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No one who seeks to define what the theatrical collective or directing trio with the unusual name Rimini Protokoll does can avoid the words reality and fiction. Rimini Protokoll look to real life for their themes. Each one of their projects is developed out of a concrete situation in a specific location on the basis of exhaustive research. The group always conceives its productions in collaboration with amateur actors who play themselves. Haug, Wetzel and Kaegi prefer to call these actors, who they find while they are carrying out their research, “specialists”.
However, this is where it becomes difficult to separate reality and fiction as the actual and the imaginary shift, interact and overlap: the audience does not know where drama begins and real life stops; it is unable, and also not intended, to know where this line should be drawn. However, the group is not just taking pleasure in sleight of hand; indeed, this ambiguity makes it apparent again and again that it is only on the stage that reality is genuinely revealed. The theatre of Rimini Protokoll does not set up an opposition between the stage and the audience, but integrates the two spheres in ever changing experimental set-ups. In doing this, they are interested in perception and the knowability of the world, in particular the knowability of human beings. The aim is to break open the complex that constitutes our reality, showing it in all its facets as a way of enabling us to interrogate it. Rimini Protokoll apply their method to the world with enormous subtlety and great curiosity, bringing people and ideas together in constellations that always come as a surprise. In consequence, they have become the central figures in the documentary movement that has been making such an impact in German theatres over the last few years.
MEETING and RIMINI PROTOKOLL - Projects Call Cutta and Calcutta in a Box
On Calcutta in a Box
Imagine you are buying a ticket at the box office for an individual show on a specific day, but are not led to the auditorium of the theatre. Instead, you get the key for a room and a sketch of how to get there. It might be a room in the theatre, an office, or an apartment somewhere close by. You open the door and you find a phone ringing. You pick up the phone and a person with a strange accent strikes up a conversation with you. The person seems to know the room you are sitting in, even though he is about 10.000 km away. The voice belongs to a call centre agent from Calcutta, India. He and his colleagues usually sell credit cards and insurance on the phone to people on the other side of the globe or provide navigational help in cities that they have never been to themselves. But this time you are not supposed to buy anything. By now, you are standing at the window and your transcontinental conversation partner is pointing some curious people in the opposite building out to you. On the notebook desktop in your room images and videos are opening up out of nowhere. A story is about to develop and you realize that the call centre agent and you and your city are the very first protagonists of the plot.
