Abstract
The theatre company Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel) for many years was best known for bringing ‘real people’ to the stage and creating their very own, highly influential version of documentary theatre. In recent year another strand of their work has become more prominent: the use of existing cityscapes as material and protagonist as well as the creation of complex, half-virtual spaces. Often touching on political issues, the question remains whether their work could also become more directly engaged in concrete social causes of our time. Florian Malzacher, who collaborated as a dramaturge with Rimini Protokoll in their very first work, is a performing arts curator and writer, focusing in recent years on the relationship between art and politics. In referring to several recent examples of Rimini Protokoll’s work, Daniel Wetzel stresses the differences and similarities between art and politics in Rimini Protokoll’s practice referring to a variety of other artists’ work. A fundamental question that runs through the conversation is whether theatre could be more than merely a sphere of representation and critique; could it become an agonistic space to try out new and different forms of political procedures?
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Translated by Ralf Remshardt.
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Premiered in 2013 at the Ruhrtriennale in Bochum , Situation Rooms is a multiplayer video-piece that gathers together twenty people from various continents whose biographies have been shaped by weapons.
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Thirteen videos guided spectators simultaneously along intersecting routes which they explored following the narrations of members of the Heart Song Choir. National Theater Wales, 2011.
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100 Prozent Berlin. Eine statistische Kettenreaktion (100 Per Cent Berlin. A Statistical Chain Reaction, 2008): For this jubilee revue of the 100th anniversary of the Hebbel Theatre in October 2007, an inhabitant of Berlin proposes a participant from his circle of acquaintances, who in turn proposes the next one, until one hundred people are found who fit the pattern. In this casting chain reaction, the median statistical values concerning age, sex, nationality, place of residence, and civil status of the city of Berlin have to be adhered to. Thus, in February 2008, one hundred people could be seen on stage representing the statistical average of the population of Berlin. The show was later adapted for many other cities around the world.
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Wallenstein . Eine dokumentarische Inszenierung (Wallenstein. A Documentary Production, 2005): People from Mannheim and Weimar—two towns that had belonged to the opposing ideological blocks on each side of the iron curtain—stand on stage. Their biographies relate them to Schiller’s characters. His dramatic trilogy served as a template for organizing narrations and dialogues of these ‘experts’ for rise and fall in the political power game of strength, loyalty, and obedience and swift phases of political collapse.
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A surveillance performance at Theaterformen Festival, Hanover 2002, in which spectators equipped with binoculars and earphones are placed behind the windows on the tenth floor of a building. What happens on the square below is recorded and manipulated by four agents and scored live with soundtrack and narration .
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Fifteen model performances premiering simultaneously with the UN climate change conference COP 20 in Lima (2014) and ending with COP 21 in Paris (2015), at Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Münchener Kammerspiele .
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The map recording and logging results of every performance is permanently updated here: www.homevisiteurope.org
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Anestis Azas, one of the most important young directors in Greece, staged a play about the Farmakonisi case in July 2015. A young Syrian refugee was sentenced to 145 years in prison for the death of eleven people on a refugee boat that sank in 2014 even though the accident was allegedly caused by Greek border patrol guards. The actors restage the trial and hear witnesses and survivors.
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Right in time for the 1998 German federal elections, Christoph Schlingensief’s decision to found his own party with the generic name CHANCE 2000 marked the artist’s most high-profile attempt to unite his art and life. CHANCE 2000 probed the rules of a party election campaign, using democratic instruction manuals to explain to independents, for example, how to run for the German parliament with a minimum of red tape while exposing the culture of political devices by promising nothing.
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The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) is a group that operates in an ‘expanded approach to theatre,’ engaging with aggressive forms of political performance art. (More information on http://www.politicalbeauty.com)
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Deutschland 2 (Germany 2, 2002) was a ‘pirate copy’ of a fifteen-hour parliamentary debate. The original debate in Berlin was transmitted live to 237 citizens in Bonn through telephone on headphones to the speakers. These representatives of the people’s representatives repeated the Berlin debate word for word in Bonn.
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In 2012, the Centre for Political Beauty offered a reward of 25,000 Euros for the heads of the owners of the German munitions company Krauss-Maffei-Wegmann, to put them behind bars for their weapons deals (such as selling Leopard II tanks to Saudi Arabia).
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Jonas Staal’s New World Summit is an artistic and political organization that develops parliaments with and for stateless states, autonomous groups, and blacklisted political organizations. The first edition of the New World Summit took place in the Sophiensaele in May 2012 during the seventh Berlin Biennale.
References
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. New York: Verso.
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Malzacher, F. (2018). ‘Almost Like a Teaching Play’: Daniel Wetzel/Rimini Protokoll in a Conversation with Florian Malzacher. In: Arfara, K., Mancewicz, A., Remshardt, R. (eds) Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75343-0_13
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