Since the beginning of 2020, the world has gone through a rapid process of digitalization. As a result, holding meetings on split screens has made it possible for participants from all over the world to come together on a single platform, and it has become part of our daily routine. But did you know that split-screen technology, and perhaps even the first applications of changing the background image, were actually used in silent films at the beginning of the 20th century? In those days, a telephone conversation or a daydream was best told with the split-screen technique. And that is not all: the different body measurements of a stunt double were resized with the same technique and matched to the size of the actor in question. A few materials were needed for this.
You can see a subtle example of split-screen technology in the science-fiction comedy Amour et Science (1912), featured in the final part of “Cinema’s First Nasty Women,” a selection compiled around the theme of “Nasty Women,” which you can watch on Kundurama until April 19. The film tells the story of the revenge that a young woman named Daisy plays on her fiancé, who has invented a kind of “Zoom/Skype” prototype. Daisy’s fiancé, the male inventor Max, invents what is in a sense the prototype of FaceTime or Zoom, and this nearly a century before our time. So how did women instantly grasp the potential of this device, and how did they use it?
*Katharina Loew’s presentation was given at Domitor’s Early Cinema Conference held in November 2020. https://domitor2020.org/en-ca/split-screen-effects-and-early-cinema/
Discovery and revelation shape some of cinema’s most iconic moments. But beyond the best-known scenes lie insights into humanity, craft and discovery, as in Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, where a mother suddenly begins to see her child in a new light. There is also the discovery of the nakedness of the opposite sex, as in the scene in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman that turns the tables on the male gaze. Then, in Sabiha Sumar’s Silent Waters, the audience itself is led to a discovery that changes everything about how they see the story.
Famous film genres – war films, westerns and so on – are about adults, but in this chapter Jane Fonda tells the story of 18 films about children from Germany, Belgium, Mongolia, Sweden, Russia, Canada, Senegal, Argentina and Scotland.
We have all seen bloated films, but what visual and storytelling lessons about keeping things simple can we learn from Claire Denis, Maria Louisa Memberg, Kinuyo Tanaka, Agnès Varda, Valeska Grisebach and Desiree Akhavan?
How have filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay and Kathryn Bigelow in America, Sarah Maldoror in Mozambique, Leni Riefenstahl in Germany and Drahomíra Vihanová in the Czech Republic, together with their editors, pushed the boundaries of montage techniques?
Is cinema the art of point of view? Jocelyn Moorhouse, Ida Lupino, Edith Carlmar from Norway, Sofia Coppola, Liliana Cavani from Italy, Kelly Reichardt, the great Larisa Shepitko, Jennifer Kent and other great directors will show the art of the point-of-view (POV) shot in film.
If close-ups give films their tension, then films shot over more than a century in Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Finland, China, America, France, Germany and Ukraine will show how that tension is best used.
India’s Sharmila Tagore, one of the great stars of film, narrates this bold chapter exploring dreams in films, ranging from Wayne’s World to experimental film, and from there to Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Bulgaria and silent films.
In cinema, bodies can appear as seductive, dancing or subjected to violence. Jane Fonda narrates this chapter on how great directors have filmed bodies, including Agnès Varda, Andrea Arnold, Marva Nabili from Iran, Pirjo Honkasalo from Finland, Márta Mészáros and Wanda Jakubowska from Poland.
From bodies to sex, the most controversial element of film. In this chapter, Diane Kurys, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Jamie Babbit, Safi Faye, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Alison de Vere, Carine Adler, Donna Deitch, Miranda July, Lucía Puenzo, Maren Ade, Chantal Akerman and others will show the best ways to portray sex on screen.
Refuge, shelter or prison? Sharmila Tagore tells the story of the idea of home on screen, using wonderful films by Edith Carlmar, Lynne Ramsay, Mai Zetterling, Liu Jiayin, Forough Farrokhzad, Antonia Bird and others.
A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA
Boldly following in the footsteps of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, this long-in-the-making work draws on hundreds of film clips to show how films are made. Across 40 chapters, it asks questions such as how to shoot a great opening scene, how to frame an image, how to introduce a character, how to film scenes of sex, dance and death, how work and love are portrayed on screen, and how the genres of comedy, melodrama and science fiction work.
Uniquely, all of these questions are answered using clips drawn exclusively from films directed by women. Alongside celebrated women directors, hundreds of forgotten women filmmakers from every era of film history and from every continent appear in the film. Women Make Film is an illuminating work that brings the unknown to light, a celebration of the art and craft of cinema, and an “I Accuse”[1] (J’Accuse…) letter addressed to film history.
Most films have been directed by men. Most of the films we call cinema classics have been directed by men as well. And yet, for one hundred and thirty years and on all six continents where films are made, thousands of women have directed films too. Some of them are among the very best films ever made. What films did they make? Which techniques did they use? What can they teach us about cinema? By neglecting them, film history has been sexist. Women Make Film looks at film once again, through the eyes of the world’s women directors: it is a new road movie through cinema.
This film is not about the lives of directors. It is not a chronological survey. It is not an analysis of the ways in which women directors differ from men. And it is not one of those lists of the greatest films ever made.
No. Its lines are clearer than that.
This film is about films, about scenes. It answers practical questions. How do you begin a film in an intriguing way? How do you set the tone of a film? How do you make a film believable? How do you introduce a character creatively? How do you make a ‘tracking shot’ with a moving camera mesmerizing? It looks for answers to the kinds of questions you ask when you make or watch films. How do you approach dream sequences, dance routines, the workplace or politics? How do you film bodies? What is a wonderful way to show love? Or tension, memory or death? We will ask 40 questions like these. In 40 chapters. In 40 montages along the road. 40 stories about great films.
This film is a kind of film school in which all the teachers are women. It is a Venus Academy. It is a montage built from examples, hundreds of examples, bringing together film scenes from all over the world and from many eras.
Your favorite films may not be here, and neither may your favorite directors. This film does not try to be comprehensive. In fact, some of the more famous films were deliberately left out.
It is, however, full of surprises. Of revelations.
You are free to be annoyed that some of these great films have been overlooked.
But you are also free to take pleasure in the film medium, and in the women on whose shoulders we stand.
[1] Translator’s note: J’Accuse…! is the open letter written by the renowned author Émile Zola about the Dreyfus Affair, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the French Third Republic, and published in the newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898.
“Many films about cinema feature only male directors, so this work is a corrective. It is a film school in which all the teachers are women. The aim of this film, as Diaghilev and Cocteau put it, is to ‘astonish us.’ Fighting for equality in cinema is an imperative right. Part of that fight is to celebrate great women directors and to place them on the launch pad they deserve, one that many film historians, most of them men, have denied them. Women directors are only one part of this history. There have been great women writers, producers and actors on the stage of history, yet there is great ignorance and blindness about women who direct films. Our film will boldly fight that blindness.”
– Mark Cousins, 2018
With examples ranging from 1943 to 2013 and stretching from China to Iran and from Australia to Finland, we will look at the wide spectrum of ways a film can open, from the mysterious, the direct and the gliding to the intuitive and diving straight into the subject. Every film is a lesson in how to create a world in an instant. It offers the chance to learn from examples.
What is the tone of a film? It is not the film’s story or theme, but how its world feels. This time we go to Hollywood, to director Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell and its tone, which evokes an overwhelming sense of love. This chapter examines the countless ways directors set the tone of their films: pleasure, anger, poetry, double tone, moral seriousness, caring, unsettling, violence and more.
It is a subject that is easy to spot but not so easy to understand. Basic human stories, the truth about life, real emotions, responding to the world. How do directors create a reality that does not feel fake? Stories from real life can help with this. But what is the trick? You will find some answers to these questions, together with a master class in believability, through examples ranging from Lois Weber’s The Blot (1921) to Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016).
There are many ways to meet people and introduce characters in films: entering a house, overhearing people, witnessing a strange act. In Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film The Connection, a documentary crew is used to introduce the characters to us; Andrea Arnold places her characters at the center of the frame in Fish Tank; and in The Story of the Flaming Years, directed by Yuliya Solntseva, the main character is presented to the audience by being filmed as a statue on a building.
“The classic Hollywood trope of the meet cute and its countless interpretations. From intimate glances to worlds colliding spectacularly. Unique examples include the fiery central meet cute in Germaine Dulac’s experimental The Seashell and the Clergyman, Céline Sciamma pitting two girl gangs against each other in Girlhood, and the skeptical veteran FBI agent meeting the idealistic rookie in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.
And then a layered meet cute in Mania Akbari’s One. Two. One, masterfully choreographed and shot in a wide angle, composed like a Renaissance altarpiece.
How do you make a simple human interaction cinematic? In Places in Cities, Angela Schanelec advises us to focus on body language; Cecile Tang uses the zoom to guide us through the emotional transitions of The Arch; and Sofia Coppola, in The Virgin Suicides, shows us an unspoken conversation by using songs and split screens that tell the story of an impossible longing.
Frames define scenes and give them their color. They can make sport look like ballet, as in Olympia by the controversial Nazi iconographer Leni Riefenstahl. They shape the cinematic world through the impressionistic glances in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the claustrophobic close-ups in Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl, and camera angles as extreme as the emotions of the title character in Mahalia Belo’s Ellen.
For many, tracking shots are the very essence of the magic of filmmaking. They can ask questions, and they can speak when almost no one else in the film does, as in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est or Marion Hänsel’s Le Lit. In Antonia Bird’s Face, an uninterrupted tracking shot creates the illusion that the camera is an extension of our own eye. Kinetic by nature, the tracking shot can help to show and express a desperate escape dynamically, as in Ursula Meier’s Home.
The staging of scenes is an element of film form that clearly points to theater, the origin of cinema. In The Moon Has Risen, Kinuyo Tanaka uses staging to shape the invisible geometry of the scene, emphasizing the tension between the characters. In Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade stages the scene in depth to set up its tragicomic final lines. And in Maria Schrader’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, the complex staging of the final scene, full of crisscrossing movements, brings its setting to life.
