Talk 1: Is the Human Being an Artificial Intelligence?
Thanks to research in 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 humans, too, are “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 online talk with academic Dr. Umut Eldem, we will discuss what artificial intelligence research tells us about human beings.
Taking as its starting point the play “Uncanny Valley,” currently being screened online at Beykoz Kundura, the talk will follow in the footsteps of thinkers such as Hubert Dreyfus, Jacques Derrida and Benjamin Libet to open up for discussion concepts such as the philosophy of technology, behaviorism, free will and philosophical anthropology.
Keywords
Uncanny Valley, Philosophy of Technology, Behaviorism, Free Will, Philosophical Anthropology
Thinkers: Hubert Dreyfus, Jacques Derrida, Benjamin Libet
The second in the Singular Plural Plural Singular series takes Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley as its starting point. It shapes the introspective, methodical and critical questions that arise from quotations – from Perihan Mağden to al-Jazari, from Mohammad Salemy to Adam Greenfield – around the practices of Hito Steyerl, Wesley Goatley, Holly Herndon and Egemen Demirci. Many of the references in this open-ended discussion, which moves between body and soul, robots and us, artificial intelligence and Google, the domestic and the national, are Berlin-based, while its final stop is Korea.
I am in the palliative care unit of a newly opened hospital in the city where I was born. Sentences from Perihan Mağden’s novel The Companion come back to me years later: “Fear grows like a stain. Sometimes, for unexpected reasons, it recedes, narrows, shrinks; but it is always there.”
This time I am the companion, and helplessness stands before me in the form of myself. We are neither setting off on a long sea voyage as in the book, nor is my sibling twelve years old, yet, just as in the novel, the oddities of everyday life, states of emergency and unexpected situations are all around us. Another quote from the novel:
I reach out to stroke her hair. I can’t do it. I pull back quickly, before she notices. Bodily dialogue has always sat awkwardly on me. Like the ball gown of a tall, shapely stepsister, it hangs off me here and there. I start talking again. I am one of those who can express themselves only through words – I am crippled.
While Sena listens to a healing prayer playing on YouTube, I massage her feet with the Smart Cream Viron gave me. As I think about phenomena such as listening to a prayer from a machine, prayers circulating on the Internet and digital prayer-bead counters, I see – through the door left open – a very young imam, almost a child, passing by in the corridor. He is at least as real as the painting by the child prodigy (in The Companion), Execution of a Chinese Man Eating a Panda. I read Spinoza’s sentence “Every living being strives to persevere in its own being” together with a line from A.I., Steven Spielberg’s portrait of a postmodern Pinocchio (Artificial Intelligence: AI, 2001):
Until you were born, robots didn’t dream; they didn’t desire anything unless we told them what to want. Do you have any idea what a success story you’ve become? You found a fairy tale and, inspired by love, fueled by desire, you set out to make it real.
The way every recorded performance eventually becomes a repetition that will loop; the possibility that every repetition transforms the one who records it; and the myth of God breathing His spirit into the world and the living beings He created – all of this makes me think of Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley (Unheimliches Tal), which I watched twice in a row. Over its long-running practice, the Berlin-based collective has combined the language of documentary theater with experts from different fields, approaches to form and the possibilities of media, producing plays built on real-life testimonies, interventions in space, temporary stages, eclectic installations and radio readings. Now celebrating its twentieth year, the trio questions various layers of interaction, knowledge transfer, communication and interactive technology in its work. Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who met while studying at the University of Giessen, have realized their individual or joint productions under the name Rimini Protokoll since 2002. The collective’s only point in common with the other Rimini Protocol (2003) – proposed by geologist Colin Campbell, also known as the Uppsala Protocol and aimed at stabilizing oil prices – is retired politicians. They were the strongest supporters of Campbell’s proposal. Throughout its career, Rimini Protokoll has worked with many different social groups, variables and demographic profiles, such as Formula One drivers, pets and their owners, radio waves and teenagers; the content of its project Best Before, supported by video game technology, was shaped with the participation of politicians who had left active politics.
Uncanny Valley is a one-person play. In the lead role is an animatronic copy of the writer Thomas Melle: an electro-mechanical puppet that has “learned” his facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms one-to-one. Its face, its hands, its every movement have been modeled on Melle, copied and produced. The writer, who has been diagnosed with manic depression, wants no other cares or worries in his life besides his writing practice and his mental health. Working with director Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, he produces an impressive, autobiographical and experimental text. This robot, the writer’s copy, travels in place of the writer – who does not feel very comfortable at the social events his profession requires, from book signings to book launches – and tells the writer’s story just as it has been programmed to. From the writer’s adolescence to the making of the robot, the most fundamental reference of Uncanny Valley, which is built on Melle’s story, is Alan Turing, regarded as the founder of computer language. Turing, who worked for the British military and after whom awards have been named for his breakthroughs in cracking German communication codes during World War II, is one of the pioneers of computer science. His death is shrouded in mystery; his body, gradually transformed by hormones, can be read in the black-and-white photographs he left behind. Interweaving episodes from Melle’s life with Turing’s tragic story, this performance also reformulates one of the oldest subjects in art history, the question of “the original and the copy”: As robots, with their flawless performance, free us from the work we find tedious, are they also filling us with the fear that one day they will inevitably take our places?
Adding a human likeness to a moving puppet made of cables, electronic chips, sensors, software and algorithms is bound up with the politics of representation, with the way humans perceive the world and with our urge to place ourselves at the center of the universe. The Sistine Chapel, the painting of the Creation. Humanoid (human-like) is a term used for that which resembles a human without being one; for things that are not themselves human but have a human appearance. Its earliest recorded use runs parallel to colonial history: European colonizers used it to describe Indigenous peoples and fossils that were morphologically similar, but not identical. While Elon Musk ponders how to colonize Mars, NASA has begun developing a program, population planning and a debate on ethical values for the humanoid robots it will send into space.
@Rimini Protokol
Türkiye’s first humanoid robots are being produced about 110 km from the hospital room where I am writing this. Based in Konya, AKINROBOTICS and AKINSOFT is an organization that employs around 150 people and describes itself as “the first humanoid robot factory in Türkiye and the world.” Can we explain its relationship to Boston Dynamics through Tülin Şahin and Cindy Crawford, or Coca-Cola and Cola Turca? AKINROBOTICS, which made headlines when its Akıncı-4 model fell off the stage at the Mediterranean IT Summit, has a boundless vision for the future: it plans to produce “robot soldiers” for national defense. Most recently, at the Wedding Fair held last January at Istanbul’s Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center, it introduced its project Robot Ada, a robot that carries a henna tray, sings folk songs and belly dances.
