By Milo Rau
17.02.2004 / Neue Züricher Zeitung
For quite a while now the three former students of the Giessen Academy of Dramatic Arts, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel, let theatre overlap with public space. Their theme: reality, life.
“ If one was to give a name to the momentary state of things”, write Jean Baudrillard, “then I would say that we are after an orgy.” After an orgy – that’s not a funny state, because there’s nothing more to come. The games of liberation are played, all utopia tested. Boredom and sarcasm are spreading – drama has evaporated with the party-mood. Death, moans Baudrillard, and even evil have become somehow a matter of chance and invisible.
Not a good state, not even for theatre. Even wild creations, such as Schlingenschief’s bodies of association – sometimes naked, sometimes with megaphones -, can wake the audience from its sleep of aesthetic serenity – this isn’t real anyway, so what? Only idiots believe responsible press agencies: that it is reality, this dirty life, which is called upon stage.
Real or made-up?
Amongst the drollest documentary theatre, the works by Protokoll Rimini appear strangely silent and relaxed. Their latest production “Witnesses!” Matthias Lilienthal’s HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) shows an iridescent copy of reality on stage: Two actors are seconds to a handful of amateurs who deliver a reconstruction of daily business in Berlin courts. Facts of the cases are presented, claims are balanced against the likelihood, the Criminal Code is cited. The line between real and fake is defined over and over again until it disappears in the (unspoken) sentence.
“Inaccurate descriptions are more likely to be true than a logical order of events”, says a lawyer, a juror presents her hobby – mending lace mats - , and a carpenter explains the various interior decorations of court halls: a spectrum of the very real machinery of legal justice put upon the pedestal of the stage. Even though the actors take off their wigs at the end of the performance and the amateurs bow like actors: a disconcerting feeling remains. You were witness to an irritating process – a presentation of what is real told by the actual professionals of illusion: not by actors, but by relaxed experts of justice.
The directors-team Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel met as students of the Giessen Academy of Dramatic Arts where they produced their first projects. Their intention is not to copy reality, not to dramatise it, but to bring it onto stage and test ‘what might happen’. ‘To take a closer look at the theatricality of everyday-life’, show what happens elsewhere; turn theatre again into a totalising medium which summarises on stage things that are dispersed in reality and without conscious coherence: Their documentary theatre of a new calibre is artfully created from this starting point.
At the beginning of their works is therefore no test, but meticulous research, ‘an interest for a location, a system or a ritual which happens at a certain place’. They hired four 80-year-old ladies from the home for the elderly next door for their project “Crossword Pitstop” produced at the Frankfurt Monsounturm in 2000, and set their life-styles in contrast to motor-racing. The directors participated in memory-training courses, interviewed employees of the home, went to the Nürburgring and spoke with track managers and pitstop marshalls: motor-racing and age were interwoven. “Deadline” (2003) – which will be shown again in the Zurich Gessnerallee from June 3rd onwards – deals with death and dying. They collected statistics on reasons and locations of death, experiences of relatives, reports on daily life in a dying-hospice, and information on the organisation of funerals.
There were no actors on stage, but the specialists of death itself: a preparator, a stonemason, a funeral musician, a funeral speaker. The effect of the beautiful horror came rather indirectly. The actors didn’t refer to reality, they were reality: the game-instructions of real dying were shown. Who ever talked did so in his own right. And this is why one of the presenters only talked from a video presentation to the audience: His doctor discouraged him from a live-performance since his state of health was fragile. ...
Rimini Protokoll became famous with a production that almost didn’t take place. “Deutschland 2” was to copy a debate of the German parliament in Berlin live in the former parliament building in Bonn. They selected 200 citizens of Bonn through castings, the political speech was to be copied and returned into the mouth of the people: a synchronised exercise of democracy. The president of parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, however saw the honour of parliament threatened and forbade the use of the hall of debate (which is otherwise hired out to companies and carnival-clubs). Finally, the project took place at the Bonn Schauspielhalle (theatre) with great media response.
Suspicion of Reality
This is how Rimini Protokoll not only creates theatrically sharpened copies of findings, but also re-conquers public space. Apart from the research-based projects there are numerous activities that leave the safety-zone of the theatre. The audience is moved into skyscraper armed with headphones and binoculars; they are to observe half planned, half real scenes: people on the phone, taxi drivers, thieves. Sharpening the view creates a paranoid insecurity: Is it reported or made-up, true or false, is it manipulated?
Under Rimini Protokoll’s direction everything becomes equally real and suspicious. It is not a given dramaturgy that secures the differentiation between art and reality, but the observer himself becomes the specialist, who has to follow the traces of authenticity and theatricality. “We’d like to tune down the whole craftsmanship of theatre”, is how the three of Rimini Protokoll describe their work. They’re not after an avant-garde play with forms, but a radical ‘socialisation’ of contents. Theatre should become an observatory again of what is on the ‘outside’.
Rimini Protokoll’s credo can be summarised as: the best art is reality itself.: copied, re-assembled, mirrored upon itself, presented to an audience to be observed. “Theatre is a medium within contents can transported.” That easy, that modest, that radical is the starting point of Rimini Protokoll. The orgy continues. If it’s all about life, then we’re all specialists.
english by Sonja Müller
Milo Rau