Movement is a key element of the moving image, and journeys in films can be vertical (into one’s own self) as much as they are horizontal. Travel can act as a glue that binds characters from two separate worlds, as in Krane’s Confectionery, which follows a middle-class woman and a working-class man as they set out on a moral journey against society. Driving can be a test of will and courage, as in Nell Shipman’s Something New. The vehicle itself can serve as a safe space and a small social universe, like the car in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. Or the journey can take the character on a trip into their own nightmares, as in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.
The forgotten films of Gerhard Lamprecht, the veteran German director who made more than sixty films between 1920 and 1958, are being taken down one by one from the dusty shelves of history and rediscovered. The selection “Silent Drama: The Authenticity of Gerhard Lamprecht” brings audiences four silent films the director made in the second half of the 1920s. Shot in the years when German Expressionist cinema was making waves around the world, these films draw on the realist vein that developed and flourished with the New Objectivity movement, which emerged in Germany as a reaction to Expressionist aesthetics. Lamprecht’s films, which tell emotionally charged, melodramatic stories with broad popular appeal, are filled with realistic portrayals that reflect the everyday life and socio-economic climate of Weimar-era Germany. So what is reflected through the camera of Lamprecht, who bore witness to his time with an almost documentarian sensibility?
Scenes from 1920s Berlin
Lamprecht’s films, shot in real locations rather than in the studio and with amateur actors, are marked by an intense sense of place. With its streets and buildings, its dives and nightclubs, Berlin in Lamprecht’s films is more than just a background or a set; it lies at the very heart of the narrative. In Slums of Berlin (Die Verrufenen, 1925), the first film in the selection, Lamprecht turns his camera on the slums inhabited by petty criminals, prostitutes and street children. The film lays bare the misery of the poorest segments of society, who paid the heaviest price for the economic ruin caused by the defeat in World War I. Grimy children playing in the streets, hollow-cheeked old people and the homeless crowding the shelters enter the frame. In an interview, Lamprecht says that he recruited some of the extras who appeared in Slums of Berlin from the brothels and the homeless shelter in the area.
People Among Us (Menschen Untereinander, 1926), one of the films in the selection, focuses on the residents of an apartment building on one of the city’s busy streets: an ambitious undersecretary and his wife, who is sent to prison for hitting a pedestrian with her car; a jeweler; a woman who runs a matchmaking service; an elderly piano teacher struggling to pay the rent… Offering glimpses into the lives of these ordinary people, most of whom belong to the middle class, the film contains interesting observations on the urban life and lifestyle of 1920s Berlin. Another film in the selection, Under the Lantern (Unter der Laterne, 1928), paints a vibrant portrait of Berlin, with crowds filling the streets, avenues buzzing with trams and cars, department stores and cabaret shows, while also showing the ugly face behind the glitter of nightlife. At times Lamprecht’s films reflect the hustle and bustle of modern city life in such a realistic style that we feel as if we are watching a city-symphony documentary such as Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, 1927).
Economic Contradictions
In Lamprecht’s films, the two different faces of Weimar Germany always stand side by side: on one side are those struggling with hunger and poverty in the slums, and on the other are members of the wealthy, privileged class living in luxurious villas. At times, as if to emphasize the enormous gulf between the two classes, Lamprecht makes striking cuts between the world of the poor and the world of the rich. For example, in the opening sequence of Children of No Importance (Die Unehelichen, 1926), one of the films in the selection, we first see rich children riding in a pony-drawn carriage in the showy garden of a mansion. The camera then cuts to Peter and Lotte, the illegitimate children watching them with great interest from behind the wire fence surrounding the garden. In his films, Lamprecht not only draws attention to the economic inequality in Weimar Germany, but also shows that it is by no means a remote possibility for anyone from the middle class to lose everything they have and fall into destitution. In Slums of Berlin, the plight of Robert, an engineer who finds every door closed to him after being imprisoned for perjury and who is driven to the brink of suicide by hunger and misery, reflects the fears of impoverishment and of losing one’s job, home and respectability felt by a middle class living in the shadow of the soaring postwar inflation, unemployment and economic depression.
“Fallen” Women
In Lamprecht’s films, men who fall on hard times can manage to get back on their feet through determination, perseverance and hard work, but Lamprecht’s “fallen” women are not so lucky. The inevitable end that awaits Emma, the kind-hearted prostitute of Slums of Berlin, and Else in Under the Lantern, who is forced into prostitution to earn a living after being left penniless by her father’s oppression and unfortunate coincidences, is illness and death. Still, Lamprecht’s films do not end on an entirely dark note. Both Children of No Importance, which tells the story of three children left to the mercy of a heartless, money-grubbing foster family, and Slums of Berlin and Under the Lantern have a “happy ending” that would satisfy mainstream audiences, despite the tragic deaths of some characters.
Lamprecht’s films about the suffering of fallen women and poor children are, in their broad outlines, built on melodramatic clichés. What sets Lamprecht’s films apart from classical Hollywood melodramas, however, is that they address the social issues of their time with a realism not found in Hollywood films. So much so that by looking at the films of Lamprecht—one of the rare directors who stayed in Berlin and kept making films during the Weimar period, in Nazi Germany as filmmakers left the country one after another, and afterwards—we can trace the transformations Germany went through.
Coşkun Liktor
*This article was written for the Culture Blog by Coşkun Liktor, writer for ALTYAZI MAGAZINE.
The four-part selection ‘Cinema’s First Nasty Women’ is a kind of historical “excavation” that all but rewrites the history of early cinema. A project in which Laura Horak, Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı search the—quite literally—dusty shelves of film history, it introduces us to the unconventional female characters of silent cinema. Rebelling against sexual violence, against the exploitation of domestic labor, or against the gender roles and assigned sex imposed on them, these exceedingly “funny” women masterfully work the slapstick genre, which draws especially on physical comedy, and at times use humor as a political tool. Alongside comedy, the selection also includes westerns and thrillers, and the echoes of its “rebellious and disruptive” women can at times be seen in today’s films as well. Taking a look at the “modern versions” of these characters—which, unfortunately, can still be counted on one hand—also shows us what a disruptive potential all this “nastiness” still carries a century later. The fact that one of the events that inspired the project was the word “nasty” Donald Trump used for Hillary Clinton is further proof of this historical continuity. Here is what these remarkable women, calling out to us from the depths of history, evoke when viewed from today…
Léontine and the Mischievous Girls of Anime
One of the films in the first part of the selection, titled “Terrible Maids and Anarchic Tomboys,” is La pile électrique de Léontine (1910). In the film, we witness Léontine, star of the Pathé Comica series, whose real identity is unfortunately unknown, wreaking havoc with a kind of “electroshock” device. Reminiscent of the mischievous girls of Studio Ghibli, Léontine defies everyone thanks to her “special power,” in spite of all the adults who try to “tame” her. Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, the mischievous mermaid who turns an entire town upside down; Isao Takahata’s “uncontrollable” little princess Kaguya; Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s adolescent heroine Arrietty, who flouts all the rules and throws herself into danger… With the way they use slapstick and physical comedy, the heroines of these animated films, whose visual possibilities open up a great deal of room for “disruptive comedy,” recall the “anarchic tomboys” of the early era.
Bringing Down the System from Within: Terrible Maids
Another striking film in the first part of the selection is La Greve des Nouricces (1907), in which a group of nannies rebel against their employers. Reminiscent in some ways of the suffragette movement of its time, and in others a revolt against the exploitation of domestic labor and the precarity of service workers, the film is a kind of comedy that could almost be called absurd. Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995), one of the first films that comes to mind when it comes to rebellious maids, deals with a similar political revolt, even though it is not a comedy. Taking on a humorous tone at times, particularly thanks to Isabelle Huppert’s extreme performance, the film is like a modern version of early cinema’s disruptive maids who poked fun at class boundaries. The adjective “terrible” chosen for these maids in the selection is a highly meaningful choice, considering that the maid/nanny figure is generally one of the favorite motifs of the horror/thriller genre. The “terrible maids,” a staple of many horror films from The Omen (1976) to The Babysitter (1980), reappear in recent series such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Servant and “bring down the system from within.”
In the Name of the Power of Clumsiness: “Let the House Go to Hell!”
The second part of the selection, which follows a similar thread, focuses on “Queens of Destruction” and angry housewives. It is impossible to watch La fureur de Mme Plumette (1912), which centers on Madame Plumette, who flies into a rage when her husband leaves her to go fishing, without recalling Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), starring Carmen Maura. Maura, a favorite actress of the director’s early films, plays a housewife who raises the flag of feminist revolt in the black comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984).
Another film in the second part of the selection is Zoé et le Parapluie Miraculeux (1913), starring the comedian known as Little Chrysia. Zoé, who can make anything she wants rain down from the sky with the help of a magic umbrella, uses this power, which she cannot fully control, to physically wreck everyone around her, including her employers—and even herself. The theme of “clumsiness” or lack of control that emerges here at times brings to mind a kind of physical comedy we associate with the films and performances of Greta Gerwig in recent years. Frances Ha (2012), Lady Bird (2017) and Mistress America (2015) feature heroines who are never fully in control of their bodies and who wreck their surroundings with their “clumsiness,” constantly in a state of “shaking off” the gender roles assigned to them.
