugee crisis (Die Schutzbefohlenen); the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris (Wut); her immediate response to Donald Trump’s first election (Auf dem Königsweg), followed now by Endsieg, which she wrote within two weeks of the election. Jelinek is one of the most produced living authors/playwrights in the German language world. Her plays are presented by all the major theatre companies often staged by leading innovative directors. These productions have been invited to countless prestigious international festivals and received numerous awards. Her plays have also been produced across Europe, in Japan, India, Australia, and China. In the US the only fully professional staging was the 2013 New York Woman’s Project Theatre’s production of Jackie, directed by Tea Alagic. It was nominated for two Lucille Lortel awards, for outstanding solo show and outstanding sound design. Most recently, her opus magnum, the epic horror novel Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) about the undead victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust was published in the US in Gitta Honegger’s translation in March 2024 by Yale University Press, twenty-nine years after its first German publication. As of now, it has been (very perceptively) reviewed in the mainstream press by The Washington Post and The Nation. Photo Credit: Claudia Müller
Gitta Honegger
Gitta Honegger is the longtime translator of Elfriede Jelinek. Her translations of Jelinek’s performance texts include: Sun; Shadow: Eurydice Says (both Performing Arts Journal); Rechnitz (The Avenging Angel); the Merchant’s Contracts- A Comedy of Economics; Charges (The Supplicants); Fury; On the Royal Road: The Burgher King; (all Seagull Books/U. of Chicago Press); the “Princess Plays” Jackie, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty (Theater); Air, Ashes, Full Disclosure (forthcoming at Rowohlt Theaterverlag), Winterreise (in process). Most recently, her translation of Jelinek’s opus magnum, the 666-page novel The Children of the Dead was published by Yale University Press in 2024. She also translated plays by Thomas Bernhard, Elias Canetti, Marie Luise Fleisser and others. Her cultural biography Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Yalu U. Press) was also published in her translation into German, Thomas Bernhard: Was ist das für ein Narr by Propyläen Verlag. Dr. Honegger was a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama and resident dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre, where she also directed. She lives in Santa Fe and Berlin. Photo Credit. Manfred Laubichler
Nicole Ansari-Cox
Nicole Ansari Cox is an award winning actor, director, writer and producer. Nicole’s career spans many different cultures and languages in Europe and North America, working with directors such as Stephen Soderbergh in Side effects to Trevor Nunn in the Westend and on Broadway as well as being in the company of the famed Thèâtre du Soleil under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine. Most recently she starred alongside her husband Brian Cox in the West end hit “the Score” and wrapped the US Biopic “ Winds of Change” , The UK movie “Your Fault” , “ Hotel Tehran” ( with Liam Neeson) , “Under the stars” ( with Tony Colette and Andy Garcia) and “Glenrothan”, directed by Brian Cox, which opens later this month at the International Theatre festival in Toronto and for which she also directed second unit and acted as an Executive Producer. She is about to start filming with Samuel L Jackson and Eva Greene for the movie “Just Play dead.” Photo Credit: RJ Lewis