Société en chantier / Society under Construction

By Stefan Kaegi

The endless worksite at the Berlin airport, the interminable A3 motorway project in Italy, the squabbles around the future Lyon-Turin tunnel, the football stadiums in Qatar, the huge culture complexes in Asia: late delivery and cost adjustments, complicated interdependencies between public and private stakeholders, invisible connections around the world... Rimini Protokoll invites us to consider construction sites as microcosms that contain all of the paradoxes of our contemporary society.

The audience is divided into 8 groups that move around and cross paths inside a theatre transformed into a vast work zone with differentiated spaces that intersect with one another. They will meet with 8 experts, one after the other: lawyers, a construction worker, town planner, private sector entrepreneur, and an expert in worker insects. Moving from one sector to another, each group shifts and interacts with other groups, taking turns to represent each of the players in a construction project.

Based on information sourced from people in the construction industry and actual documents, Society under Construction devises a kind of playful and symbolic theatre where the audience can experiment with various points of view, identify the hidden structures that control the whole construction site, and beyond that, understand what our contemporary public spaces are like once they are only partially controlled by state authorities.

Rimini Protokoll portrays the interconnected network of international investors, construction consortia and contractors, and public interests as a large-scale model that provides an immersive experience.

"Société en Chantier" is the French / international extended version of "Society under Construction (State 2)" by Rimini Protokoll and Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin (2017)

 

Concept, direction: Stefan Kaegi
Stage: Dominic Huber
Research: Viviane Pavillon
Dramaturgy: Imanuel Schipper
Assistant director: Tomas Gonzalez
Sound design: Stéphane Vecchione
Régie générale: Stéphane Janvier
Light direction: Christophe Kehrli
Sound direction: François Planson
Stage direction: Mathieu Pegoraro, Xavier De Marcellis, Jean-Daniel Buri
Video direction: Marc Vaudroz, Nicolas Gerlier, Olivier Vuillamy
Production manager: Sylvain Didry, Tristan Pannatier
With: Mélanie Baxter-Jones
Geoffrey Dyson
Matias Echanove ou Amin Khosravi
Tianyu Gu
Laurent Keller ou Jérôme Gippet
Viviane Pavillon ou Tristan Pannatier
Alvaro Rojas Nieto
Mathieu Ziegler
 
Production: Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
Co-production: Rimini Apparat - Coréalisation le Festival Paris L’Été, la Rmn-Grand Palais et La Villette - Bonlieu, Scène nationale Annecy - Malraux, Scène nationale Chambéry Savoie - Fonds de dotation du Quartz (Brest) - Scène nationale d’Albi - Festival de Marseille - Edinburgh International Festival
 
With support by:
Projet PEPS dans le cadre du programme européen de coopération transfrontalière Interreg France-Suisse 2014-2020 - FVE (Fédération Vaudoise des Entrepreneurs) - Fondation Casino Barrière de Montreux
 
Production of the German version: "Gesellschaftsmodell Großbaustelle (Staat 2)": Rimini Apparat, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
 
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