Neither Lady Nor Gentleman: The Female Cowboys of the Wild West
A refusal to fit into molds similar to that of the second part forms the main theme of the third part of the selection as well: “Gender Rebels.” In this part, made up of characters who reject the role of “lady” imposed on them and challenge gender norms, we watch a western called Rowdy Ann (1919). Ann, who wears cowboy clothes, carries a gun on her hip and is always galloping around on horseback, is forcibly sent to a “finishing school” by her family after a fight with some men. Although the school files down Ann’s “sharp edges” here and there, the rebellious spirit inside her loses none of its former self. While even today it is hard to find examples of the western, historically a highly masculine genre, with female leads, Ann from 1919 winks at us with all her mischief. In this sense, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) by Kelly Reichardt, who returned to the western with her latest film First Cow, is one of the rare examples that come to mind. Placing a young woman named Emily Tetherow at the center of the western, a genre in which women appear only as archetypes, the director follows in the footsteps of western predecessors with female leads such as Calamity Jane (1953) and Johnny Guitar (1954).
The Masked Heroines of the City: “Playing the Man”
The final part of the selection, ‘Female Tricksters,’ tells the stories of modern urban women who resort to various “tricks” so as not to get lost in the chaos of the metropolis. The “science fiction comedy” Amour et Science (1912), which we have the opportunity to watch in this part, is about the revenge game that a young woman named Daisy plays on her fiancé, who has invented a kind of “Zoom/Skype” prototype. In the film, in which the screen is split into parts with a surprisingly innovative editing technique, we witness a dream of “video calling” that speaks to us across more than a hundred years. Daisy dresses her best friend as a man and plays a joke on her fiancé to make him jealous when he video calls her. Women like Daisy, who find their solution for adapting to city life in dressing as men, bring to mind many characters, from Jo March of Little Women (2019), who has to present herself as a male writer, to Mulan (1998), who goes to war in her father’s place, and from Game of Thrones‘ “gender rebel” Arya Stark to Enola Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’s mischievous younger sister. Forced to become “invisible” in order to make themselves visible, these “nasty” women undermine male-dominated society with their sharp minds and cunning, making room for themselves by breaking, disrupting, shouting and making a fuss.
Aslı ILDIR
*This article was written for the Culture Blog by Aslı Ildır, writer for ALTYAZI MAGAZINE.
The guest of Kundura Sahne’s online program is Stefan Kaegi, one of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, among the most important art collectives in European theater. The guests of his project, which he titled “Uncanny Valley,” are the German writer Thomas Melle—or rather, a copied, manufactured android of Melle—and the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing…
“All normal life, consciously or otherwise, resents domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger. Physically, and, to an extent, mentally, a robot—any robot—is superior to human beings… If a robot can be created capable of being a civil executive, I think he’d make the best one possible. By the Laws of Robotics, he’d be incapable of harming humans, incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice.” This is how Isaac Asimov, the American writer and biochemist who served as a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, sums up the situation in his book “I, Robot” (first published in 1950, adapted for the big screen in 2004, and published in Turkish by İthaki Yayınları).
From the Anthropocene to transhumanism… I am one of those who think we are stuck in this skin and body, in mortality with 206 bones. For instance, René Descartes, who said that ‘the soul is immortal,’ speaks in his book “Discourse on the Method” (published in Turkish by Bilge Kültür Sanat) of a robot monkey that looks exactly like a monkey. Just as, in its time, there was Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (published in Turkish by Can Yayınları), written when she was 18—the so-called modern Prometheus, a manifestation of the robot image in humanity’s imagination… For now, the digital revolution is part of our lives in versions such as surgical robots, secretary robots, factory robots and cleaning robots. Perhaps in a very short time, teacher robots, soldier robots, sex robots or lawyer robots will be among those taking their place in everyday life. Who knows!
As you know, when we visit many websites, what is asked of us in the name of security verification is proof that “I am not a robot.” I am talking about Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), invented in 2003. In the end, we have to prove that we are not robots in order to continue with what we are doing. And if the system is not satisfied, it even loads new questions onto the page. What I mean is that while we kept grappling with those questions, at the same time, in some corner of the world, new levels were springing up in a trek across topics.
For instance, while Elon Musk was signing a deal with NASA for some project worth who knows how many trillions of dollars, let us—far from even attempting to think about issues such as ecological destruction, the extinction of species, pandemics, the climate crisis, androids and cyborgs—just keep talking to Apple’s Siri and then arguing and bickering with that voice! Really, how many people are there who don’t bicker with that voice? With a nod to those who say that, in the shadow of all this, we are living in a simulation, allow me to come to the point, to the subject of today…
Recently a news item titled “There’s an android at Kundura Sahne!” landed in my inbox. I eagerly read the newsletter and clicked the link to the performance they recommended I watch. Afterwards, with that same enthusiasm and appetite, I wanted to share it with you. Our topic: “Uncanny Valley,” the android (humanoid robot) performance that takes the use of artificial intelligence in theater to a new threshold, shown as part of the online program of Kundura Sahne, Beykoz Kundura’s dance and performance stage. The creators of the performance: Rimini Protokoll…
Produced by Rimini Protokoll, which was founded in the early 2000s under the leadership of Stefan Kaegi, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, and created with concept, text and direction by Stefan Kaegi, the play takes as its starting point the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ first used in the 1970s by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the uncanny zone of existential uncertainty people experience when they encounter androids. Incidentally, in developing this idea, Mori drew on psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch’s “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” published in 1906, and neurologist Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” elaborated in 1919.
In “Uncanny Valley,” in which we watch alone on stage an android copied and manufactured with reference to Thomas Melle, an extraordinary author of German literature, the writer’s literary journey and his manic-depressive experiences are recounted. Another subject on stage is also the most fundamental reference of “Uncanny Valley”:
Alan Turing, who worked for the British military, was honored with awards for his inventions that broke the Germans’ communication codes during World War II, is regarded as the founder of computer language, and whose death is shrouded in mystery. Questioning the perception and structural integrity of reality, and enthusiastically received by the theater world when it was first staged in 2018, the play offers a viewing experience as unsettling as it is intriguing, in the ‘uncanny zone’ where the questions ‘what is a human?’ and ‘what is a machine?’ become entangled.
In short: If you’d like to treat yourself to 60 minutes of something lovely these days and slip away, even a little, from the parallel universe you find yourself in, you can visit www.beykozkundura.com. You have until February 28 to take a free peek at this performance. But before you discover this ‘uncanny valley,’ come take a look at our interview with Stefan Kaegi, the creator of the performance, who through a wide range of collaborations creates documentary theater plays, audio projects, special formats and works that exist in urban settings; who, following research and conceptual processes, prefers to work with ‘experts’ who have a story to tell but are not professional actors; and who has met Istanbul’s art lovers before!
“You will feel this phantom pain”
Donna Haraway, the American academic and author of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” who says, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs,” continues as follows in the chapter “From Cyborgs to Companion Species” of her book “Başka Yer” (Elsewhere): “This is as much a story of biopower and biosociality as of technoscience. / Cyborgs… can be figures for living within contradictions.” Cyborg, uncanny valley, android, actroid or transhuman—what do all these names/definitions correspond to and mean in your perception?
It is interesting that you quote Haraway. As you know, she is also very curious about animal intelligence—and right now I am working with a very intelligent octopus as the protagonist of my show. And when we look at it, it seems so alien to us that people like Vilém Flusser (philosopher, writer and journalist) say they come from outside this world. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are a concept we are very familiar with. We are so closely connected to—even dependent on—technology that it hurts when we lose our technological devices. If you lock your cell phone away somewhere for a whole day, you will feel this phantom pain.
Turning to “Uncanny Valley,” could you tell us about its theme and creative process? What was your source of inspiration? How did Stefan Kaegi, Thomas Melle and Alan Turing come together?
I had been fascinated by some humanoid robots I saw in museums, but I felt the power of encountering them when I encountered them in theater, where the encounter can be much more powerful because the robot appears before you as a performer. At some point I came across Thomas’s book “The World at My Back.” In the book, Melle shares a chronicle of his psychological illness. I thought, I guessed, that he would be interested in swapping places with a robot in order to avoid the inconsistencies caused by his bipolar disorder.
Thomas was inspired by the robot idea almost immediately… And, much to my delight, he offered to add the part about Alan Turing. The inside of the robot was created by Chris-Creatures, a small animatronics workshop in Berlin. They made the entire exoskeleton. While the silicone skin and hands were being produced at the mask workshop of the Kammerspiele München in Germany, they also installed 32 servo motors. Actually, making the robot walk would have been a completely different story. Luckily, for the purposes of a lecture performance in a theater venue, we did not need that feature.
“Forgetting less and living longer”
“Uncanny valley” is a concept that has been used frequently in recent years. Of course, arts and culture have their share of it too; we come across it in cinema, exhibitions, literature and music. Watching every day how this concept, used by roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s, has seeped into the present is in some ways both fun and mysterious. At the point we have reached today, it is obvious that technology is changing and transforming our world. How do you see this change and transformation? For instance, what will it be like to make art in an “uncanny valley”?
With each passing day, robots serve us more and more. Someone may even have written an algorithm that answers interviews like this, in which case it would be hard for you to prove that I am not the one answering your questions. That said, I was curious whether people could empathize with an object. It is a classic theater question applied to the simulation of an actor. We are probably all trying to make ourselves more efficient, less fragile. We want to forget less and live longer. And we all rely on technology and medication to go further down this road. Where is the limit right now?
What are your thoughts on the questions in the play’s description: When the copy replaces the original, what does that mean for the original? Do the copy and the original compete with each other, or do they help each other?
I prefer not to answer the questions raised by the play; I hope the play inspires each audience member to answer these questions. That said, I can say that the process of creating this human copy helps all of us look at human beings more closely and precisely. I think something similar happens to painters when they try to paint the human body. They begin to look at the original very closely and precisely. For me, this play is about empathy, because when we project ourselves onto the robot, we cannot help but empathize with this machine. And one of the many human “programs” that make me doubt where the boundary between a robot and a human lies is precisely this empathy mechanism within us. How free is our free will, really?
