What does it mean to flee? What about the meaning of homeland? What will the face of the new Europe look like? Concluding the European trilogy, Empire presents biographical close-ups of people who came to Europe as refugees, or have their homes on the fringes of the continent. After a glance at the ideological indifference in Western Europe in ‹The Civil Wars› and at the wars and explosions in ex-Yugoslavia, Russia and Germany in ‹The Dark Ages›, actors from Greece, Syria and Romania tell true and artistic tales of tragedy, torture, escape, sorrow, death and rebirth in ‹Empire›. Milo Rau assembles the individual fates as part of a larger cultural and historical tradition, and in five acts returns to the Greek. «The young Berner uses the power of depiction, not without simultaneously questioning it criti-cally, in order to fathom the intimate and collective causalities of our thought processes and behaviours.», writes the Jury of the Swiss Theater Prize, with which Milo Rau was dis-tinguished in May 2017.
CONCEPT / TEXT / DIRECTION Milo Rau
MUSIC Eleni Karaindrou
STAGE / COSTUMES Anton Lukas
VIDEO Marc Stephan
DRAMATURGY / RESEARCH Stefan Bläske, Mirjam Knapp
SOUNDDESIGN Jens Baudisch
PERFORMANCE / TEXT Ramo Ali, Akillas Karazissis, Rami Khalaf, Maia Morgenstern