In 2018, speaking at the Safer Internet Day events (February 5), Minister of Maritime Affairs, Communications and Transport Ahmet Arslan grew angry at Robot Sanbot, with which he was sharing the stage, after it interrupted him and said, “What are you saying? I don’t understand,” and he asked for it to be removed from the stage. Sanbot, developed by a Chinese company, was later reprogrammed and apologized to Arslan via a private television channel. Pure Cem Yılmaz: “So will Zeki Müren be able to see us too?”
Dr. Özgür Akın, Chairman of the Board of AKINROBOTICS and AKINSOFT, speaking on the subject, had brought a “domestic and national” sensitivity to the humanoid debate:
At the event, the interruption of the Minister of Transport’s speech by the robot, and the minister’s subsequent warnings that someone intervene with the robot, did not make for a pleasant sight in today’s era of digital transformation. This unpleasant incident also sparked debate that the use of a foreign-made robot, far removed from our customs and culture, may have stemmed from an admiration for things foreign… While I hope this incident will be the last bad example once again demonstrating the necessity of turning to Turkish engineers and domestic production, as the chief engineer of Türkiye’s domestic robotics company I can say with peace of mind that we have the potential to meet the demand for robotic technology at every event in our country.
Yet al-Jazari, born in 1153 in Mesopotamia and regarded as the father of cybernetics, had in fact designed the first robots in history with his inventions of an automatic clock, water pumps and an automatic ablution machine. In Kitâb fî marifeti’l-hiyeli’lhendesiyye (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), al-Jazari describes these devices together with his drawings, explaining one by one, along with a timeline, how all the parts are to be made, how they are assembled and how they work:
I examined the books of the scholars who came long before me and the works of those who followed them… At last I freed myself from mere transmission, broke away from what others had done and was able to look at the problems with my own eyes… I saw that every technical science that cannot be put into practice remains suspended between truth and error.
Hito Steyerl, who exposed the links between the biennial’s sponsor and the arms industry through her participation in the 13th Istanbul Biennial, asks in her film Robots Today (2016) how computer technologies are used in new war strategies. Referring to the Cizre-born polymath al-Jazari, she puts questions to Siri, the iPhone software:
– Who destroyed this city, Siri?
– I’m not sure I understand you.
During the production of this video work by Steyerl, who lives and works in Berlin, I had the opportunity to meet researcher Abdullah Yaşın, founder of the Private Cizre İsmail Ebul-İz El Cezeri Museum, which has made it its mission to preserve al-Jazari’s legacy in Cizre, and author of The Great Kurdish Inventor İsmail Ebul-İz of Cizre. Recalling Robots Today now, on the occasion of Rimini Protokoll, takes me back in my mind to an exhibition I saw recently. Researcher and artist Wesley Goatley, who examines the effects of data and artificial intelligence on our understanding of the world through his sound-based installations and lecture performances, lives and works in London. His sound installation project Chthonic Rites (2018), re-presented site-specifically in the exhibition Interstitial Spaces, which opened as part of Berlin’s CTM festival, is designed as a conversation between Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. The installation follows a strategy that uses the ability of Alexa and Siri – what we might think of as “smart PAs” (smart personal assistants) – to talk to each other in order to expose the ideologies, problematics and unknowns behind their design, circulation, functions and operations. Exploring the complex relationships of artificial intelligence (AI) with the politics of power – premodern ones included – in many different contexts, from banquet culture to the organization of daily life, this presentation also raises new questions about the notions of friendship, companionship and conversation.
In his book Radical Technologies (Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life), which I couldn’t put down last year, Adam Greenfield speaks of how “time is now chopped into slices between notifications” and, basing his argument on the global clash between Silicon Valley and the way the world currently works, describes “the colonization of everyday life by information processing.” Today, even the seemingly most transgressive visions of technology in everyday life invariably veer back into the familiar patterns of capital investment, the extraction of ever-increasing value and endless exploitation: “We don’t even talk about progress anymore; it has been replaced by ‘innovation.’”
There are also those who remain hopeful about new technologies. For her latest album Proto, released last May and labeled an “AI baby,” whose singles Godmother and Eternal play constantly on my playlist, Holly Herndon worked with her partner Mat Dryhurst and AI specialist Jules LaPlace (whom I actually got to know during the production of Hito Steyerl’s works, and with whom I shared a studio at UdK). While teaching Spawn, the AI program developed for the album, how to interpret voices, they drew on live studies with the vocalists they worked with, vocal warm-up exercises and endless folk songs. For joining a Twitter argument between Grimes and Zola Jesus – even though that tweet was later deleted – she was declared “a silicon fascist and the voice of privilege” by Zola Jesus. The reason all hell suddenly broke loose in the world of experimental music was this simple question: Will artificial intelligence replace musicians in the future? Herndon, an American musician living in Berlin, takes an optimistic view of this question:
AI tools will not replace skilled musicians, but the possibilities of drum machines can be multiplied. So the issue is the drums, not the drummers. Technology and the ideal of automation can together provide a more humane production environment. AI can be used to evolve toward an ‘interconnected’ model of music. Instead of hyper-individualized successes, we can be coordinated and independent.
In his presentation titled “Portrait of the Artist as a Living Algorithm” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Berlin-based artist and curator Mohammad Salemy, one of the founders of The New Centre for Research and Practice, examines contemporary art’s problematic relationships with algorithms, artificial intelligence and the Internet, posing one important and critical question after another: Can an artist’s work be thought of as an algorithm, or at least be compared with other algorithmic processes? What kinds of methodologies are needed to reveal the algorithmic logic of contemporary art and to erase its “original,” human-centered self-image? Can we redefine the figure of the artist as a living algorithm, in an ontological context?
