Ahead of the Rimini Protokoll performance Conference of the Absent – Kundura Sahne’s guest at the end of March – Art Unlmited’s Ayşe Draz spoke with one of the collective’s founders, Stefan Kaegi.

One of the most important names in documentary theater, Rimini Protokoll, returns to Istanbul, this time with Conference of the Absent (Namevcut Konferans), a conference in which absent participants are represented by the audience members who are present. Having previously welcomed the collective onto the streets of Istanbul with the Remote İstanbul project and shared their performance Uncanny Valley online with Turkish subtitles, Kundura Sahne is hosting them in Istanbul on March 31, April 1 and April 2. On this occasion, we spoke with one of Rimini Protokoll’s founders, Stefan Kaegi.

Interview: Ayşe Draz*

In the face of the climate crisis threatening our home – the world – is a touring format with zero carbon emissions possible, especially in the performing arts? Or might the solution be a format that actually and physically brings us together in the same space, rather than meeting in an online space through constantly dropping Skype and Zoom connections? What are the factors that determine who represents whom, and how they go about it? Taking up such questions within the possibilities of theater, itself an art of representation, Conference of the Absent is a provocative work that, on the one hand, redefines the boundaries between performer and audience and, on the other, brings audiences the stories of people from all over the world who have had to cope with some form of “absence” in their lives. We talked to Stefan Kaegi, one of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, about Conference of the Absent. Although we conducted this interview long before the earthquakes of February 6, when we were back in touch, Kaegi told me how saddened he had been by the news of the earthquake, which also affected the families of many people of Turkish origin living in Germany, and asked me to pass on his wishes for a speedy recovery. The road ahead is long for the wounds we will heal through solidarity and by keeping our collective memory alive, and the struggle we must wage is exhausting… But perhaps coming together at artistic events such as Conference of the Absent will do us all a little good and help us catch the breath we need. At least, that is what I want to believe…

Conference of the Absent – did this work emerge as a result of the pandemic, or is it the outcome of a process you had been thinking about and working on for a long time?

It was an idea that had come up earlier, but with the pandemic it took on a new relevance. Conference of the Absent is actually connected to the climate crisis, an increasingly urgent problem, and to the fact that we are a group that frequently goes on international tours with our projects. One of the questions we were grappling with was how we could maintain international connections and give our audiences access to international content without touring huge ensembles, huge stage sets and large technical crews – and therefore without leaving an enormous carbon footprint – and how we could develop different formats to do this. For a long time we had already been devising structurally different forms of performance, such as Remote X. For Remote X, only three people travel, and we source the headphones locally; these three people then spend three weeks on site working out all the details, and that is how the whole piece comes together. It’s quite a different approach from flying somewhere, doing two shows, collecting the applause and flying back. The local adaptations of Remote X, and therefore its impact on different cities, differ from place to place. It also takes place in the local language, which is in fact a process we are now addressing with Conference of the Absent, because everything will be translated into Turkish.

The issues I have just mentioned served as the initial triggers for Conference of the Absent. But then, when the pandemic came, the work took on a different meaning as well, because now we were also confronted with the absence of those who could not travel to where we were. On the one hand, we felt this more and more; on the other, we set about thinking, acting more constructively in Zoom meetings than ever before and complaining about our situation too. But physical presence and what it means take on a truly special form in this work. Even though most of the shows we did during the pandemic were initially performed with masks, which was not exactly ideal, it was very useful to have Conference of the Absent at hand.

I think the real question is this: how can the local audience become more and more performative in a work that comes from far away? After all, in Remote İstanbul people are already giving a performance. At least they interact physically with one another and with the content, and now it’s time for the next step. Now they will even start to speak.

I understand that at the heart of the work lies, perhaps, your search for an answer to the question of whether a tour that leaves no carbon footprint is possible. On the other hand, in Conference of the Absent there is also an intense questioning of what absence means. What can you tell us about that?

This is something we have always been interested in and thought about, because theater is entirely about presence – about what we call liveness, about the presence of the performer in order to do something – and yet much of our work is actually concerned with how we can reconstruct the identity of someone who is not here. For example, Nachlass was a piece I made about people who died after we had devised the performance together, or who knew they would die shortly afterward. These people are not present in the room the audience visits, but their voices, their pictures, even the spaces we reconstructed with them are present. So I suppose we are asking a kind of philosophical and poetic question about absence. But in Conference of the Absent, for example, this question takes a very simple and direct form when someone who works on phantom pain explains to you how you can simulate your neurons – how something that is not there can still be there, or how you can go on representing it in the brain.

