Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll

Ungunstraum’s disappearing performers required stand-ins who could be given specific instructions to carry out on stage. That is why the first experts appeared on stage as early as the 1995 piece 2nd Stage: once again, to the right and left of an installation made up of a great deal of equipment and frosted-glass windows sat two firefighters, whose presence was in fact required on health and safety grounds (and who therefore, in a sense, belonged to the infrastructure), since toward the end of the piece candles would be blown out by bass tones and lit again. Haug, Droß and Wetzel convinced them that they were the fire experts who would carry out this task.

The literal following of instructions on stage (switching off machines, changing projected images, writing on condensation, moving from one piece of equipment to another, stopping a record, rewinding it and letting it go) was also very clearly influenced by performance art and conceptual art. This should not, however, be taken to mean that these acts under any circumstances fell into performance art’s and conceptual art’s trap of creating an aura. Ungunstraum was about indirect and functional actions rather than overt ones, and certainly not about loading reality with symbolism. Using experienced professionals even for small jobs proved a good solution because they were “simply happy to do what they could do rather than wearing that eager Giessen expression on their faces” (Wetzel).

In 1996, Stage: Alibis brought an entire choir to the small Rauischholzhausen castle. The 1998 piece Bei voieviel Luxschalten Wurst und Kraus das Licht ein? (At what brightness do Wurst and Kraus switch on the light?) showed the work that an engineer named Wurst (who appeared on stage under the name Wetzel) had (perhaps) done the previous evening at Frankfurt’s electricity distribution center, and the audience watched him (perhaps) switch on the city’s lights for the last time. He pressed a button and Frankfurt began to glow in the night.

Many of the radical interventions in the theater system, attempted sometimes playfully and sometimes seriously, were the result not only of performance theory and philosophical or artistic speculation but also of pragmatism, in the sense of working with what was at hand. When the first monitors and later the first video projector were purchased, the monitors and then the projector (and after that, sound recordings from the new sound department) began to be used as key elements. If your entire audience consists of fellow students who not only know everything but also watch every production analytically, why not turn the production into an analysis that examines its own materials? If you have no actors other than yourselves, you try to use forms of expression that are not in ordinary actors’ repertoire (as with the rapid-fire speech and screaming René Pollesch used, inspired by John Jesurun, who came to the Institute regularly as a guest teacher), or to place your own technical shortcomings deliberately at the center of your performance (as with She She Pop and Showcase Beat Le Mot), to remove yourself from the performance, as Ungunstraum did, or even to see what happens when you put your neighbors on stage as real people. While Ungunstraum had not yet placed these things at the center of their work and justified their complex experimental designs through practice, Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi concerned themselves with the matter itself and left out of the work anything that might obstruct the point of view. In Kongress der Schwarzfahrer (Congress of Fare Dodgers), staged in Hamburg in 2000, sixty experts drawn from a wide spectrum, ranging from a beggar to an NLP manager and on to an endosymbiosis theorist, presented their knowledge of parasitic systems. Alongside human experts, Hygiene Heute repeatedly brought animals onto the stage, because they were ideal in their complete lack of narrative, psychology and stagecraft. In 2001, at the Tanzquartier Wien dance center, the Congress of Vienna was reenacted with seventy guinea pigs in Europa tanzt (Europe Dances), and the following year a thousand ants were used to create the installation Staat, Ein Terrarium (State, a Terrarium) in Mannheim. “We realized that the only actor we could really rely on was one who needed no rehearsal” (Kaegi). Although the animals did not act out stories, stories could be projected onto them. In addition, the discussions about the animals reflected the metaphors and language used in a discussion about people.

Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll

In this way, although Hygiene Heute and Ungunstraum moved closer to each other, they did not actually overlap, nor did any great interest in collaboration emerge between them. Helgard Haug had finished her studies many years earlier and since 1997 had been working in Berlin on her own artistic, primarily visual, projects, earning her living as an editor at a theater publisher. Marcus Droß left Giessen in 1998 after his diploma exams. In 1999, when Daniel Wetzel and Stefan Kaegi, over a long night in the Institute’s sound studio, introduced each other to work they had previously known almost nothing about, the Ungunstraum chapter had long since closed. More important than the lists of their previous work were their existing connections, shared ideas and, above all, a real project that both had been developing along parallel lines. Like Haug and Wetzel, Kaegi had planned a project using the senior residence next to the Frankfurter Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Shortly after they applied to the Plateaux festival, a newly founded platform for emerging artists, they were accepted, and work began on their first production in this lineup, Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp (Crossword Pit Stop). The piece premiered in November 2000, while Hygiene Heute continued working on its own projects and Haug and Wetzel were working together on the radio play O-Ton Ü-Tek.