The last piece of research to be added to this open-ended field of discussion is a series of works titled Call to Action (CTA series), shown in the exhibition The Influencing Machine, which opened toward the end of 2018 at NgbK in Kreuzberg – Berlin’s “democratic Kunstverein,” whose members meet once a year to decide on its exhibition and event program. Starting from our increasingly symbiotic relationship with the phones and tablets that, according to Greenfield, have taken hold of us, Egemen Demirci problematizes the notion of “the ownership of our screens.” Screens are not only spaces of computing, information and communication; they are also commercial, economic spaces that are up for sale. In his installation proposal, panes of glass 1 mm “thin,” chosen in the most commonly used dimensions of mobile devices, are printed and arranged according to Google Ads’ strategies of size, color and expression. These designs, produced as glass prints, function almost like a fake button for the viewer, who is confronted with their own user identity. The colors, typographic play and propositions relate to the advertising, listing and campaign spaces we encounter on the Internet, while the readings, references and concepts they bring in draw inspiration from philosophy, art theory and ontology. According to Demirci, “limitation is the key to control.” The titles proposed by this series are meaningful for the reader as a way of rethinking the ever-changing values of the virtual world, as are the sections into which it classifies the questions it problematizes: Absolute Transparency, Convert to Material, Tap into the Anthroporeal, Negative Participation, Panic of Emancipation, Impossible to Avoid Identification, What if there is nothing on the other side? and – my favorite among them – Human Values…
How do we define human values? Toward the end of Uncanny Valley, Thomas Melle, appearing in the projection, suddenly begins to talk to his robot copy; although he cannot use his leg with the same 360-degree flexibility it has, he wants to reclaim his face, his voice and his expressions: This is mine… My voice… My face… Is this still me? This moment reminded me of a reality show full of dramatic moments that I recently watched online. TV producers used virtual reality to “reunite” a child who had died in 2016, at just seven years old, with her mother, who grieved for her constantly. With the help of VR, Jang Ji-sung saw her daughter Nayeon in a park they had often visited together while she was alive, and the father and the other siblings in the studio watched her performance live on air.
It seems we will never be able to answer the question “Is the body a prison or a pair of wings?” Robots, artificial intelligence and algorithms show us once again the limits of our bodies, our minds and our interaction with the world. Sooner or later we accept that we are made of flesh and bone, and that one day we will surely succumb to the fatigue of our material, to gravity and to time. To return to the beginning of this text, that quote from Mağden’s The Companion, mingling with a line from the final scene of Spielberg’s A.I., might console us, if only a little: “Everyone is granted a certain quota of crying at birth; the sooner you use it up, the better.”
“David, you are the enduring memory of the human race…”
Misal Adnan Yıldız
This text was originally published on unlimited .
We tend to think of robots mostly as working machines, as efficient doers that carry out their tasks with precision. Unlike in Asia, where humanoid robots have long been developed for roles such as sex partners and service staff, in German industry these robots look far less like humans, in order to avoid emotional complications. Physical resemblance to humans also makes machines easier to accept. But if a machine resembles a human too closely, we begin to feel unsettled: what is human, and what is machine? Japanese robotics researchers call this strange resemblance the “Uncanny Valley.”
For his new play, Stefan Kaegi is working with an author and playwright for the first time: Thomas Melle agreed to have an animatronic copy of himself made. This humanoid copy stands in for the author and raises a series of questions: What does it mean for the original when the copy takes its place? Does the original get to know himself better through this electronic double? Do the copy and the original compete with each other, or do they help each other?
Kundura Sahne brought a special online screening to audiences from January 15 to March 1, 2021: Kaegi’s performance with a humanoid robot, “Uncanny Valley,” which was much talked about when it was staged in 2018 and took the use of artificial intelligence in theater to a new threshold. In the play, we watch a humanoid robot, copied and built with reference to Thomas Melle, one of the most unconventional writers in German literature, alone on stage as it recounts the author’s literary journey from his childhood onward, along with his experiences of manic depression. Taking as its starting point the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ first used in the 1970s by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the uncanny zone of existential uncertainty people experience when they encounter humanoid machines, the play offers the audience a viewing experience that is as unsettling as it is intriguing, in this uncanny space where the questions ‘what is human’ and ‘what is machine’ blur into one another. You can find detailed information about the play, which drew great interest when it was streamed with Turkish subtitles on the Culture Blog, on Rimini Protokoll’s page linked below, and read articles and interviews about Uncanny Valley on our blog.
Situation Rooms © Ruhrtriennale / Jörg Baumann
‘Almost Like a Lehrstück’: Florian Malzacher’s conversation with Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll appears in the book “Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere,” edited by Katia Arfara, Aneta Mancewicz and Ralf Remshardt and published by Palgrave Macmillan in London in 2018.
Florian Malzacher is a writer, dramaturg and independent curator of the performing arts. He also serves as curatorial advisor to the Ruhrtriennale for 2018-20.
For many years, the theater collective Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel) has been known for bringing ‘real people’ onto the stage and for creating its own distinctive, highly influential form of documentary theater. In recent years, another strand of their work has come to the fore, which can be summed up as the creation of complex, semi-virtual spaces as well as the use of existing urban spaces as the material and protagonist of the piece. While they mostly address political subjects, there are also questions as to whether their work could engage more directly with the concrete social problems of our time. Florian Malzacher, who worked as a dramaturg on Rimini Protokoll’s first piece, is a curator of performing arts and a writer who in recent years has focused on the relationship between art and politics. Discussing a number of recent examples of Rimini Protokoll’s work, and also referring to various works by other artists, Daniel Wetzel highlights the similarities and differences between art and politics in Rimini Protokoll’s practice. A central question we explored throughout the conversation was whether theater can go beyond being merely a space of representation and critique and become an agonistic space in which new and different forms of political process can be tried out.
This text is based on a live conversation held in Berlin on February 19, 2015, which was later revised and updated via email1.
In recent years, as the number of economic, political and social crises around the world has grown, there has been a renewed focus on the relationship of art and artists to politics, along with a desire to define what political theater today might look like and what role artists might play in society. Your performance installation Situation Rooms (2013) focuses on the role of weapons in the world2. Considering Rimini Protokoll’s earlier works, this seems an unusually concrete social subject.
The path to Situation Rooms was initially determined by form rather than content. We wanted to develop a particular model of theater; the subject of the piece came later. Our starting point was projects such as the various audio tours we had done in previous years, followed by a video tour called Outdoors (2011)3 in Aberystwyth (Wales), in which you take a tour of the town guided by films on an iPad. The video you watched had been shot exactly where you were walking; that was the principle. The person filming, talking to you and guiding you was the protagonist of the story, and since thirteen episodes were shot simultaneously in a single take, they also encountered one another. The starting point for Situation Rooms was to bring this principle back into the theater. That is why, for Situation Rooms, we designed a highly realistic set made up of seventeen spaces, in which each door takes you to a different country, sometimes to a different continent, and always to a change of ‘situation.’
Situation Rooms has seventeen spaces representing different places in various corners of the world. In addition, you encounter twenty-four different virtual performers, who in turn represent larger groups (arms dealers, soldiers, victims, doctors, etc.) that at times openly oppose one another. As is often the case in your work, the question arises of whether one should present ethically questionable situations without comment, without stating one’s own position. In your live theater work, I suppose there is a rather pragmatic reason for this, since you cannot have people represented on stage in a way they would not accept themselves. But in Situation Rooms the protagonists appear on film, so you could in fact easily comment on them. Yet you still present their situations side by side, without commentary.
