Rimini Protokoll is an independent group of artists, founded in 2000 by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. The three members are graduates of the program for Applied Theatre Science at Gießen university, which has served as an incubator for multiple German performance groups, including She She Pop and Gob Squad.
Rimini Protokoll has a unique working method – it refrains from working with pre-written texts, as well as from using professional actors. Instead, it bases its work on the life stories of different people, who report their private and professional lives without representing anyone but themselves.
The group calls them "experts of the everyday" – a term that has become prevalent in the contemporary artistic discourse in Germany. Group members research the life of each "expert", and create a report-like monolog (protocol), which reconstructs private or collective events from that person's life.
The group's works are therefore documentary – they deal with the everyday lives of the participants, and through the investigation of the performance's space and environment, they confront the participants' personal narrative with the spectators' collective ethe. This matches Stefan Kaegi's vision of theatre as "a museum in which people and things appear lifted out of a certain hectic causality for the purpose of contemplation."1
In recent years, the use of amateurs (called "real people" by critics, influenced by reality culture) has become a widespread phenomenon in Germany, with many artists choosing to collaborate with non-professional performers to create an authentic experience2. Performance researcher Miriam Dreysse and dramaturge Florian Malzacher point out that unlike television documentaries, Rimini Protokoll "are not crudely affirming a reality but representing a complex world in which the individual is fundamental and the truth is always narrative."3 According to the group, the rise of television documentaries put an end to reality as we had known it, and the group's method of work is one way of reawakening it.4 According to this assumption, the performance of the reconstructed in a theatrical context is the authentic, while the reality to which it refers is a post-modern reality, in which endless quoting, inter-textuality and self-reference impede authenticity.
Reconstruction as a Reconsideration of Reality
"Rimini Protokoll" has served as an umbrella for projects of multiple genres, media and platforms, labelled as theatre, radio, cinema, lectures, exhibitions, books and applications, many of which deal with various forms of reconstruction. "World Premiere: The Visit" (Uraufführung: Der Besuch der alten Dame) from 2007 is a reconstruction of the world premiere of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, which had taken place at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in 1956. The group used a group of "experts" (artists and spectators that had participated in the original premiere) and a combination of photographs, cardboard dolls and the play's original soundtrack to recreate Oskar Wälterlin's legendary production.
"You are not an actor, but a reconstructor" – one of the "experts" was told by group members. Journalist Tobi Müller, who examined the work process in this production, described the reconstruction as a creation of collective memory by the carriers of that memory5. The reconstruction became the subject of the work: it opened a discussion about the essence of collective memory versus personal memory, and the authenticity of dramatic and post-dramatic reality.
Another example of a reconstruction-focused project created by the group is the mobile application "50 km of documents", which reconstructs Stasi eavesdropping in the form of radio play. Users could listen to different radio plays in various sites across Berlin, and discover an unseen layer of the city.
Situation Rooms – A multi-Participant Video Work
Last August, the group was invited to present a project in the Ruhrtriennale festival in the Ruhr region. The festival's generous funding made it possible to build a space that was specially tailored for the work, including twenty separate doors for each of the twenty spectators. Upon entering, each spectator received an iPad with which to navigate his or her individual way between the different rooms. Also stored in the iPad life were the stories of "experts" from various countries, which at first appeared unrelated yet had one obvious thing in common: they all dealt with weapons and war.
The different spaces reconstructed specific places mentioned in the expert's story: a cemetery in Mexico, a Swiss bank, a city in the West Bank, a field hospital in Sierra Leone, and more. The spectators did not only follow the experts, but they were also asked to recreate their actions, which had been performed and recorded in the same space. These actions included learning to point a weapon while lying in ambush, participating in a meeting in Dubai, and broadcasting from a radio station in South Sudan.
Situation Room – An Experimentation Beyond the Digital Screen
The Situation Room is a conference room located in the basement of the White House, from which the president of the USA and his advisors monitor crucial events. One of the most famous photos taken in this room in recent years is the photograph of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gabes, watching the extermination of Osama Bin Laden on the television screen. The photo shows their different reactions to the event – happiness, shock, determination, and concern.
Rimini Protokoll created an analogous situation in their work: with the help of a digital screen, participants meet stories of battles and weapons, in a space that enables them to examine a situation from a distance while taking part in it. From here on I intentionally refrain from using the term "spectator", since both in the White House's Situation Room, and in the homonymous work, the participants are not passive spectators: they are responsible for the events that take place, as they are performing them. In other words, the work is founded on role games that blur the boundary between spectator and performer: once they begin recounting. the experts become witnesses of their own lives; they recreate situations in a space which imitates, almost naturalistically, spaces they know from real life. The audience of Situation Rooms watches the "experts" on their iPad screen and reconstruct the displayed actions: wearing a bulletproof vest, flying a flag, going through papers before a board meeting, etc.
As visitors move through this space, they are obliged to interact with other visitors, using simple, everyday gestures such as a handshake or the passing of an object. The other visitors appear on the iPad screen as additional experts one had already met or is about to meet, although there is no concrete narrational connection between their stories. The reconstruction allows to position two personas (I intentionally refrain from using the word "characters", as these are "real" people) in the same room even if they live in different countries, and so two visitors can be present in a single space, which stands for two entirely different spaces in reality.
