Home Visit Europe

By Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel

Hausbesuch Europa (Home Visit Europe) is a performance you can put in your hand luggage - big ideas are rarely presented so intimately. What is Europe actually? Is it a geographic border, a cultural identity, a coalition of states? It is said over and over that Europe is an ever changing idea - too theoretical, as the individual can tell from their own experience. Rimini Protokoll contrasts this abstract idea of Europe with the individuality of a private apartment. 15 people become part of a performance in a living room that interweaves personal stories and the political mechanisms of Europe. How much Europe is in us all?

You can host Home Visit Europe in your own home or be a guest in a stranger's private apartment. Each performance takes place in different homes and so the performance will travel through hundreds of apartments throughout Europe, building a network that rather than growing from a centre, stretches from front door to front door across a continent.

"(...)The ingredients of the piece fit into an Aldi bag – a few pieces of bakeware, crayons and a random generator. But the real play is the social situation itself, which arises from a few game rules, the previously mentioned props and the host’s four walls: here we are immersed in the world of other people and the behaviour of a group that doesn’t view or consume the play but rather, through their responses and action, create it in the first place. The performance is practically us; we have only the fun we make for ourselves. This is in a way like IKEA.(...)
Interview with Thomas Oberender by Christine Wahl (read more here)

Voting results and group pictures from all of the home visits will be anonymously collected at www.homevisiteurope.org. The results can them be compared online as part of an ever growing European archive.

Link to arte

Concept / Script / Direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel
Dramaturgy: Katja Hagedorn
Interaction Design: Grit Schuster, Hans Leser, Mirko Dietrich
Assistance Interaction Design: Philipp Arnold
Setting: Belle Santos, Lena Mody
Assistance Setting: Ran Chai Bar-zvi
Production Management: Anna Florin, Juliane Männel

Production Management Touring: Louise Stölting
Technical Direction: Sven Nichterlein

Master of Ceremony Tour: Anton Rose
Technical Support Tour: Claes Schwennen, Hans Leser, Sven Nichterlein

Website Design: Tawan Arun + Ralph Gowers (Programming)
Website Editorial: Anton Rose, Cornelius Puschke

Home Visit Europe is production of Rimini Apparat.
In coproduction with Archa Theatre Prague (CZ). BIT Teatergarasjen/Bergen International Festival (NO). Frascati Teater Amsterdam (NL). HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (D). Kaaitheater Brussels (BE). LIFT London (GB). Malta Festival Poznan (PL). Mungo Park (DK). Sort/Hvid (DK). Teater Nordkraft (DK). Théâtre de la Commune Aubervilliers (FR). Théâtre Garonne (FR). Teatro Maria Matos (PT).
A House on Fire commission / coproduction with the support of the Cultural Program of the European Union. The project is supported by Capital Culture Fund Berlin. Home Visit Europe as part of the Territoria Festival (Moscow) is funded by Goethe Institut.