Rather than without commentary, I present them after thinking them through, developing, scripting, rehearsing and editing them very carefully, and arranging the music used. It would be without commentary if I simply invited someone to say whatever was on their mind and then used the result as a whole, unchanged. In fact, that is also a possibility in our theater. In 100 Per Cent City, for example, it is essential that we capture as wide and as spontaneous a range of views as possible in a given city4. In Situation Rooms, on the other hand, the aim is difference and distance. Unlike in conventional theater, nobody says to your face or to the audience, ‘I did this and that’ or ‘I sell tanks.’ Instead, you are drawn into the performer’s perspective; they speak their words directly into your ear, and in a sense you ‘see the subject through their eyes.’ What matters here is creating a focus and characterizing the individual situations as sharply as possible. You have to be aware of the limits of what a visitor drawn into the situation can bear. Because it is such a direct form of narration, presenting very concrete images you can connect with emotionally, it allows you to switch between perspectives on almost the most disparate situations. Of course, we made the greatest effort here to talk to people from the arms industry, but almost all of them immediately rebuffed our efforts. They had no interest whatsoever in a dialogue.
Still, I suppose it was ultimately easier to show what you wanted to do with the participants than it was, say, in Wallenstein (2005). In that performance, a conservative mayoral candidate from the city of Mannheim, who had lost the election and his reputation, was on stage talking about the end of his political career and about the people he felt had betrayed him. You probably had to do a great deal of negotiating and, in the end, cut a lot of material you would have liked to show5.
On the contrary, we actually had to rein the politician in. And in both cases, questions of cutting, reducing and focusing were very important. The difference was that the films in Situation Rooms became documents in their own right. Situation Rooms is not a piece you can direct; it is like the kind of mechanical clock with twenty figures you might see in a medieval town hall, except that instead of watching these figures in a clock tower, you need twenty performers when you press ‘start.’ This is because the whole audience moves in parallel with the performers’ individual camera movements, as on a film shoot. There are two levels of participation here: the first is the collaboration with the experts who are not present, and the second is the collaboration with the other spectators you encounter in their roles in the other episodes (Figure 13.1).
You create a space that could almost be called a kind of hyper-Stanislavskianism, one that contains as little ‘outside’ as possible. Above all, through a hyperrealistic set designed by Dominic Huber, in which even the temperature changes and sudden gusts of wind blow, you draw the spectators as deeply into the situation as possible. The theatrical aim is for the individual to be completely ‘inside’ an analog virtual world in which any Brechtian alienation effect is avoided. I sometimes think that immersion in theater, apart from its political potential, simply means participating.
Situation Rooms © Ruhrtriennale / Jörg Baumann
Figure 13.1 Situation Rooms. Rimini Protokoll. Photo: Pigi Psimenou
Isn’t more distance needed, in the sense of critical distance from the realities you present? Why, on this subject in particular, do you place your trust in authenticity, concrete reality and empathy – right down to ambient temperatures designed to help you immerse yourself in the work?
First, watching yourself try to maintain or regain distance in this situation is an internal process. Second, the fictional side of the production is always present. In a way, you feel the heat of Africa and the wind on a Middle Eastern terrace where wet laundry flaps in the breeze. But in one episode the African room represents an improvised radio station in present-day South Sudan, and in another the room is a classroom in Zaire twenty years ago. This makes up part of that distance, in the sense of the actuality of the moment when the footage was shot. The illusion is constantly broken because you see the other participants and are holding an iPad in your hand. This is less illusionistic than the games with virtual reality headsets that have started to go on commercial sale. For me, what is ‘authentic’ actually lies somewhere in between. Amid all these realistic signs, the reason for what is said is obvious, and these are not easily identifiable reality effects. Reality is the unresolved in-between space among the situations that I inhabit or occupy in turn. You can enjoy the illusion and at the same time be constantly aware that it is all a game.
To return to the question of representation, which is always on the agenda in theater: for me, representation in Situation Rooms works quite well as long as I am familiar with the spaces shown, such as a corporate boardroom in the West. In that case, I can place the representation in a context based on my own experience. When you take me into non-Western contexts, things become more complicated. Can I really understand them? Am I expected to immerse myself in them? Or doesn’t the situation almost turn into a parody?
You are placed inside an image that is meant to be accurate to a certain degree, yet it is not accurate, because it shows its limitations, its shortcomings. And this point where the signs intersect is exactly where theater begins. Of course, all of this feels like being on a film set. It is also where comedy emerges at the edge of the notion of representation. In this concrete example in Syria, you stick a bandage on another participant’s hand, and this sign shows that the person is injured to a degree that means they can wait another day for treatment. What you see in the video is that the patient has a gunshot wound in the leg, but you are actually ‘treating’ a spectator ‘in Syria,’ while in ‘your own’ story you are in Sierra Leone, where it is obvious that all the wounds were inflicted with more primitive weapons such as machetes, kitchen knives and the like. In Situation Rooms, the point is overlaps and divergences as much as the act and tactic of ‘immersion, involvement.’ It is not about parody but about irony. Sarcasm would be the next step. But that expression assumes that everything has already been said. The irony in juxtaposing situations, by contrast, allows the dialogue to continue.
At the height of the so-called refugee crisis, the municipal theater in Bochum packed a group of people into the back of a truck to show what refugees feel when they are crammed into a transport vehicle. I know that this way I might indeed better understand the feeling of being trapped in a confined space, but I don’t think I would better understand the full extent of the fear and, more importantly, the systemic causes that lead to it. Here, the anecdotal explanation would in fact prevail over the systemic one. As a participant, you concentrate on the situation and ignore the context that created it. This creates the danger of the subject being completely trivialized.
Absolutely. But it still depends on the concrete experience and how it is framed. Today there is a clear focus on different strategies of representation, but as with all kinds of theater and experiment, there are also those that miss the mark. For the summer of 2015, I proposed a concept involving a night-time boat crossing between Türkiye and the Greek island of Lesbos. It included tourists, border guards from both sides, survivors and others. It didn’t happen. But formally, it would clearly have been very different from crossing over in an inflatable boat with a sputtering engine.
An inflatable boat with a sputtering engine would at least have been consistent. But even then, the boat shouldn’t just be floating in a theater pool. Nor should I be aware that the director could rescue me if the engine stopped. So the question remains: am I having a real experience, or am I imagining that I am having one? There is also a certain amount of arrogance involved here. In the end, I may even have understood less than before. And the misunderstanding only grows.