“A good moment to question growth”
Machines have begun to replace humans in many fields. There are questions such as, “Could artificial intelligences and machines replace humans in theater as well? If so, how might they guide the audience?” Do you think we would need to give theater made by artificial intelligence a name other than theater?
From a certain angle, theater is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of artificial intelligence. Because what is artificial intelligence? It is the effort to predict what people will feel and what they will need. And to prepare direct responses to these. In theater, if you have a sad scene, you put on a certain kind of music. You predict what feelings will be stirred in people. So there is a strong connection between the two… There is only one option for how a scene will end. You feel sad and that music plays. People go through this mood, reach catharsis, and in the end they applaud. In interactive forms, you try to open up different branches. As in computer game design after GTA (the video game series).
There were cases where “open world” games let you go in any direction you wanted. The game offers you every kind of option for how you might behave. So I think there are very broad possibilities in this realm. But I’m not saying we should replace this kind of classical artificial intelligence—that is, classical theater direction—everywhere with programmed, computerized artificial intelligence. It might be interesting to try it once or twice and reflect on what we have been missing. But then let’s go back to the venues and make completely live work.
In fact, in my latest play there was an animal, which I mentioned a moment ago. An octopus. And there were a few people around it. The play included improvisation at times. So it has nothing to do with surrendering to technology. But I think theater has always blended live art with technology. It has been this way since the ‘deus ex machina’ of Roman and ancient Greek times. Indeed, Aristotle wrote about this. Many of the illusions used in Baroque theater were in fact extremely technical things too. And this is normal, because our lives are also seriously affected by technology.
There is the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who says in “Of Grammatology,” “This world is the manuscript of another world, closed to universal reading, whose cipher only existence can decode,” and the novelist and critic Raymond Williams, who says in “Modern Tragedy,” “Man is not ‘by nature’ anything: he is the being who both creates and transcends his limits.” In light of the words of these two masters, how do you think the pandemic we are going through on a global scale will transform the performing arts and the way people live in the future? Or, in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth, will the 350,000-year story of the human child simply carry on as before?
Human beings are definitely a worn-out animal species. Somehow they have lost their user manuals, their instincts. Having started to outsource everything they used to do themselves—either to machines or to countries where labor is cheap enough for your money—they no longer know what else to do. I think it is a good moment to look at this nature, since it will continue for a while. The pandemic is definitely a good time to ask ourselves how much longer we want to live and reproduce ourselves. It is a good moment to question growth, in terms of both economic growth and population growth, the lengthening of our average lifespan, and so on.
Are there any new projects and plays on the table? It would be nice to share the news here.
My octopus piece is finished and is waiting for its audience. In fact, its recording will be released online this week as an online version by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne. During the restrictions, I created an audio tour for abandoned theaters: Black Box, Phantomtheatre for 1 person. (Black Box, Phantom Theater for 1 person).
With my colleagues at Rimini Protokoll, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, we created a live Zoom performance version of our “call center” play “Call Cutta.” It is a performance that takes place only on Zoom, and we will open this project next week. And we are working on a large immersive exhibition for the CCCB museum (Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) in Barcelona… And as for Türkiye, I hope our audio tour “Remote İstanbul” will start again at Kundura Sahne (this summer).
Betül Memiş / Cnnturk.com
‘Uncanny Valley’ raises the possibility of ‘actroids’ taking the place of actresses and actors on stage. In this pioneering play by the German company Rimini Protokoll, we watch a humanoid robot.
A middle-aged male performer sits on an empty stage. A performer, but not a human; a humanoid robot, an android. Or—to borrow the apt term from an article I came across about the play—an ‘actroid’. He sits before us in an attempt to unravel the blurred boundaries between humans and humanoid robots made with artificial intelligence. With a laptop in front of him, necessarily bound to the armchair he sits in, he is about to give us a presentation, accompanied by images he will project onto the digital screen from time to time and by what is going through his ‘mind’…
‘Uncanny Valley’ is a work by the German company Rimini Protokoll, with text, concept and direction by Stefan Kaegi, one of the company’s founders. Currently being screened with Turkish subtitles as part of Kundura Sahne’s online program, the play takes its name from the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. The term, which Mori used in the 1970s, refers to the uncanny zone of existential uncertainty people experience when they encounter humanoid machines.
So what did Kaegi do? By cloning the physical features of the German writer Thomas Melle and programming his personality traits and behavior, he created what Melle, in the play’s own words, calls ‘an outdated puppet’ of him. Yes, an android that looks exactly like Thomas Melle is on stage. Meeting the audience, he talks about himself from childhood onward, about his literary journey and his psychological struggles. He is someone who could stand in for all those tedious ‘author duties’ (interviews, signings, shoots, etc.) even if Melle were to disappear. Just look: he has already proven himself on stage!
Even the sound of clearing his throat is the same
‘Uncanny Valley’ is a work that, through this ‘theater machine’, invites the audience to reflect on the existence of a human being and of their copy, and on the strange, truly uncanny relationship between the two. Through the footage used during the play, the ‘real’ Melle also becomes part of it. His robot, which in the name of ‘realism’ does not even skip the sound of clearing its throat, reminds us that the fundamental measure of being human lies in emotions and in life’s coincidences, while at the same time asking: “Why do I behave like you? So that you will see yourselves in me? I can empathize with you, but can you?”
The ‘humanoid robot’ question, which has been the subject of cinema and literature time and again, presents itself directly as a subject in theater with this 2018 production. For me, the strangest moment is when, in the recording I watched, the audience enthusiastically applauds the robot on stage with shouts of “Bravo!”
Bahar Çuhadar
3.3.1. Breaking News:
The play takes the form of a reality show in which footage from daily news bulletins broadcast around the world is shown live, one after another.
“(…) Just as the object no longer has any relationship with the earlier object, the news produced by the media no longer has any relationship with the “reality” of facts. Both the object and the news are the product of a selection, an edit, a shot (…)”[14]
In this play by Haug and Wetzel, staged in 2008, there are 25 TV monitors and numerous satellite dishes on stage, and the stage has been turned into a huge studio.
First, Martina Englert, Marion Mahneke and Sushila Sharma-Haque come on stage. Standing in front of boards displaying pictures of their homes, they introduce themselves and talk about their relationship with TV. After the three men who follow them do the same in turn, the boards are turned around to reveal a large world map, and each person begins to describe, geographically and culturally, the part of it that falls to them. The experts of everyday life chosen by Rimini truly bring the skills and experience of their professions to the stage. Sushila Sharma-Haque is an editor at the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle in Germany; Simon Birgisson is a researcher-journalist in Iceland; Andreas Osterhaus is editor-in-chief at the French news agency AFP; and Hans Hübner is the Africa correspondent for the German television channel ARD. All of these experts take their places at their own monitors on stage and begin watching, together with the audience, the evening news of various countries broadcast live via satellite. On stage, much like reporters, they give special headlines to the news items they choose. They translate the news and comment on it. With the commentary on the different news segments that follow one after another, seeing how the main topics emphasized by broadcasters in different countries vary or stay the same makes each performance a different live experiment and produces a different result.
Magel says that over the course of two hours the images around the world are almost the same, but the emphasis differs.[15] In fact, one can never be sure of this. Depending on the changing topics of the day, broadcasters in different countries may report from different perspectives. In such cases, it is not entirely clear whether Rimini favors leaving the flow to chance, or whether highlighting the sameness of the images is meant to emphasize the technological dominance of the global world. I think it would be more accurate to interpret each performance as an investigation of the content of the news as it is shown live on channels such as ARD, CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC and the Pentagon. The group simply asks questions such as “How much foreign news reaches Iraq compared to Iceland?” or “Which images are shown in South Africa compared to Ukraine?”, “What is the breaking news of the day?”, “What gets lost in the hunt for images?”[16] This work is accepted as a topical inquiry or investigation.
Breaking News is a work that turns into entertainment by conveying real news as interpreted from personal perspectives. It can be said to be a simple play that has no problem of credibility. No attempt whatsoever is made on stage to create an illusion. The only text used in the play is Aeschylus’s “The Persians.” Hans Hübner recounts his memories of Africa by blending them with The Persians; here, too, deeply subjective memories are synthesized with a dramatic text. Apart from this, the performers speak in their own words, without any text. Katia Arfara describes the performance style of the experts on stage as follows:
“(…) In recounting what is happening, the experts of everyday life are like the Messenger in ancient Greek tragedy or a Brechtian narrator. With their objectivity and impartiality, their style of acting echoes Piscator’s idea of the actor guiding the audience like a piece of stage material, “without feeling deeply.””[17]
The technical operation of the multimedia surrounding the play—that is, the control of sound and video—is carried out from the stage. In the use of multimedia, one of the most important elements of the new theatrical language the group has built in relation to reality, the illusionist approaches of realistic theater are strictly avoided. According to Katia Arfara, the performance of the company, which strives to redefine theater by tearing down all preconceptions about what it is, consists of three temporal layers.[18] The first of these is actual, live time. This is the time in which the participants instantly translate the news they encounter on television. The second is recorded, documentary time. This temporal layer is the situation in which interpretations are made using previously recorded television footage. The third is historical time. It is the temporal layer created by incorporating the text of The Persians into the play. Thus, the different temporal layers indicate degrees of authenticity. The play, which contains all these different temporalities, achieves a state of being “here and now” by juxtaposing the anti-theatrical situation of the experts of everyday life on stage with TV images.