Herforder Quittung (Herford Receipt)

At first they worked in informal configurations, each with a slightly different aesthetic sensibility and set of interests (more precisely: Kaegi on his own, Haug on her own, Haug/Wetzel or Ernst/Kaegi, Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel or Ernst/Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel). But as professional and press interest in them grew, it became difficult to continue with this informal arrangement. By 2002 it was clear that the child needed a name. Matthias Lilienthal, then head of the Theater der Welt festival, asked the group, which was staging Deutschland 2 in Bonn, to come up with a name, and to do so immediately.

So Haug and Kaegi hired a bar poet they happened to run into. Although the poem itself, made up of the initials of the four directors’ names, was not much help, it was written on a bar receipt headed “Herforder Quittung.”

Although this name was ultimately rejected too, because the word Quittung (receipt) somehow sounded terrible and nobody knew where Herford was, it pointed the way forward. The word Quittung belongs to a particular group of words, and combining such a word with a place name somehow sounded plausible, especially now that they had run out of time. The word that seemed most fitting was Protokoll (protocol, bulletin or minutes). Then, after long discussions lasting whole nights that had more or less to do with German tourists in Italy and the riots in Genoa, Rimini replaced Herford, and Rimini Protokoll was born.

Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll

The matter-of-fact pragmatism they showed in finding their name also reflects the way the group has understood itself to this day. Alongside friendship and the joy that collaboration brings, there is a non-ideological, almost practical relationship between them. The name is not a formal declaration of intent but a label that facilitates communication, reflecting an effective working network, an umbrella organization, that still keeps separate accounts even today.

Rimini operates as a team with equal authority, without specifically assigned roles, and in this sense differs from well-known avant-garde groups such as the Living Theatre, the Wooster Group or Forced Entertainment, all of which rely on a central figure (not to mention traditional director-led theater). They have always had, and still have, different interests and skills. Daniel Wetzel works in sound studios and as a DJ, Helgard Haug is interested in spaces, Stefan Kaegi was for a long time interested above all in producing text, and Bernd Ernst was always in search of a story, a subject. Yet clinging to areas of interest separated by such clear boundaries was never a feature of the work they made together. In the beginning it was difficult to explain this to artistic directors, who wanted precise job descriptions such as director, dramaturg or designer to write into contracts, and to fit these titles into programs and, above all, into budgets.

Working this way as a collective had to be learned, and pursued with determination. Rimini Protokoll’s strength has come not so much from the similarities that developed over the years as from the points at which each of them differs: “We still listen to each other with a sense of separateness. That is what makes it interesting: working on other projects in other configurations and being changed by them. Each time we have to rediscover each other” (Haug).

Disagreeing over long periods of time can only be sustained in this way. It is all about discovering entirely new things, surprising yourself, developing fantasies together, going beyond yourself. The script moves back and forth between these and objections, and new work is discussed before and after rehearsals. The process of sharing information, of updating both the production and the text, takes longer than the rehearsals themselves. Lingering differences of opinion and reservations must stay within the team. Once work with the experts begins, they must speak with one voice, which is why, under normal circumstances, only one of them is present at rehearsal.

At the beginning of a new project, they have often each rehearsed separately with a different performer. “Still, it is essential to rediscover yourself every time and to pin down what you really want.” (Kaegi) However dangerous disagreement can be, consensus that leads to routine, the one thing their collaboration must resist, is just as dangerous. “Of course routine things happen, because thanks to all that shared experience you use phrases that come easily to everyone in order to agree on things quickly, and you carry the language you have developed while making theater together onto the stage. But the things that become routine are precisely the things we always want to expand and transform.” (Wetzel)

Even within these relatively open arrangements, though, working as a group of four was not easy. When they worked in pairs or even trios they developed common languages, and things went surprisingly well, but Bernd Ernst, above all, long remained skeptical about the possibility of working together over time. He and Kaegi had in fact discovered a wild, intoxicated way of thinking all their own, filled with strange and fantastic ideas that did not translate well to the stage. “What really united us was that we were constantly working on what else we could do, without stopping and without thinking about the cost.” (Kaegi) In thinking about feasibility only afterward, they were reminiscent of Hygiene Heute; projects that would be abandoned halfway because of the realities of life were started again and again. Once they tried to persuade all the residents of an apartment building to take in guests overnight; another time they tried to present a demolition expert together with his profession; and on yet another occasion they wanted to lead people underground through the center of the town of Friedberg near Frankfurt… Because his imagination headed in different directions and the size of the group did not suit it, Bernd Ernst never fit in all that well with Rimini Protokoll. While still continuing to work with Stefan Kaegi to produce the guinea pig congress in Vienna, the ant state in Mannheim and the final part of the “Kirchner” audio tour in Munich, he left the group after Deutschland 2, before withdrawing from the production of Physik at the dance center in Vienna while it was being made.