In a theater pool, you have a theater experience. Reflecting that is essential. If the point of approach were not made clear in this way, it would be arrogant. And for me, this is a clearly different approach compared with the undecidability between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in many productions of the early 2000s, as in the case of Sonde Hannover (6). But the point is not to create reality effects. On the contrary, the point is to listen, to think, without giving up your distance from what you hear. It is an act of letting go, a different kind of play theater in which the protagonist, the performer, hands things over to the audience. Different possibilities can emerge from this. In our performance World Climate Change Conference, 670 spectators become members of the delegations of 196 nations7. When you enter, you are given a small booklet that you hang around your neck and that also serves as your country badge. That way, everyone can see that today you are speaking for Turkmenistan. Then everyone takes a seat in the conference hall, and ‘we’ as delegates are briefed on what decisions ‘we’ as the global community took in Rio, what we have done since then, and where we stand now, ahead of the Lima summit and then the Paris summit. After that, in our model, each delegation has to take action by doing research as well as negotiating with the others. At the end of the performance, we show whether we are below the 2-degree or the 3-degree limit [of temperature change], and the result is usually not far from reality. This is because you identify with the countries you are assigned to. Here, representation becomes playful, combined with the desire to understand better. Someone once said that the piece gave them the chance not to have to be Germany, but to be Mexico for three hours instead.
This is almost like a Lehrstück (learning play).
Almost. Perhaps it could be called a ‘situation play.’
The idea here was that you are spectator and player at the same time, and that you learn to better understand different positions. That is quite similar to the learning plays.
What is really interesting emerges at the didactic level when you are not in just one position but rotate through all the roles. And of course the question remains: Is there a message? In Situation Rooms, the point is primarily the incompatibility of perspectives; the impossibility of synthesis. In World Climate Change Conference there was a synthesis, because the global community had set itself goals, and the subject was this performance aimed at achieving potential unanimity for the sake of reaching those goals.
World Climate Change Conference
© Benno Tobler
But theater is also a space for rehearsing and experiencing social processes, negotiations and the like. Although they emerged from similar ways of thinking, the outcomes of Situation Rooms and World Climate Change Conference are in fact quite different. In the first, I have to accept the theatrical contract and be willing to believe that I am standing inside a hospital tent in the desert. In the second, although this fictional level is present, the primary aim is to understand the rules of the game and to learn how nations negotiate with one another.
True, even if only at a basic level. In World Climate Change Conference, the point is to occupy one of the various positions within the United Nations, even if not in the way it actually works. When you leave the piece, you leave having shared the space with 195 different perspectives.
I’m very curious how differently you can experience other perspectives when you test or live them yourself. In Situation Rooms, the aim is rather to ultimately identify with one person; what is at stake here is not only perspectives but very specific biographies that amount to more than simple avatars. Whether or not I find someone sympathetic, for example, is a major factor. Even if you can look at it in the abstract and see only their socio-political role beforehand, you can also gain structural insights into them from the piece.
Yes. Theater is above all a good tool for perceiving strangeness, for taking a closer look at the unfamiliar. This also applies to developing an understanding of something you do not actually know or understand. But it is also a space where I can have an emotional and an intellectual experience at the same time with things I only know. Among all strategies of re-presentation, however, theater is a place subject to parameters entirely different from those of the original place in question. Situation Rooms is also a space that makes it possible to connect with the observable situation.
So what you essentially want is to show situations as they are and, in this way, allow them to be better understood. But if we are talking about political theater, isn’t the next step to see theater as a space where new procedures, possibilities and systems can also be developed?
Absolutely. And it goes even further. In Home Visit Europa8, one of our European projects, fifteen visitors find themselves seated at a table, each time in a different apartment. So there are no longer any spectators, nor any outside experts. The point is for fifteen people to discover ‘competitive cooperation’ and thereby unravel the political mechanisms of an institution such as the EU.
For me, political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe 2013) is at least a useful metaphor, despite the problem of applying political theory directly to theater. If we do not want to fall into the trap of outright hostility, which essentially means civil war, we need spaces of agonistic pluralism in which conflicts can be expressed. I believe theater can be an arena in which we can express our differences as adversaries, without needing to suppress them. It is no coincidence that Chantal Mouffe borrowed the word ‘agonism’ from theater, from the ‘agon’ of ancient Greek tragedy, that is, the contest of discourses.
While preparing Home Visit, we had already held meetings with game developers and with the creators of game models of political conflict. An unexpected preliminary result of this marathon of fictional negotiations was how many people were astonished at how much harder it was to escape that mechanism of group formation under certain conditions than they had skeptically predicted. The need for something to be approved, the lack of an alternative and the obligation to produce a final text are examples of such conditions. Afterward, it would turn out that the text produced was very similar to those that already existed. The attempt to develop an alternative way of thinking within a political process, by developing it in a different environment, became almost a political rather than an artistic exercise. Such work can lead to the emergence of concrete models of political action.
The artistic side at this point might be that you are not immediately drawn into pragmatism, and that instead something like a ‘radical imagination’ asserts itself, which is an artistic rather than a political value.
Absolutely. In the end, in World Climate Change Conference, the ‘USA’ fundamentally changed its stance, said ‘okay, listen, let’s step on the gas and pay up,’ and replenished the Green Climate Fund. That is a rather utopian situation.
I have always found it astonishing how far questions of representation in society are mirrored by questions of representation in theater: Who represents whom? With what authority? In what way? Who is not represented? How could other models of representation be designed? – this, for example, was at least partly the concern of the Greek left movement and the Syriza party. But politics immediately becomes subject to pragmatism; there is very little room for maneuver. Perhaps you can imagine things a little more radically, but then, to use an analogy by political theorist Gerald Raunig, you may have to repair your ship while it is sailing full speed ahead. And that, of course, would be quite a challenge.
And even a ship is too simple to serve as an analogy.
For me, the theatrical space becomes politically interesting when you stop a ship sailing full speed ahead for a moment in order to look at it from the outside while still remaining part of it. You are both inside and outside the ship at once; a situation emerges that is at the same time real and artificial, actual and symbolic. What other forms of representation can we imagine here?
I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Whenever I hear the word ‘representation,’ I feel a strange buzzing in my head.
Who is represented, and how? That is the issue underlying political struggles in Greece, in Spain, in different ways in Germany, in the US and, in fact, all over the world. How is it possible to look at this issue within the artistic processes of theater, and even to develop new ways of dealing with it? For me, theater is still the best tool for achieving this.