We can say that Rimini Protokoll’s intention in placing television and news bulletins at the center of the play is to make its audience ask questions about comparing the images that television, as a mass medium, produces in the global world and about questioning their reality. At the same time, it is also about the audience’s changing relationship with the content of news bulletin footage. The change in attitude toward the consumption of television news can be exemplified by the way live war footage during the Gulf War was watched over dinner. Baudrillard says that what mass communication gives us is not reality but the vertigo of reality.[19]
While seeing the same images in completely different geographical areas produces one result in the play, showing the sameness or difference of the information these images contain also brings contradictions to light. While the play raises a wide variety of questions about the media and the visual form of the global press, it also leads societies that consume the images created by television to confront the relationship they have established with image and reality. The fact that television, the most important medium of information, actually moves away from reality precisely through the images it creates becomes another conclusion for the audience. Robins says the following about the use of images:
“(…) While I am interested in how images are used to know and understand the world, I also want to draw attention to the fact that they can be used to prevent, reject and deny the reality of events in the world. As important as the question of what is shown—indeed, an even more important question—is the question of what is not shown (screened out).”[20]
Rimini Protokoll has raised its questions about the most influential mass medium of the world we live in, and revealed the form of sociological relationship it produces, by means of television itself, the very object at the center of its critique. In other words, the material for the television object, the culture and the mode of reception questioned in the play was once again television. This attitude is in fact much like pop art’s understanding of art. It shares common ground with pop art’s critique of consumption, which it carried out by using as its material everything that is itself consumable. The observation made by Neil Postman, who says that television “forms the paradigm of our public understanding,” about the spread of the language of TV is important:
“While television presents the news to us packaged as vaudeville, it forces other media to do the same, so that the information environment as a whole is shaped to mirror television.”[21]
In using TV and the images of the reality it creates in its play, Rimini Protokoll inevitably mirrored it as well.
In defining the function of television and images in the play, we can say first of all that they are used in place of a text. The text of the play is formed through the interpretation of the news coming from television. Here, without any linear narrative, the play moves on to a different news item with each changing news image and the person interpreting it. This rapid succession of news images and commentary has brought speed and dynamism to the play in an aesthetic sense. But the defining feature of the images is that they transfer the present-day realities of life into the play, without any projections of written documents or previously prepared fictional films. The real images being watched around the world are shown to the audience simultaneously from the theater stage. The reality here takes shape not as the showing of real documents in the conventional manner of Piscator’s plays, but as bringing what is real onto the stage without aestheticizing it at all. The playing space is constructed with images; beyond that, the images have no further use, such as expanding the boundaries of time and space. In Breaking News, too, we find the consequences of the qualitative change that images have undergone within the postmodern paradigm. Because the images serve the play not to create thematic unity or meaning through their content, but simply through their presence as images. In other words, the emphasis is less on what the images tell than on how they are told and edited, and on the diversity or sameness of this (around the world). Society is no longer the society of Piscator’s theater, moved or shocked by the image, but a media society that uses the language of the media as an ordinary, everyday language. Their theater, too, is created in the same language—that is, with television.
The central structure of the images in the play and the aesthetic they create is a new techno-aesthetic formed within the aesthetics of the media and communication technologies. Thus technology has now shaped the artistic imagination at the level of form and content. That is, content has become fused with form, and formal structure has come to be perceived as art.[22] The fact that the images produced by technological material are used as they are, in their everyday functions, without being aestheticized and without even the aim, as the Wooster Group had, of creating a new unity of meaning from them, indicates that art has now been reduced to mere technique and material. Moreover, bringing everyday life to the stage just as it is (the experts not concealing their own personalities, and the everyday news in the television footage) has completely erased the boundary between art and everyday life.
In Breaking News, Rimini Protokoll does not present to the audience, from an ideological perspective, its political stance regarding the questioning of television images in the global world. In the end, it makes no proposition. Having exposed people’s perceptions as they drift away from the reality created by images, it does not set out in search of any answer. With the noncommittal attitude of postmodern art, the play ends just as it began. Wetzel expresses this choice in their plays as follows:
“Theater can be a tool for creating experience, but it is not suited to perceiving the world in a standard way. It may concern your next-door neighbor or the ideology of global markets. But we do not make theater to tell you our own critique or to get you to accept a critique as true. If that were the case, we would write brochures.(…)”[23]
The questions that ought to be asked in the play remain hanging in the air within the format of an entertaining reality show. It can be said that this ambiguity at the end of the play is also clearly visible in their other plays. One of these is Radio Muezzin.
3.3.2. Radio Muezzin:
The play was created under the direction of Stefan Kaegi and first staged in 2008. In the play, in which four muezzins from Cairo appear on stage as performers, the starting point was a real issue. In Cairo, the call to prayer recited by many muezzins in different voices was banned, and it was decided that the call to prayer recited by a single muezzin from one central location would be broadcast across the city on radio frequencies. In order to select this one person, 30 muezzins were entered into a call-to-prayer competition, and those other than the winner lost their jobs. Radio Muezzin brings together on stage three muezzins who lost the competition and the muezzin who won it. The experts of everyday life perform themselves on stage.
The muezzins sit on chairs in an area covered with carpets (just as in mosques). Behind them are four projections. The muezzins talk about themselves, their work, their families and their ideas. While they speak, pictures from their lives or prepared video presentations are shown on the screen behind each muezzin. As the muezzins talk about themselves one by one, documentary images of their real worlds are also shown to the audience. They share deeply intimate information about their lives, such as how much money they earn, what they think about religion and women, or how big their homes are.
The fact that the play brings to the stage an event that actually took place in real life, together with the real people involved in it, is a clear example of Rimini Protokoll’s use of found objects in its artistic approach. The only difference between this play and the reality shows watched on television screens is that it is watched not on television but on stage. Baudrillard says that the ancestor of the reality show is the ready made.[24] The transformation of the play’s found-object elements into artistic material while preserving their own functionality, without removing them from their function in the world of objects, is the essential orientation that defines the making of Radio Muezzin.
“Today, any object, individual or situation is a potential ready-made to the extent that the phrase Duchamp implicitly uttered about the bottle rack, “ It exists, I came across it,” can be said of them. Thus everyone is invited to show themselves as they are and, just as the ready-made plays its role live as it is from the museum’s screen, they too are invited to play out their lives live on screen. (…)”[25]
How the reality of the experts of everyday life making themselves so transparent on stage, all but exposing their lives through pictures and video films, affects the audience is a matter of debate. The reality on stage of the other three muezzins who lost their jobs carries the potential to produce an effect similar to the way people in front of the television lose their capacity to react by growing accustomed to the horrifying images they watch on reality shows. Does the viewer’s capacity for empathy increase while listening to the life stories of the muezzins on stage who have lost their jobs, just as they are, and while watching real documents on the screen? Or does the viewer put a distance between themselves and all this reality and consume it as material for a show? Baudrillard expresses the problem of the relationship that the reality show viewer establishes with reality, which encompasses these questions, as follows:
“The same problem is encountered in reality shows: the television viewer must be drawn not in front of the screen (they have always been in front of the screen—indeed, that is their excuse and their refuge), but into it, to the other side of the news. In a way similar to what Duchamp did with the bottle rack, transferring it as it was into the other realm of art and thus creating an inextricable confusion between art and the real, the same conversion must be carried out on the television viewer.”[26]
It is necessary to repeat the questions concerning the effect that the authentic presence of the muezzins on stage has on the audience. Is it possible for the audience to become voyeurs of the reality on stage and turn deaf to that reality? If the reality of the “others,” whose realities on stage are proven with documents, is indeed being abstracted, the orientalist elements present in the play also have a share in this.
The muezzins show on stage, without completing them, a number of rituals belonging to Eastern faith, such as reciting the call to prayer and performing the ritual prayer. They do not carry them through to the end, in order to avoid using an act of worship or any religious ceremony for the purpose of spectacle. Still, while one should be skeptical about how large an audience a play built around fragments of such religious rituals could find in a Muslim country, in Germany or other European countries it is likely to be found interesting by audiences because of its authentic character. Here, of course, the West’s orientalist view of the East plays a role. However, how and to what extent the reality of what happens on stage affects the audience, how real a relationship the audience establishes with reality, or whether they consume its authentic motifs merely as the aesthetics of a show, is not clearly evident in this play adorned with religious rituals.
In Radio Muezzin, film and projection are the only means of showing the reality of the people and events on stage. Through them, a great many details about the lives of the muezzins telling their stories are shown. Their reality is reinforced. Through these pictures of their living spaces, their children, their neighbors and their own lives, one comes across various examples of the living standards of Cairo’s muezzins and their outlook on life. While all the details of how they clean the mosques where they work and how they became muezzins are conveyed in their own words, their photographs are shown in the background as images that in fact depict their identities. For example, the muezzin who won the competition is interested in bodybuilding, and becoming a muezzin was not actually his dream. Since childhood, others had wanted him to be raised as a muezzin. The photograph he had taken in front of McDonald’s after placing second in a Qur’an recitation competition he entered in Malaysia is interesting. The strange longing he feels, as an Easterner, for the Western way of life is all but laid bare in this photograph. In this and similar ways, projected images that openly reveal the true circumstances of the people are displayed. In addition, a film made from various footage of Cairo is used in the play to reveal the authentic living conditions of a Muslim country. Since film and projection are the only source through which the play—which shows reality with all its documents without creating any illusion whatsoever—is able to create on stage the aesthetics of Muslim worship and of everyday life, we can say that film and projection are the most important elements of this play.
The muezzin who placed first in the competition and won the right to recite the call to prayer from the central system left the show in the later stages of Radio Muezzin. In subsequent performances it was stated on stage that the reason for this was the tense atmosphere between him and the muezzins who had been left unemployed, and his image on the screen was used in the play in his place. The image took the place of reality. The approach of having objects from real life take part in the play without concealing anything of themselves continued unchanged; in place of the found-object muezzin, his double—his video image—was used in the play with the same function.