The focus of Rimini Protokoll's dramaturgical activity in this piece (similarly to their other works) is not the transformation of a performer to the character he represents, but the transformation from an act of watching to the act of performing – spectatorship becomes active, as it demands a theatrical reconstruction of the video, and involves movement and spatial events. The "experts" represent no other character but themselves, yet visitors represent (or at least mark) in space the character of the "expert". This is the moment in which the one onstage stops acting, and the "spectator" replaces him (and becomes a participant).
The event moves between several layers of reality: the reality that is the basis for the expert's report; the reality the expert reconstructs, documented in a video; the recreated reality created by the spectator; and the interpretational dimension which gives meaning to the different rooms, and different identities to the different visitors, as the room and the visitor are specific signifiers for various different signifieds.
The medium through which the different realities are experienced is also important. The space creates a microcosmos, wherein moving between rooms may also represent a movement between countries. In the digital experience of reality via an iPad, the spatial concepts of distance and proximity are erased, just like the Situation Room of the White House wipes out the distance between those inside the room and the battleground. On the one hand, it draws the spectator closer to the world of the "expert", and on the other, it creates an abyss between the two worlds (for example, what appears in the video as a "realistic" space turns out to be a theatre set in real life). The simultaneous experience of multiple layers of reality makes it possible to examine situations from different perspectives. This experience may evoke a feeling of strong identification with the stories (some are indeed touching), due to the "authentic" representation of the work's protagonists.
Rimini Protokoll creates an arbitrary world – as a visitor, you do not get to choose which of the twenty "experts" you will meet during their visit. You must follow the route you were given and cannot affect the events – which are closely intertwined with their different timeframes and spatial frames. In a single hour you may embody a child soldier in Kingo, a refugee and a human rights activist, without undermining the work's coherence and uniformity.
An Overview of War Stories
Some of the reviews referred to the use of iPads, which enabled a personal encounter with a single "expert", yet prevented a more general view of the different war stories6. While many critics and theoreticians tend to praise the group's work (which aims, as we have said, to redefine reality and authenticity by using "real people" and by rejecting the theatrical illusion), a Marxist critique would question the concept of authenticity of performance and post-dramatic theatre.
In his latest book, "The Critique of Theatre" (Kritik des Theaters), dramaturge Bernd Stegemann explains that in the current artistic discourse, the term "authentic" came to refer to "moments of reality", "real people", and "real life". He perceives authenticity as an element of style, which identifies the original and unexpected with a "real" theatrical event, and which has become a key criterion in evaluating contemporary art: "the authentic becomes feeling, which intentionally tries to make us forget the lie of existence, and has indeed forgotten it. In doing so, it moves towards a series of social structures of reality which claim to an ontological existence that is beyond criticism. The authentic, therefore, is the right sentiment for the nature of emotional capitalism. It repeats its own false claim to being natural, by claiming that it can sense the subject's nature7." Therefore, the feeling of identification with the "real", "authentic" and "natural" stories of the "experts" portray these stories as a given nature, and according to neo-liberal thought, nature cannot be criticised.
In a text included in the work's brochure, architect Florian Hirsch explains that the "experts" are not portrayed as criminals or as victims; instead, they are positioned in the grey area of economy and human rights policies. In addition, he assumes the person who responds to the work will find it hard to take a stance about the stories, and will not be able to talk about the war in terms of "for" and "against". Situation Rooms presents war as painful, shocking and general – it belongs to the soldiers, businesspeople, politicians, civilians and journalists. This idea is accentuated by the fact that as participants experiment with different roles in the same reality, they get to examine war from different perspectives. Yet there is one crucial difference between Barack Obama watching Bin Laden's extermination and the participant in Situation Rooms: while Obama makes decisions as he watches the live broadcast, the latter has no real authority. Perhaps in the end they are mere spectators, witnesses of a ("real") reality prepared for them in advance, one that they do not control and cannot affect.
The interest each one of the "experts" and their stories evoke in the spectators and the virtuosic treatment of space and video erase moral categories of "good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong". One of the "experts", for example, recounts his experiences and difficulties as a soldier and says: "I am not a victim." This claim, which creates an identification with his decision to fight, erases another possible question about his role as a victimizer.
Rimini Protokoll wishes to present a reality, and this reality is very hard to criticise, as it has no good guys and bad guys – each maker, trader and distributor of weapons is also a person whose story needs to be told. And the question remains, whether the reconstruction and representation of war in their work affirm reality or criticise it.
1 as quoted in Gerald Siegmund, „The art of memory. Fiction as seduction into Reality”, Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher, Rimini Protokoll: Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll. (Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2008), 188 .
2 Annamarie M. Metzke. „Von echten Menschen und wahren Performern.“ Erika Fischer-Lichte, Barbara Gronau, Sabine Schouten, Christel Weiler (Hg.). Wege der Wahrnehmung. (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006).39-47
3 Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher, Rimini Protokoll: Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll. 9-10
4 Rimini Protokoll, ABCD (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012), 106
5 Tobi Müller, „‘But you’ve been rehearsing your entire lives!’ The Development of Uraufführung: Der Besuch der alten Dame“ Florian Malzacher, Rimini Protokoll: Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll. 214-215
6 Sarah Heppekausen, In den Krieg gezogen. Nachtkritik, August 23, 2013
7 Bernd Stegemann, Kritik des Theaters. (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2013) 55-56