JusticeWorld premiere

The second foray into opera by Switzerland’s best-known theatre director Milo Rau – after a streamed production of La clemenza di Tito during the pandemic – could not escape his quest for a theatrical form as a political discourse on the world today. We are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. February 2019. A tanker carrying acid collides with a bus on a road in Katanga, between Lubumbashi and Kolwezi. The result: more than twenty dead and many injured. The acid flowed into a nearby river, the same acid that is used in the processing of minerals by industry, in a mining region of Southern Congo where the road infrastructure is either in poor condition or non-existent. Milo Rau chooses an event involving a Swiss multinational in the DRC and delivers a choral elegy on the destiny of this village, of destinies torn to pieces and, beyond that, a reflection on the forces of good and evil and general interests. Between NGOs and multinationals, political powers and local populations, the entanglement of responsibility and of what is called “development” seems to be very sophisticated… Ghosts and victims, culprits and false culprits mingle with the myths and legends of this land as rich in stories as it is in minerals in this dance of death, brought to life by the libretto by a Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, in collaboration with Milo Rau.

The Catalan composer Hèctor Parra is also known for his musically rich adaptations of literary works into opera form. One of his most recent operas is Die Wohlgesinnten, based on the novel The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which premiered in Antwerp in 2019. Parra’s music is a music that steers clear of pure noise and is built on the edge of pleasure and pain. Its power hits you in the guts while its evocative and expressive capacity is written in a polished language and compact architecture. The creations of Milo Rau, essayist, director, and producer, are based on socio-historical and documentary research. He has created his own theatrical format between the narrative theatre genre and the courtroom. In 2015, Rau gathered 60 witnesses and experts in the Congolese civil war zone for his Congo Tribunal, one of his most ambitious political theatre projects.

Alongside the US tenor Peter Tantsits, who had already sung the role of Max Aue in Die Wohngesinnten by the same Parra, are singers specially cast for this creation, from the legendary Willard White to the young Congolese countertenor – he comes from Kolwezi – Serge Kakudji, known, among other things, for his show with Alain Platel Coup Fatal. Conductor Titus Engel from Zurich, a great specialist in contemporary music, who skillfully drove our Einstein on the Beach machine in 2019, will undoubtedly make this new score sparkle, perhaps also adding a few touches of Congolese rumba…