Regarding the outcome produced by showing a state of reality through photography and film, it should once again be noted, with respect to the principle of use of film and projection in this play, that it remains uncertain whether the impact of what is real actually reaches the audience, and that there is a possibility that reality is consumed by the audience as if it were a fictional show. This situation is just like the reaction shown to the reality meaning of images on television screens. Kevin Robins, saying that screen voyeurism is giving way to an unprecedented cruelty and indifference toward life, quotes John Berger:
“The screen is taking the place of reality. This substitution has a double function. Because reality is born of the encounter between events and consciousness. To reject reality is not only to reject objectivity. It is also to reject a fundamental part of what is subjective.” [27]
It is clear that the power of the screen eliminates genuine responsiveness for its viewers. From this, it is a highly likely outcome that, in Radio Muezzin, the projected images of subjective realities become detached from their real context for the viewer and are consumed as just another fictional show, exactly as the television screen does to its viewers. From the 1980s onward, as what was private opened outward and turned into news, information and images, and as the boundary between inside and outside melted away, a “private life industry” came to the fore in a cultural environment in which public and private spheres became intertwined.[28] Just as the entire cultural field was affected by this, so was theater. In Rimini Protokoll’s works, however, this influence has turned into a distinct orientation. When the realm of subjectivity, like all other realms, was surrounded by the mass media, fields and professions with their own languages, images and visuals emerged, such as private-life journalists, private-life magazines, private-life cinema and private-life novels.[29] In this case, I think it would not be wrong to define Rimini Protokoll, which is described as “new documentary theater,” as a “theater of private life” favored by the private life industry, since its theatrical style, by bringing certain people from real life onto the stage, makes no claim to prove reality beyond documenting their realities.
It is said that Radio Muezzin “explored the complexity of contemporary Egyptian society through the differences between its protagonists.”[30] The atmosphere created in Cairo by the call to prayer recited by the muezzins in many different voices was shown in a film made by editing together numerous images from the city. The central focus of the play is that the centralized form of the call to prayer, recited by a single person, is a move toward the disappearance of authenticity in a changing Cairo. From this perspective, we can assume that the play intends to raise questions about how the need for human beings disappears as technologies advance, and how authentic characteristics are steadily diminishing in a globalizing world. But was an honest relationship really established with this situation through genuine empathy? Or does lending a theatrical quality to a show prepared merely with this intention, simply because it contains the elements of performer and audience in a particular time and place, represent the final stage that contemporary theater has reached? At this stage, the umbilical cord between re-enactment/production and the audience has been severed. That is why, in Rimini Protokoll’s Radio Muezzin and a number of their other plays (Mr. Dağaçar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash), the reality of life and real people are present on stage just as they are, in their real state. They conceal nothing of their reality. Daniel Wetzel defines the company’s notion of theatricality as follows:
In our understanding, theatricality has nothing in particular to do with acting. This is a common misunderstanding. Theatricality is the process that takes place between us while I watch the person in front of me. It is a state of pausing, of being affected and of being open. I call theatricality the process of aesthetic experience. It is a process of creative perception. That is exactly why theatricality is political.”[31]
From this definition, it can be seen that the company perceives real life as political and has no intention of producing art and ideology with an aesthetic beyond this. In fact, showing real lives on stage (when it could just as well be fictional, since reality is not their focus) amounts to nothing more than satisfying the hunger of viewers who have already embraced voyeurism in front of the television.
As part of “İstanpoli,” a “Garajistanbul, Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Project,” the company presented the play “Mr. Dağaçar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash”. The directors of the play, which premiered in Istanbul on October 15, 2010, were Helgard Heug and Daniel Wetzel. I think it would not be wrong to say that “Mr. Dağaçar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash” was created as an exact copy of Radio Muezzin in both form and content. The real people of this play are waste pickers who collect solid waste on the streets. On stage there are various kinds of waste and the carts of the paper collectors. At the back of the stage is a screen onto which the projection is cast. The stage has been set with elements from the natural, real lives of the people we are about to watch. This is the same approach to the stage as the carpets in Radio Muezzin. The realities of these people, four of whom are of Kurdish origin and one Roma, are conveyed, just as in Radio Muezzin, both through their own accounts and through photographs and film footage that reinforce their realities. While describing their lives both as people of the street and as minorities in Türkiye, they share very personal information with the audience, such as their families, their social circles, their working lives and their financial hardships. The photographs and film footage supporting this information are projected onto the screen at the back of the stage, onto the carts, or sometimes onto a cloth that is also used for shadow play. The prepared film and photographic images bear witness to moments of daily work and life. The greatest hardship for the paper collectors is that the growing solid waste recycling companies are cutting into their earnings and gradually taking their work away from them. This situation is exactly the same as the hardship experienced by the muezzins in Radio Muezzin who lose their jobs in the process of globalization. At the end of both plays, Rimini has no concern with taking sides or producing solutions to the hardships of its performers/experts. Nor does it reflect on the fact that this situation now relates to an unstoppable global crisis, and it positions the audience just as it positions itself. Both of these plays, made with people from different geographies, share the same subject and the same scheme (non-actor real-life people, private lives revealed in turn, real-life images, various authentic elements…). Aesthetically, a ready-made scheme can be seen applied to the same kind of people, even if they come from different geographies. The cultural identities these people have in real life are shown in the plays in a completely formulaic way, more or less the same. In order to bring what is real to the stage, Rimini Protokoll turns these people into its own material and makes them consumable objects. In reality, the subjects it addresses from a perspective entirely removed from social critique, and what the people’s hardships are, may not matter very much. As we have seen, it fits them all into the same formal template and makes them the object of the show. The single and most obvious means of doing this is the film and projection used. Whatever the subject or the narrator, film footage and photographs documenting their real lives are always streaming on stage. It is difficult to say that this form of presentation and these realities touch the audience more than those under observation in television reality shows.
Not only television: with new communication technologies, the perception of surveillance has developed, traditional surveillance has become institutionalized, and watching has turned into voyeurism as part of a mechanism of oppression.[32] The siege of visual culture and technologies continues by presenting and showing the viewer what is ever more real. For audiences nourished by this tendency, Rimini Protokoll’s real-life stories are undoubtedly very close to the viewing culture they are accustomed to from television and visual technology. The purpose behind Rimini Protokoll’s use of technology is likewise to serve the audience’s habit of easy reception in front of the news or reality shows by presenting the reality of life to them visually. For the audience, this means taking in reality visually and quickly and making it consumable. Yet this reality is the reality of life; it is the real lives and hardships of the muezzins who are speaking. From this, we can conclude that the company’s relationship with the masses is nothing like Piscator’s relationship with the masses. The reason the company uses the visual technique the masses are accustomed to, and the display of reality they are also accustomed to, is that this is the general mode of mass perception. In other words, the shows are made for the audience. Piscator, on the other hand, offers the masses an aesthetic they are not at all accustomed to as he reaches out to them. At a time when projection and film were not yet widely used, Piscator wanted to affect his audience quickly in order to carry out political agitation. The intention of reaching the masses with this impact was to reveal political reality.
As can be understood from the plays of Rimini Protokoll evaluated here, they keep their distance from conventional forms of staging. Elements such as illusion, psychological realism and linear storytelling have no place in their plays. Action, rather than the main story presented to the audience, comes to the fore. Events/subjects are recounted from the stage without being dramatized. Their performances are anti-theatrical as well as anti-dramatic.[33] Media devices are at the center of the plays as elements that can never be dispensed with. These definitions largely coincide with the characteristics of Lehmann’s postdramatic theater.[34]
To summarize the function of film, projection and media devices in the Rimini Protokoll plays we have examined:
Reality and life are brought into the playing space/onto the stage through real images of real people shown by means of film and projection. As in Breaking News, the television screen brings real-life information live to the stage. In Radio Muezzin, film and projection are used to transfer personal lives from real life to the stage. The reality of life has been documented just as it is, without being aestheticized. These documentary images were prepared with the intention of reinforcing and proving the realities of the real-life experts on stage; however, there is a high probability that the reality of these prepared images is a reality prepared from Rimini Protokoll’s own point of view. Now that reality in images can easily be altered with technical means, the documentary status of all image-producing devices appears questionable. In that case, the images are assumed to be real not in order to prove the reality of the experts on stage, but merely so that they fit the reality show format on which the company bases its performances, and they are used to document the realities and lives of the real-life people on stage.
In all of the works, modes of use have been created for film and projection, and for the images they produce, that exist so that the performance can take place and that generally make it possible to carry out a present-tense performance on stage. Since there is no text, the images have been made the source and center of what the narrators on stage recount. The images necessarily appear on stage so that any subject or situation can be recounted at that very moment, and so that the reality of what is recounted can be proven. Of course, along with this functionality, the presence of film and projection as objects has also been used to create the aesthetics of the authentic situation on stage. For example, the 25 TV monitors in Breaking News turned the stage into a television studio, while in Radio Muezzin the film shown on screen brought the authentic atmosphere of Cairo to the stage.
The group, which generally chooses its subjects from events or situations belonging to the globalizing information society, wants everyday realities and experiences to reach its audience on stage, again within the aesthetics of the everyday and the ordinary. In the techno-cultural age we live in, the expansion of the realm of visual experience leads Rimini Protokoll, too, to carry out a technological rationalization by confronting its audience with visual experiences.
“Rimini Protokoll makes theater in a systematic, experimental way. It does not search for absolute truths; rather, it searches for models of collective reality.”[35]
What is being described here comes close to meaning that, with its plays, the group never fully captures reality, and instead achieves a fragmentary show made of elements related to reality. Their most evident attempt to realize this reality formally is the reality show format they employ. Real people, the real world and real situations seem ideal for a real stage model that excludes illusion. However, the connection established with the viewer here is not at the level of heightened senses and shocked emotions. It holds the possibility that the audience consumes the reality they watch by separating it from the reality of life. The real-life realities of the people the viewers see on stage as real are proven and reinforced through the arm of film and projection. In this way, life is brought onto the stage. For the viewer, this is likely to result in distancing themselves from, and severing their bond with, the reality they are watching. Because by looking at the world through a screen or through mediated media devices, as Gingrich says, we watch what is happening “out there” without missing anything but also without coming into direct contact, and thus we are protected from the effects and consequences of what we see [36]
Whether real documentary images are documents is debatable. Because, as mentioned earlier, what is real is now a matter of the viewing position. The reality of every film and photograph that serves as a document is now regarded with suspicion. In taking a photograph digitally or producing an image with computer technology, intervening in color, brightness, contrast and areas of light and shadow has become something easy to do in terms of time and effort.[37]Today, even National Geographic magazine moves pyramids around in its photographs to make them fit its cover. Since Rimini Protokoll, too, uses real images within the context of its own editing, it should not lay claim to reality. In that case, describing this staging as documentary theater sounds rather too ambitious.
