Not Just Adult Entertainment: Milo Rau and CAMPO’s Collaborative Five Easy Pieces

Director Milo Rau collaborated with children ages 8 to 17 to explore the Belgian national crisis precipitated by the abduction, rape, and torture of six girls, and the murder of four of them, by Marc Dutroux between 1995–1996. Staged as five acting lessons, the child actors in Five Easy Pieces (2016) become theatrical material for reconsidering how the myth of childhood “innocence” results in political actions and cultural technologies that teach real children how “not to see” beyond the frameworks that replicate patriarchal and heteronormative state power.