100% Dresden

- A statistical chain reaction

By Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel

On December 31st 2011, 530,729 people were living in Dresden. 4.2% of them were foreigners, 51% women and 8.9% were unemployed. In contrast to that, 1.8 million people were visiting Dresden as overnight guests. 17.8% of them were foreign tourists who spent, on average, 2.1 days in Dresden.
Statistics gathers people and packs them into pieces of pie, into bars and curves that are used to further political arguments and create economic strategies. What if those statistics had faces? What if Dresden could be represented on stage by 100 people? People who are selected so that they can make statistically "correct" statements?
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Dresden State Theatre, the theater collective Rimini Protokoll represent "Dresden in numbers” – the city on the stage. In several months of chain research 100 inhabitants of Dresden are selected, chosen to match the statistics and brought to the State Theater stage as representatives. Unlike many other Rimini Protokoll projects, for "100 Percent Dresden" only one person is selected by the directors. This person then searches for the next person (who in turn must fit the remaining statistical results – matching the necessary gender, nationality, residential district etc) among their acquaintances. The second then finds the third and so on, until 100 Dresden residents have been found. Together, they are "100 Percent Dresden". Each individual represents 5,300 inhabitants of Dresden. The result: a mass that embodies the city, a choir that hasn’t learnt any songs, an unlikely entity that is continually reconfigured into new formations, creating fleeting portraits of belonging and antagonism. A sea of voices: a geometric body on a 100 square metre stage.

 

 

with 100 people from Dresden

concept: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel
directors: Helgard Haug, Daniel Wetzel
set design: Marc Jungreithmeier, Mascha Mazur
technical director: Marc Jungreithmeier
project coordinator and research: Luise Mundhenke
production Assistant: Thomas Mende, Anne-Kathrin Roßner
setdesign-assistant: Anne Alma Quastenberg

Liveband: Die Bagles