Transferring this into artistic processes is important. Recently, Greek Prime Minister Tsipras went to see a very good work by Anestis Azas and his company. The play dealt with the case of a refugee boat that sank near Farmakonisi, drowning most of the people on board9. A young boy, who clearly belonged to the group of refugees, was sentenced to an incredibly long prison term for human smuggling. Everything about the incident was dubious, and much of the way the case was handled was very ugly. Even though for months he had done nothing meaningful to improve the situation of asylum seekers, either at sea or in the migrant camps, Tsipras arrived at the play smiling and left it smiling. He probably left that evening at the theater having gained nothing except the experience of being among cultured people, of how peaceful the place was, and of how these cultured people ‘conveyed’ the problems of our time. Much as we often do, too. On the other hand, though, you speak of theater as a kind of laboratory in which perception and common knowledge, a different kind of action, are tested. There are even plays in which people vote on alternative draft constitutions.
Absolutely. This is the classic Mayakovsky/Brecht question: Is art a mirror held up to society, or a sledgehammer with which to change it? Is it enough simply to observe and analyze conditions? World Climate Change Conference explores the possibility of changing reality and actually influencing politics – but of course it only does so as if. It adopts a critical Enlightenment stance, in the hope that if you understand, things can get better.
But what if there were a real opportunity for artists and audiences to contribute to concrete change? What would theater’s specific possibilities be in that case? As theater makers, we have a great deal of experience in how people are brought together, how people are organized, how representation works, and so on. Why not try to make use of this knowledge? After all, aren’t parliamentary spaces theaters, and theaters parliamentary spaces?
This subject, this theatrical turn in relation to parliament, once interested me too. At the same time, I am aware of the difference between the possibilities of theater and the rather shabby show in parliament, owing to the differences in representation. Of course, from the perspective of political activists, the notion of an Enlightenment bourgeois theater, in which I sit below the stage as analyst and empathizer and am presented again and again with the same mechanisms that I can nicely imitate when I go home, is rather shabby…
But how is that not exactly the same as what you do?
Ah! I don’t see it that way. But I’ll think about it. That isn’t our starting point. But if you use bourgeois theater buildings, what you are describing will always sneak back in through the back door. Can I change something by changing the parameters there? We claim that we can. Psychologists probably have lots of nice maxims along the lines of ‘you can only start to act once something has happened to you.’ So at the level of theater, the distinction at stake is the one between the sledgehammer and the mirror: do my observation and empathy come from a distance, or will I act differently? The sledgehammer is a tool in the logic of agitprop and of revolution that can also set off alarm bells in a person, and art projects that embed themselves in political practice, especially in theater, are often chained to their own transience.
Look at Christoph Schlingensief’s party10, or at the so-called actions of the Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty), which prepared an unusable, camera-equipped island to rescue asylum seekers11. I truly believe that thinking develops together with theater, nourished not only by knowledge but also by the formal means employed. Do I think differently when I am inside a position rather than being represented in it? I think so. But in that case I am clearly operating in a space different from the one in which politics is made.
While Retrospective and Expo Zero treat time as an important factor, for many other live exhibitions it seems to be more of an accessory. Although Obrist voices his interest in time, a closer look at his time-based curating suggests that the true potential of liveness is rather neglected. 11 Rooms, which he curated together with Klaus Biesenbach, is an exhibition that places 11 live artworks inside 11 white cubes. The performances are clearly framed as artworks, like objects in a rather old-fashioned exhibition. The shows ran all day long, but the viewing arrangement was demanding. Perhaps this is because the time visitors spent watching the exhibition was longer than the famous 30 seconds devoted on average to each artwork in most exhibitions. Yet no attempt was made to create a durational experience for the audience, or even for the performers. Conventional exhibitions are durational because that is what the classic exhibition format requires. The focus of Obrist and many of the artists he works with is not on creating artworks made of people, but on replacing objects with people. This approach is mostly sculptural or spatial; the material is people. Or, as Obrist puts it on his website: “11 Rooms is like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at 18.00.”
But time is a more powerful tool than that, as shown by postdramatic theater, which ultimately replaces the fictional drama time of dramatic theater with real time and insists on creating a situation rather than representing one. Although theater in this understanding may well include a story, fiction, imagination, dramaturgical arcs and the like, it cannot be defined through them. It is defined by the creation of a temporarily shared reality. And this is a great opportunity for performative curating.
Curating as Public Space
Theater has long been the space in which societies explore their own tools, procedures, ideals and limits. As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition (1958), “The art of politics is the best of its kind; there is only the political space transferred into art.” Carrying this legacy into the field of curating – at a time when presumed political certainties are collapsing and our democracies are constantly under threat – poses an enormous challenge to putting it into practice. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic pluralism, which seeks to bring out different positions in struggle and dissent, for example in The Democratic Paradox (2000), allows us to think of democracy as a public space that permits the possibility of conflict. Just as the curatorial can be thought of as performative, the concept of agonistic pluralism looks almost like theater written in other words. It is no coincidence that Mouffe derived this term from “agon,” the Greek word for contest. On a small scale, theatrical and curatorial concepts can create such open spaces of exchange in societies with little freedom of expression, or even in Western democracies, where the gap between consensus and antagonism keeps narrowing. The distinction drawn by art theorist Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another (2002) may be one of the most important contributions of performative curating: art not in public space, but as public space.
To give an example from my own work, Truth is Concrete was a rather ambitious project that we realized as the curatorial team of Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria, in September 2012. The starting point was the strong impression made by the role of artists in political upheavals around the world, as well as the question of what role artistic strategies could play in such situations. Conceived long before the Occupy movement began and taking place shortly after its first anniversary, the Truth is Concrete marathon brought together more than 200 artists, activists and theorists. Alongside 100 students and young professionals, a local and international audience took part, meeting in a shared space of art and activism. Running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the marathon comprised a 170-hour program of lecture-performances bringing together useful strategies and tactics in art and politics.
Sometimes very fast, sometimes very slow, the marathon machine kept running, producing discussion and knowledge, but also frustration and exhaustion. It used time as a tool for creating an extreme social experience. But in doing so, was it not holding up a mirror to the neoliberal agenda? The truth is that Truth is Concrete was aimed in the opposite direction. This machine did not set a task that could be completed. It could not easily be commodified, nor easily consumed. There was no right time, and it was not built around highlights. So there was not just one marathon but many individual marathons; having to miss things was part of having to make choices. Truth is Concrete was concerned not only with the intellectual intensity it generated. It was also concerned with the effect of this encounter on our bodies, in the moment.
Running at the center was as tough as a marathon. Surrounded by a camp-like living and working environment, it was a social space with its own needs and timing: a community, created for just one week, in which night blended into day and which lived its own jet lag, independent of the outside world. Through daily workshops, various durational projects and an exhibition, the vertical movement of the marathon machine was embedded in a horizontal structure of openness. Most important of all, however, was the spontaneous content that the participants created within this open marathon by organizing themselves.