Film and projection have also had different journeys within the postmodern paradigm through changing processes. In comparing the ways film and projection are used in the plays of the Wooster Group, the American avant-garde company of the ’70s, and of Rimini Protokoll, which came under the influence of the techno-culture of the globalizing world after the ’90s, it is important to identify the differences and commonalities that first stand out. This identification will be useful in revealing, through the specific cases of two different theaters, the changing forms of art’s relationship with reality, and it will also reveal the changing thinking behind artistic production.
[14]Jean Baudrillard, Simgesel Değiş Tokuş ve Ölüm, p.99
[15]Eva- Maria Magel, “What The Messenger Brings”,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21.02.2008, (online) http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/article_3419.html
[16]Rimini Protokoll, website, play description (online) http://www.riminiprotokoll.de/website/en/project_888.html
[17] Katia Arfara, “Aspect of a New Dramaturgy of the Spectator Rimini Protocoll’s ‘Breaking News’”, p.114
[18] Ibid..117
[19] Jean Baudrillard, Tüketim Toplumu, trans. Hazal Deliçaylı- Ferda Keskin, Istanbul, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2008, p.27
[20] Kevin Robins, İmaj, p.26
[21] Collective volume, Sanatlar ve Toplumsal Etkileşim, p.27
[22] Ibid., p.23
[23] Barbara Van Lindt, “Call It Call Cutta In A Box”, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, 01.05.2008, (online) http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/article_3656.html
[24] Jean Baudrillard, Kusursuz Cinayet, trans.: Necmettin Sevil, Istanbul Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2006, p.44
[25] Ibid.
[26]Ibid., p.45
[27] Kevin Robins, İmaj, p.124
[28] Collective volume, Sanatlar ve Toplumsal Etkileşim, p.36
[29] Ibid.
[30] Peter Snowdon, “Ambassadors Of The Azan”, Al Masry, 03.03.2010, (online) http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/article_4562.html
[31] Barbara Van Lindt, “Call It Call Cutta In A Box”, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, 01.05.2008, (online) http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/article_3656.html
[32] Collective volume, Sanatlar ve Toplumsal Etkileşim, p.41
[33] Katia Arfara, “Aspect of a New Dramaturgy of the Spectator Rimini Protocoll’s ‘Breaking News’” p.115
[34] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London, Routledge, 2006.
[35] Katia Arfara, “Aspect of a New Dramaturgy of the Spectator Rimini Protocoll’s ‘Breaking News’” p.118
[36] Kevin Robins, İmaj, p.48
[37] Collective volume, Sanatlar ve Toplumsal Etkileşim, p.92
İlksen Gözde Olgun
“Thanks to work on artificial intelligence, we are in fact also developing new perspectives on human intelligence. In light of findings in fields such as behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and genetics, many thinkers have begun to argue that human beings, too, are something “programmed.” In light of these developments, it seems we will need to reconsider many of the things we believe to be uniquely human: free will, memory, love, aesthetics, language… In this talk, we will discuss what artificial intelligence research tells us about human beings.” – Dr. Umut Eldem
Taking the curatorial programs of Kundura Sinema & Sahne as its starting point, FelsefeLab invites participants to understand and read concepts by following philosophical methods, and throughout 2021 it will hold talks and film programs on intriguing topics ranging from artificial intelligence to science fiction cinema. FelsefeLab’s first event was the talk “Is the Human Being an Artificial Intelligence?” by academic Dr. Umut Eldem. Held in January, the talk took as its starting point Rimini Protokoll’s play “Uncanny Valley,” currently streaming online on Kundura Blog, and, following in the footsteps of thinkers such as Hubert Dreyfus, Jacques Derrida and Benjamin Libet, opened up for discussion concepts such as the philosophy of technology, behaviorism, free will and philosophical anthropology.
FelsefeLab’s talk series with Dr. Umut Eldem will continue with the talks “Artificial Intelligence Rights” on February 11 and “The Synthetic World of the Future” on February 25.
Click here to watch “Is the Human Being an Artificial Intelligence?”
İlksen Gözde Olgun, who completed her master’s thesis in 2011 at the Department of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy of the Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences on the ways film and projection were used in 20th-century theater, examined several works by Rimini Protokoll as part of this study. We are sharing a portion of it with you.
This study traces the journey that film, projection and image-producing devices have taken in theater from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, within the framework of the changing relationship between theatrical practice and reality. The first chapter examines the principles by which Piscator, influenced by the aesthetics of avant-garde art, created Documentary Theater with image-producing devices during the period in which the avant-garde movements emerged. The second and third chapters identify the principles governing the use of image-producing devices within the distinct artistic and aesthetic orientations of the Wooster Group and Rimini Protokoll.
“There is no longer any difference between contemporary art and technical, advertising, media or digital operations. There is no longer any artistic transcendence, any difference, any stage that seeks to reflect the contemporary world as it is. In this sense, there is no such thing as contemporary art, because there is no difference between it and the world; the two are one and the same.”[1]
In the plays the Wooster Group staged up until the early 1980s, the use of film and projection to blur the boundary between life and art, and the use of deconstructed texts drawn from performance art, constituted an avant-garde theater movement in its own time. In today’s contemporary theater, alongside the tendency to bring deconstructed texts to the stage, debates about reality and art are also approached in a rather different way. The effort to bring reality/life to the stage has gone very far, and so has the aim of building theatrical aesthetics exactly as they are in life.
Rimini Protokoll, one of the most important companies of the 2000s, stages plays in Germany that claim a significant form of authenticity and reality in contemporary art. This reality is put into practice by moving away from the text and by showing on stage every kind of event and person drawn from the practice of everyday life. In this theater, which has come to be called “new documentary theater” or “reality theater,” the use of elements such as film, video, photographs, diaries and archival records on stage is striking for its similarity to the stage devices of Piscator’s political theater. The company, which uses in its own plays the devices Piscator employed in his, creates its productions in partnership with non-professional actors.
Going even beyond the new documentary style, Rimini Protokoll proposes a new critical reality grounded in an awareness of the present moment for both performer and spectator.[2] The use of technical devices in the plays to show real documents on stage plays an important role in how they approach reality. There is no intervention in reality; reality is simply investigated by showing real materials through a real event. Archival material is used to question social rituals, belief systems or the political situation.[3]
“Rimini Protokoll challenges the blurring that all the binary oppositions of the late ’60s and the ’70s produced in Western art, as well as structuralist discourse. That is why they stand somewhere between dramatic form (in the Hegelian definition) and documentary. The accuracy of the documents or the alteration of the truth is not the focus of their attention. They are more interested in shifting attention by revealing the nature of the document as a fragment of reality.”[4]
Yet why is there an effort to show, and at times even to prove, reality in the productions of a company that is not concerned with the accuracy of documents or with the formal or substantive consequences of showing reality on stage? Although this is a somewhat paradoxical point of view, the disappearance of reality in the age of techno-culture seems to be the condition behind the motivation for this effort. In the abstract of her thesis, Julia Elizabeth Burger says that Rimini’s approach of bringing reality onto the theater stage can be interpreted as a reaction against the overstimulation caused by mediated realities and as an attempt to transform them into our own reality.[5]
The approach of using media devices on stage, also discussed in relation to the Wooster Group, can be seen in almost all of Rimini Protokoll’s work. The way Rimini uses film and projection in its stagings will be examined from a quite different angle. In the plays it makes in the age of techno-culture, Rimini Protokoll uses film and projection, but it also uses everyday information devices such as television, telephones and computers within the scope of their own functions. What meanings do the image-producing devices brought onto the stage by advancing technology generate, both within and beyond their own functions? In what forms is the reality and authenticity that Rimini Protokoll seeks to achieve with images on stage constructed? Whether this reality goes beyond being an imitation of reality from their own point of view must be examined. Because in an age when images have moved away from simply showing reality, the claim to prove reality and the creation of an aesthetic form with this reality seem far removed from objectivity. Just as Burnett points out, the questions of what is depicted, what is real and what is not have become a matter of the viewing position rather than of what is inside the image.[6]
In order to examine this assessment within the context of its own period dynamics, it is first necessary to briefly discuss the developments that shaped the general socio-political and cultural atmosphere of the 2000s.
3.1. The Globalizing World after 1990:
With the fall of the Wall in 1989, the Soviet Union and its empire quietly disappeared. It took with it the international order based on the Cold War. Germany was reunified; the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet periphery gained their independence; the apartheid* regime in South Africa collapsed; countless civil wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America came to an end; Israelis and Palestinians came closer to peace than ever before; the disintegrating Yugoslavia was dragged into war and ethnic cleansing. The war in Afghanistan continued under different conditions and had serious effects both on the region and on the world. The United States, the victorious heir of the collapsed Cold War order, stood alone and unrivaled at the peak of its global power. Perry Anderson describes the outcome of this process as follows:
“(…)By the end of the 1980s the Soviet bloc had collapsed and the ideological offensive of the right had gained momentum. Far from disappearing, grand narratives seemed, for the first time in history, to have brought the entire world under the rule of a single grand narrative: a single, universal narrative of freedom and prosperity—the global triumph of the market(…)”.[7]
It is a fact that with the end of the bipolar political era and the passing of the bourgeois world into history, aesthetic polarization also disappeared. There appears to be no structure for avant-garde art to attack ideologically. The truly striking phenomenon of the 1990s was the general encanaillement (vulgarization) seen among the wealthy classes: star princesses, philandering presidents, rooms put up for sale in the White House and bribes paid for eye-catching advertisements, Disneyfied protocols and Tarantino-esque practices, funerals turned into spectacular shows—this was the environment that formed the social background of the postmodern.[8] The new cultural form, which did not oppose the economic order but accompanied it, constituted the power of the postmodern.