“Some people aren’t there because they can’t physically move, others can’t come because they are in outer space, some can’t attend because they have to keep working at their jobs, some don’t want to travel because they think it is bad for the climate, and others can’t be visible because they have to stay hidden, like a secret service agent.”

I suppose the one element whose presence we cannot do without in theater is the audience – what do you think?

Yes, and I think that was a very important thing we learned during the pandemic: how much we missed being together, missed one another… During the pandemic we could still watch performances online and, for example, see the actors, but that isn’t the only reason we go to the theater; we actually also go to the theater to meet one another. So that is what we should celebrate. With the forms of interaction we have invented for theater, I think we should call what we do in theater play theatre: not a play for others, but a play with one another. Conference of the Absent does exactly that: it allows the audience to come together, to take responsibility for this game and this protocol, and for this interaction to take place. If the audience doesn’t do this, the work could actually stop after twenty minutes. So far that has never happened, because people are always quite happy to take part. But we didn’t know that at the start, and we always rehearsed it wondering about exactly that.

I think that in a work like this the audience feels empowered in a sense, because they are part of the “game.” I wouldn’t say in control, but I can speak of a sense of empowerment. I had observed this in Remote İstanbul as well. In Conference of the Absent, you hand over the “word” to the audience from a different angle, and at certain moments the audience can give a much more beautiful, much more poetic performance than an actor.

Beautiful things can happen, because sometimes a child might represent a very old person, or women represent men and men represent women; and while all this is happening, there is this embodiment that you observe. Something I find especially beautiful is the moment when an audience member on stage begins to speak the sentence of someone whose identity they don’t even know yet. They take someone else’s place, they begin a sentence whose ending they don’t know, you observe something passing through their body, a change taking place; you watch them turn into someone else, or at least engage with someone else’s identity.

The audience members who represent others on stage do so either by reading the text in front of them or by repeating the text coming through their headphones. In my view, representing someone else by repeating the text heard through the headphones, rather than by reading the text in front of you, requires a different kind of concentration and, by bringing about a different form of embodiment, allows for a different transformation. This can easily be observed by the other audience members who are not on stage, too. Did you take this into account when choosing who would be represented and how, or did it play a role in the dramaturgy of the work?

I think that, first of all, we wanted to use different forms of performativity, because, for example, there isn’t only text – there are also gestures written into the text. As the performance progresses it becomes more complex; for example, two people come on stage at the same time and begin to interact with each other, or there are moments in darkness when everything becomes more theatrical. On the other hand, we thought it made sense to start simply; everyone understands how reading the text in front of them works, but it also has some disadvantages – for example, people look down in front of them instead of looking at the audience – whereas once they are listening to the text through the headphones they are much more likely to look directly at the audience, because it allows them to, and it also involves a predetermined timing, which gives a little more room to go deeper into representing the person being represented. Also, Conference of the Absent lasts almost two hours, so it’s nice to keep changing the rules of the game just when people think they have learned them.

So how did you choose the people who would be represented, whose stories would be told?

When we stage works that feature different characters, we do a lot of interviews. We spoke to many more people than the ones we present – I think we had around thirty options – and we wanted to cover geographically very different corners of the world. In the end there is someone from Portland, Ohio, someone from Yakutia¹, two people from Africa, someone from Israel, people from Central Europe, where we developed the work, and so on. We included people from very different corners of the world, and in fact there are very different reasons for their absence, too. Some people aren’t there because they can’t physically move, others can’t come because they are in outer space, some can’t attend because they have to keep working at their jobs, some don’t want to travel because they think it is bad for the climate, and others can’t be visible because they have to stay hidden, like a secret service agent. I think this is also partly about mapping out different variations of the game.

And how did you find these people, how did you get in touch with them?

Through very different channels. For example, I visited Mr. Patke, a physicist with locked-in syndrome, in his own home; his house wasn’t all that far from mine, so I visited him there. It was very interesting; he is a very intelligent, brilliant person. As for the others – for example, I had once been to Yakutia and had contacts there. When I came across the huge pit mentioned in Conference of the Absent, I started asking what it was and set out to find people who had worked there, and they pointed me to Tamara; but I never met her in person, and since she speaks Russian we could only communicate with her indirectly. We found some of the others through research on the internet – for example, Les U. Knight, a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT). Daniel (Wetzel)² met the refugee we feature in person, at a refugee camp in Athens. I met the doctor who works on the phenomenon of phantom pain through the Charité hospital in Berlin. I was interested in the phenomenon of phantom pain, so I started researching it, and that is how I reached him.