Knowing and Not Knowing
If performative curating creates a social situation within a framework, then the production and exchange of knowledge become key issues. In recent years, many approaches have been developed that combine knowledge production with performative tools and formats, creating theatrical conferences, choreographed panels and staged lectures. In particular, “Go Create TM Resistance” (2002-2005), a series focusing on art and activism at Schauspielhaus Hamburg by academics such as Sibylle Peters, Stefanie Wenner and Gesa Ziemer and curator Matthias von Hartz, created formats for choreographed panels and staged lectures. Unfriendly Takeover & Multitude e.V’s Dictionary of War (2006-2007), or the performative conference I prepared for Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, Appropriations (2014), can also be said to belong to this strand.
Probably the best known and most influential work in the field of artistic and curatorial knowledge projects, however, is Hannah Hurtzig’s installations for the distribution of knowledge; in her work, in theory and in practice, content and form have become almost inseparable. Her website, for instance, describes The Kiosk for Useful Knowledge, which she developed together with curator Anselm Franke, who originally comes from theater, as “the construction of public spaces that experiment with new narrative forms for the production and mediation of knowledge.” Professional knowledge and theoretical discourse meet individual narratives. The distribution of knowledge becomes tangible for a spectator who is at once a voyeur and the witness of an almost intimate conversation. Two protagonists share their expertise in the form of a personal narrative, and we can take part in it through image and sound. This principle was also applied in the performance Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge. In this performance, some 50-100 experts sat at small tables, creating half-hour sessions in which they sold their expert knowledge in return for 1 Euro. From scientists to artists, from hairdressers to fortune-tellers, they shared insights and information about facts, experiences, self-help or fields of knowledge entirely unknown to you. All of it depended on the person passing it on. In this way, Hurtzig also pointed to the performative character of knowledge transfer.
This example, like many others collected in the second part of the book, highlights in one way or another the potential of a curatorial approach that uses the performative as a tool for creating discursive spaces. They combine both aspects of the term performativity: they become partly theater-like in order to curate reality-creating situations using the tools, strategies and methodologies of the live arts. This social, even political practice takes the possibilities of curating even further.
In his book The Empty Space (1968), theater director Peter Brook tells the story of some children in Mexico at a time before the wheel had been invented. “Gangs of slaves had to carry huge stones through the jungle and over the mountains, while their children pulled their toys on tiny rollers.” The parents did not realize that the wheels they used when making toys for their children could in fact be a far more powerful tool. They could not make that connection. Brook used this image to show that theater can be regarded as a lovely entertainment, a toy. But in fact it can be much more: a way of moving things. Perhaps we, too, as programmers of theater, dance, performance and music, still do not fully understand that the wheel of performance we constantly watch in theater, choreography and performance is too powerful a tool to leave unused.
Performing Urgency
A publication series commissioned by the European theater network House on Fire. Co-published by the Live Art Development Agency. Published by the Berlin publishing house Alexander Verlag Berlin.
This publication series focuses on the relationship between theater and politics. It asks how theater can engage with current social issues without compromising either its art or its politics, and what the processes and methodologies for doing so might be. It aims to foster a broader discussion about the conditions, aesthetics, concepts and subjects of contemporary performing arts.
This article appears in “Essays & Conversations,” the first section of Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy, edited by Florian Malzacher and Joanna Warsza as part of the Performing Urgency series, under the title “Feeling Alive: The Performative Potential of Curating.” It is published on the Beykoz Kundura Culture Blog with the kind permission of Florian Malzacher. The Turkish translation is by Nil Ege Özden.
Florian Malzacher is a writer, dramaturg and independent curator of the performing arts. He also serves as curatorial advisor to the Ruhrtriennale for 2018-20.
With the arrival of the concept of curating in the performing arts, it became clear that programming performances, theater works, dance pieces or music could involve more than simply selecting or producing shows and then placing them in a particular time slot and venue. What is needed is an arrangement in which works are set in broader contexts, where they interact with one another and with the world that informs them. Not only within the performance itself: we also gain the possibility of transforming a festival, a program, an event or a venue into a broader space of communication and exchange.
Although concepts of curating have been worked out in far greater detail in the visual arts than in the performing arts, the relationship between the two has always been more reciprocal than is generally acknowledged. It is no coincidence that the work of Harald Szeemann, the prototype of the contemporary curator, has been compared to that of a theater director, or that art theorist Beatrice von Bismarck has stressed how close the task of an exhibition maker is to it.
Taking Szeemann’s idea of staging an exhibition seriously, however, leads us even further. It raises the question not only of how curating has, often without realizing it, generally borrowed the tools of theater, performance and choreography, but also of how it could gain much more from these practices by consciously understanding and integrating their strategies and techniques.
The Performance of the Performative
The impressive and at times inflated career of the concept of the performative began with the “speech acts” introduced in J.L. Austin’s lectures “How to Do Things with Words” (1955). As a forerunner of the idea of performativity, he described verbal utterances that draw on the transformative capacity of an act that constitutes or changes reality. The essentially linguistic discourse that followed Austin was the basis for Judith Butler’s radical interpretation, in the early 1990s, of gender as something performed and constructed through speech or physical action: reality as a social construct that exists by being constantly repeated and cited. For Butler, performativity, as defined in Bodies That Matter (1993), is “the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.”
Although definitions of performativity are numerous, contradictory and vague, most of them are tied to a constructivist belief that there are no fixed notions of objectivity, reality or truth, and that everything is constructed individually, shaped by context and interaction.
Alongside the linguistic arguments, influential impulses for theater and performance studies also emerged from ethnographic and anthropological discourses. The term “cultural performance” was introduced in 1959 by the ethnologist Milton Singer in his book Traditional India: Structure and Change. Singer believed that people rediscover their own traditions and identities through dance, theater and rituals (anything containing an element of dramaturgy). The anthropologist Victor Turner went on to develop the concept of cultural performance, which was taken up by theater makers and theorists such as Richard Schechner, who worked with him and applied his findings to theater, carrying them even further. However different the concepts of the performative may be, all of them, in one way or another, emphasize its capacity to create reality, as Shannon Jackson points out in this book.
Yet there is another dimension to the use of the word performative – equally vague and rather what we might call colloquial. In Jackson’s words, it essentially describes “theater-like but not theater” artworks, “providing an umbrella for clustering works in time, in space, with bodies, in relational encounters.” This is an in-between use of the performative vocabulary that often foregrounds the sometimes productive, sometimes uneasy relationship between the performing arts and the visual arts.