This period was in fact also the beginning of a new era in which globalization accelerated, media culture spread globally, and, with the concept of techno-culture, borders disappeared and gave way to rapid flows of information. The possibilities of computer technologies began to bring people living across oceans closer together, erasing borders and distances. At the same time, the spread of screen images brought with it, after the ’90s, all sorts of debates about the distinction between the “virtual” and “reality.”
“(…)We live in an age in which images are produced independently of meanings and referents in the real world. In modern life, we have come to relate to images and simulacra that are no longer mediators of reality. As Scott Lash says, postmodernism places the problematization of reality at its center. We now express our identity not through reality but through the image. Seemingly self-contained, self-referential image systems are about to assume their own autonomy and authority.”[9]
The acceptance of the dominance of the new techno-culture created by technologies is thought to be closely related to this new postmodern process. While it is said that we are experiencing an “image revolution” of unexpected proportions, it is also argued that this is linked to a historical transition to the postmodern era. [10] Postmodern art’s work with images in the global world, and the explanation of today’s society through the concept of simulation by important theorists such as Baudrillard, have given rise to numerous artistic debates about reality. According to radical postmodern theories, “reality” is not something that can be proven or measured.[11] The fact that people today, who have begun to see everything amid an inflation of images, at the same time see nothing, causes their relationship with authenticity to grow steadily weaker. In its works, Rimini Protokoll seeks to confront its audience or its performers with the direct presentation of authenticity, without creating any illusion. In this new form of the world in which reality has eroded, the anxiety over the loss of reality may have led Rimini Protokoll to pursue what is “real.” This “reality” at times means a provable reality, but what really matters is whether or not it touches the spectator in light of the style and formal features they use.
The practice in art of expressing an object through a phenomenal form other than its meaning had a breakthrough at the beginning of the century when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down and named it Fountain. Duchamp’s found objects (ready-mades) are not works of art but demonstrations.[12] The idea of placing found objects at the center of art later became a source of inspiration for leading figures of pop art such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. The idea of overturning all the values of art that had turned into religious doctrine made it possible for every object and every ordinary situation of daily life to be used as the material of art. In his 1980 work, Jeff Koons placed neon lamps beneath a vacuum cleaner, giving it a brand-new, illuminated and absurd appearance. When this work by Koons was first exhibited in the window of the New Museum in New York, it not only attracted the attention of passersby, exactly as expected; those who came into the gallery space to look at the vacuum cleaner more closely asked whether they could buy the product, as if they were in a home appliance store.[13]It is possible to give many other examples of artworks in which found objects brought into the artistic realm openly insist on their own function without concealing it.
The reason for mentioning the introduction of found objects into art is that it is a fundamental orientation that nourishes Rimini Protokoll’s understanding of theater. The collective selects its performers from the universe of found objects and puts them on stage without asking anything of them other than to play themselves. The objects, things and events used on stage conceal nothing of their own accord. Thus, through the use of found objects in art, Rimini Protokoll distances itself from any claim to individual creativity and finds the chance to capture the form of authenticity it wishes to approach. However, what kind of aesthetic form this authenticity creates, how image-producing devices contribute to it, and whether the resulting artistic form has an aura remain open to debate.
3.2. Rimini Protokoll: A Brief History:
Rimini Protokoll, made up of three friends from the University of Giessen—Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel—is an important theater movement of the 2000s. Known as the “Reality Trend” (Theater der Zeit), this movement has brought about an influential shift in alternative theater. Each of the group’s projects begins in a specific place, from a concrete situation, which they develop through an intensive research process. In the works they call “Theater of Experts” (theater of experts), they cast non-professional performers on stage or anywhere in the city. The performers’ expertise or experience in life is conveyed or shown within the plays from their own perspective. The place where the group stands between reality and fiction defines its decisive position across all of its works. Bringing the coexistence of life and art to the stage through an event once again brings to the surface, in the 2000s, the aesthetic and artistic debates this produces.
The company produces projects not only in theater but also with the materials of various visual arts such as radio, film and exhibitions. To briefly introduce the members of the company:
After studying applied theater at the University of Giessen, Helgard Haug has, since 1996, been working at the intersections of theater, documentary, radio drama and the applied arts. After her 1998 work “Ungunstraum- Alles zu seiner Zeit” (Ungunstraum – there is a time for everything) came under the umbrella of Rimini Protokoll, the Ungunstraum series began. With this series, the discussion on stage of the real-life experiences of people unfamiliar with theater productions came to the fore. Just like actors, they too present their own expertise. They are ready-made presenters for the stage.
Born in Zurich in 1972, Stefan Kaegi studied visual arts in Zurich and drama, theater and media at the University of Giessen. He creates a wide variety of live/live works in urban contexts with local performers, such as motorcycle tours and bus trips stretching from Argentina to Lithuania and from Cairo to Vancouver. His Argentinian work “Torero Portero” toured Europe and South America, and the miniature train world he created, “Mnemopark,” received an award from the jury of the “Festival Politik im freien Theater.” In 2006, his work “Cargo Sofia,” featuring two Bulgarian truck drivers and an audience transported in a mobile viewing room, toured Europe. In 2007, working with the Argentinian writer and theater director Lola Arias, Kaegi presented Argentinian police officers and their biographies in São Paulo, Munich and Berlin. In 2008, again with Lola Arias, they staged “Airport Kids,” a play performed with the participation of immigrant children aged 6 to 13 in Lausanne that questions the third-culture identity of immigrant children. In 2009, he staged “Radio Muezzin,” a work in which five Egyptians perform their prayers on stage.
Born in Konstanz in 1969, Daniel Wetzel studied applied theater and performance at the University of Giessen, then wrote his doctoral dissertation on taking pictures performatively, and works on performance, theater and related disciplines. In the works he has made since 1997, Wetzel has brought to the stage people with their own fields of expertise or experience whose identities are far removed from the theatrical discipline, such as pilots, children, engineers, salespeople, guesthouse owners or street sweepers, and since 1999 he has carried out numerous theater and radio projects.
In all of its work, the company has sought to establish a new relationship with reality and an original theatrical language under the conditions of the “present moment.” To give some examples of the plays the three directors have made together: “Kreuzwortratsel Boxenstopp,” which they directed in 2001, is a work in which 80-year-old women in Lucerne confront Formula 1 racing.
“Shooting Bourbaki” from 2002, again in Lucerne, is a work showing a few young boys encountering and confronting firearms.
The 2003 radio play “Deadline” was performed by funeral service directors, funeral musicians, medical students and gravestone makers. The play contains information about the death of an average European.
“Call Cutta” from 2005 is an experience in which a call center in Kolkata and audience members in Berlin communicate with each other by mobile phone for one hour.
Another interesting work of theirs, from 2006, is “Blaiberg and Sweetheart 19” at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, which brings together heart transplant specialists, people who have undergone heart transplants and online speed-dating experts. The play explores what those searching for a soulmate in the virtual world have in common with those waiting for a suitable heart for a transplant. In “Wallenstein- a documentary play,” which they made in 2005, they start from the story of Ralf Kirsten, who, after being dismissed from the police, became Weimar’s police chief following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of Dr. Sven-Joachim Otto, who was driven into political exile while serving as an elected mayor. They bring together on stage people living in cities such as Weimar and Mannheim, which in the past symbolized two opposing ideologies. Accompanied by Schiller’s verse, people present on stage with their own personal biographies try to answer a number of barely remembered questions about the past.
As can be seen from these examples, the two fundamental points in the artistic approach of the group, which tends to create performance and theater out of the experience of a current issue, are the use of the universe of found objects and the introduction of what is most authentic into the realm of art, without any attempt whatsoever to create illusion. Within this artistic choice, it is necessary to take a close look at the use of film and projection and of other image-producing information devices. Film and projection have been used to produce images on stage since the beginning of the 20th century; in Rimini Protokoll’s works, alongside which new image devices are they used, and what kind of aesthetic and content do they create? It would be more accurate to examine this by evaluating a few of the plays.
[1]Jean Baudrillard, Şeytana Satılan Ruh, p.103
[2] Katia Arfara, “Aspect of a New Dramaturgy of the Spectator Rimini Protocoll’s ‘Breaking News’” Performance Research on Dramaturgy, Volume. 14, September 2009, p.112
[3] Ibid.,p.112
[4] Ibid., p.113
[5]Julia Elizabeth Burger, “Rekonstruction im Theater von Rimini Protokol”, (online) http://othes.univie.ac.at/2063/, 2008
[6] Collective volume, Sanatlar ve Toplumsal Etkileşim, p.97 * The system of racial segregation enforced in the Republic of South Africa.
[7]Perry Anderson, Postmodernitenin Kökenleri p. 50
[8] Ibid., p.122
[9] Kevin Robbins, İmaj, trans. Nurçay Türkoğlu, Istanbul, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 1999, p.82
[10] Ibid., p.22
[11] Rıfat Şahiner, Sanatta Postmodern Kırılmalar Ya Da Modernin Yapıbozumu, p.108,
[12] Peter Bürger, Avangard Kuramı, p.108
[13] Rıfat Şahiner, Sanatta Postmodern Kırılmalar Ya Da Modernin Yapıbozumu, p.114