All about Love

“Sweetbitter love”: already the first love poet in history, Sappho, knew about the sublime but also terrible power of love. No feeling is so strong, none is so radiant, but also dangerous, because none embraces us so totally. In 2020, Milo Rau, together with 5 performers from Flanders, France, Italy and Israel, began planning a feature film: The Partisans, an epic about an impossible, fatal love affair between a fascist and a partisan during World War II, based on a real case. 

During the castings and preliminary discussions for the film, the performers kept coming back to their own love relationships - happy or unhappy, past or dreamed of. From love in the Israeli army or in the Parisian suburbs, from the entanglements and power games on film sets in Cinecittà and at theater rehearsals, from violence, stalking and the pain of separation, from unrequited childhood love to MeToo: as so often in Milo Rau's work, private memories and film plot began to flow together. Thus, in those days the idea was born to make a theatre play about love: All About Love. What spiritual and solidary power, what dangers does this greatest feeling in the world hold? Which images, which movie scenes have impressed us most deeply? What would the perfect love movie look like?

Milo Rau is most famous for his plays about political and economic crimes (Hate Radio, Antigone in the Amazon, The Congo Tribunal), about death and violence (Family, La Reprise, Five Easy Pieces) and his adaptations of great myths (Lenin, Orestes in Mosul, The New Gospel). Now he turns for the first time to a love story: with 5 performers we see live on stage the making of The Partisans – a tragic, heart-breaking love story from World War II. From the castings to the scenes of the film, from the most private memories of first movies and first kisses to the big questions of existence, All About Love accompanies a group of performers on their journey through the dark beauty of the human soul, taking the central idea from bell hook's eponymous book as starting point: How can we survive in a society that provides no models for true, non-destructive, fulfilled love? In short: How can we - truly - love?

With: Anna Chiara Colombo, Arne De Tremerie, Noémie Guille, Yael Mor, Olga Mouak 
Text & Direction: Milo Rau 
Dramaturgy: Giacomo Bisordi 
Set & Costumes: Anton Lukas 
Video: Moritz von Dungern 
Sound & Technical Direction: Jens Baudisch 
Production Management: Mascha Euchner-Martinez 
Spreading: Sophie Vanden Broeck

A co-production of IIPM — International Institute of Political Murder, NTGent 
and MC93 House of Culture of Seine-Saint-Denis