So can we say that there are subjects you are interested in, such as phantom pain, and that under these headings you reach out to people whose stories relate to them? Or doesn’t it need to be that systematic?

Sometimes we would find someone and reach others through them, but their stories might not be interesting enough for this work. When we did the first trial, for example, I got in touch with people in Egyptian prisons; that could have produced another story worth telling in its own right, but it was very difficult to communicate with them, and therefore to create the text together. As for the secret service case, we thought it might be interesting to include such a person, but we couldn’t find one. Then we decided it might also be good to explore the question of co-authorship through someone’s story. And so we met Gerhard Schindler, who worked in the secret service all his life but would have to censor most of his own life story if he told it as it really is. We asked him whether he would consider writing a fictional character in situations very similar to the ones he had faced; after all, he is someone with plenty of knowledge about how the secret service works and the problems it faces. And so a wide variety of stories emerged.

Conference of the Absent, as you mentioned, contains different performative moments guided by various instructions: audience members who come on stage to represent others sometimes perform the gestures given to them, or audience members sitting in their seats also become part of these moments, for example by standing up or being invited to vote. In fact, I think it is very important for the empathy established with others that the audience doesn’t just “watch” but somehow becomes involved in other people’s stories with their bodies as well. So how did the rehearsal process for a work like this unfold?

It was a complicated process, to be honest. Frankly, each time we tried out a set of (performative) tools, and some of them didn’t work at all or turned out to be very ineffective, while others worked very well – but then, when you repeated them, things could turn out differently. For example, watching someone you enjoy watching, who is enjoying what they’re doing, can easily make for a good performance and make it work, but a “good” performance only emerges if that holds for everyone who comes on stage. Yet by the very nature of the work we can’t control everything, and some things going wrong or feeling a bit strange is part of this game. Otherwise people might think that those who come on stage are actually all actors, which is definitely not the case – and it is very important for the audience to understand this in order to be able to participate actively. So we knowingly take on a certain risk; the performance can go one way or the other. In some of the places where Conference of the Absent has been shown, I have witnessed wonderful performances, but some of the moments I witnessed were awful. You spoke of empathy, but I think it is also about liveness on stage. If none of us goes on stage, the performance doesn’t go on. Or if you notice that the person on stage feels insecure, you may feel that you want to help them. It’s also nice that you are never completely disconnected from what is happening on stage.

It’s as if you distribute responsibility among the audience; that way, each of us becomes individually responsible for the performance as a whole. As I understand it, you don’t hold “rehearsals” in the classical sense. And in your work you already have experience and knowledge of working with “absent” performers. But something else I am curious about is who you do the first trials with. Do you invite your friends, saying come on, let’s all see what happens together?

Yes – I’ve only talked about the difficulties, but we need to do trials in order to find solutions. We invite people to the trials, and at first we do them with our friends. But the problem is that our friends can be too good at these trials. You also need to test the work with different groups, such as older people or people who are hard of hearing, and to do the trials again and again – which was one of the challenges for us. For about a year, we held these trials once a month.

Did you always do the trials in the same city, or did you also do them in different cities?

We did them in different cities, and at one point we even started doing them in different languages, because translation was also an element we needed to test.

Among the works you have created as Stefan Kaegi, the ones that caught my attention include the performance Uncanny Valley (Tekinsiz Vadi, 2018), in which you put a robot on stage; Temple du présent (2021), in which a real octopus appears on stage as the protagonist; and Natures Vivantes (2022), the five-hour theatrical promenade you created with Caroline Barneaud, in which theater leaves not only its buildings but the city as well and you turn a park into a stage with “natural” elements – to name just a few. They remind me of the three concepts discussed by Rosi Braidotti, one of the leading figures of posthuman theory: zoe/geo/techno. Would you like to say something about this?

For me, nature is a very big and important subject when it comes to re-establishing a certain balance between ourselves and other animals. That is why we have also developed a large project called Shared Landscapes, which is in fact also a Creative Europe project. Within this project, we are working on pieces that will take place outside theater venues, in open spaces and in nature, and that will involve different forms of interaction with nature over several hours. Temple du présent also explored how we can communicate with an animal that we may never truly understand, because its intelligence is different from ours, but which we know to be highly intelligent.

¹: Yakutia, or the Sakha Republic, is one of the federal republics that make up Russia, and the Yakuts, who form the majority of its population, are a Turkic people.

²: One of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, together with Stefan Kaegi and Helgard Haug.

*This interview was originally published in the March–April 2023 issue of Art Unlimited magazine.