With Szeemann in the back of our minds, it is precisely this notion of “theater-like but not theater” – though often rejected for being all too real – that opens up a whole range of possibilities when applied to the processes and products of curating. How might concepts such as the handling of time, narration, process, the use of space, the co-presence of the audience or role-playing inform and shape curatorial work?
In my view, the curatorial potential of the performative lies not in separating these two strands but in thinking them together as different aspects of the same approach: adapting “theater-like” strategies and techniques makes it possible to curate situations that “create reality.” Such situations do not merely describe reality; they also generate an awareness of their own reality. By placing less focus on the product or the outcome and more on its own becoming, performative curating takes up the central definition of theater and performance: liveness, the co-presence of all participants, and the forming of a temporary community.
For curatorial praxis, separating the more linguistic, anthropological or philosophical concepts of the performative from its literal, theater-like use is an unnecessary limitation. Unlike Dorothea von Hantelmann, who in “The Experimental Turn” (2014) dismisses the latter definition as a mere misunderstanding, I insist that they are connected to the tools of the live arts. This is not only because Austin, Singer, Turner and Butler explicitly refer to theater in their writings, but also because their discourses have in turn been taken up by theater and performance makers and have changed artistic practice. One might say that, by performing the performative, a new reality of performative performances has been created.
Even though conventional approaches try to neglect it, theater has always been a social and self-transforming art form. Theater is a paradoxical machine that allows us to observe ourselves while we are part of the performance. It does not create an artificial phenomenon outside of pure critique, yet it cannot be fully seductive even when it attempts nothing but immersive identification. Theater marks a space in which things are real and at the same time not real, creating situations and practices that are both symbolic and real at once. Curatorial thinking that consciously uses this knowledge underlines its own relational aspects, highlights both social and political implications and creates spaces for negotiation.
This proximity to theater can also be seen in concepts of the curatorial. In art theorist Irit Rogoff’s conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck in Cultures of the Curatorial (2012), for example, questions are raised about how the curatorial is embodied, how things are not made more difficult in the process, and how a public platform could be created that allows people to take part in these processes. For Bismarck, curating is a dynamic field of liveness, transformation and transience.
The fear that a work might appear too complete, like a finished product, is an integral part of all live arts. Here the ever-present possibilities of failure, chance, error and loss of control are seen not as unavoidable flaws but rather as the very essence of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them can become a key curatorial strategy for creating a tension that highlights the liveness present even in the most conventional repertory theater, dance company or music ensemble. Extending, shortening, interrupting or altering time can create awareness and give rise to spatial complexities. Inventing specific dramaturgies or playing with the limits of narration, or confronting works that at first glance do not seem to fit together in order to create both tension and openness through their friction, is another option. This list could be extended much further, and the possibilities are considerable. The many concrete examples in this book, developed by curators, artists, dramaturgs and activists, show how widely curating is understood as a performative tool focused on the here and now. At its best, it creates a temporary – specific yet permeable – reality that connects to many other realities, allowing artworks to be experienced not as autonomous entities but in their own right, with their own lives, and in relation to others.
Empty Stages, Crowded Flats
Theater is still bound to specific spaces reserved for its practice: the stage and the auditorium. Yet even in the most conventional settings, being aware of the specificity of the space can produce artistic or curatorial added value. How does the audience enter the space? When does the show actually begin? At the theater entrance? In the foyer, or in the auditorium? What difference does it make when I have to enter from a different place than usual? Is this part of the performance or merely pragmatic? What are the rules of the theatrical contract in this case?
Even conventional theater spaces are not neutral. On the one hand, they provide the necessary technical equipment, protect the work from unwanted encounters with its surroundings, allow for concentration and preserve artistic clarity. On the other hand, the spaces themselves largely define the possible outcome. They are limited not only in terms of architecture and possible spatial arrangements; since they essentially took shape in the early eighteenth century, they also represent a particular idea of the institution. At their core, they reproduce not only certain conventions about what theater is and ought to be, but also a particular image of society. They frame and domesticate both artistic and political visions. It is therefore not surprising that many curatorial projects in the field of theater either try to leave these predetermined spaces behind or to challenge them (as described in this volume, and as we can see in the B-Visible projects of choreographers Deufert & Plischke and dramaturg Jeroen Peeters).
Especially since the mid-1990s, the growing and at times exaggerated interest in site-specific work has brought a particular focus on place, moving out of theaters and occupying supposedly non-artistic spaces, seeking an authentic touch or contradicting what appears to be authentic. More often than not, this meant a move to the outskirts of the city, to empty industrial zones, half-ruined factories and vast storage spaces, which was associated with documentary theater’s need for a commitment to what supposedly lies behind the scenes. At the same time, this also overlaps with the logic of gentrification, at least symbolically, in that it occupies spaces reserved for others.
Using theater’s designated spaces against their nature, as Deufert & Plischke do, or abandoning them altogether challenges not only the institution but also the artistic work itself, revealing both the limits and the possibilities of the genre. Working conditions may become messy; unexpected situations may even arise that require audiences to be organized differently, and these may also limit technical possibilities. Site-specific work cannot simply transfer the logic of a theater venue to another spatial situation. It must be more than a mere reaction to the situation, more than a pragmatic response that deals with the disadvantages or adapts the original plans only as much as necessary. Such work gains momentum when it adapts the logic of its conditions, pushes against them or deliberately contradicts them. It needs to be sensitive to context, making the space part of its own form and content. Not by surrendering to it, however: obeying the space easily breeds boredom and can result in a mere semantic shortcut when narration, atmosphere, movement, space and everything else come too close to one another, so that all artistic tension disappears.
One of the best-known site-specific curatorial projects in the performing arts, German curator Matthias Lilienthal’s X Apartments (2002-), actually has an even more famous predecessor. For the iconic exhibition “Chambres d’Amis” (Guest Rooms), curator Jan Hoet persuaded more than 50 residents of the city of Ghent to let artists work in their homes and residences. His concept of displacement, which he later also used for documenta IX, aimed at the shift in perception that occurs whenever something is experienced in an unfamiliar context. It took art out of the exclusive gallery spaces to which it is usually bound. As he put it in the New York Times article “Avant-Garde Art Show Adorns Belgian Homes” (1986): “I am bothered by the idea that art is here and reality is there.” In Chambres d’Amis, one was meant to have the impression of being “not only in front of the work but inside it.” Each artist, among them Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt and Mario Merz, used one or two rooms to create a work that reflected its surroundings. Since these were homes in use, encounters and discussions with the owners were an integral part of the concept.
Although Chambres d’Amis exhibited only works of visual art, it effectively created its own performativity by sparking the visitors’ imagination. The walks between the houses allowed for very different individual narratives and dramaturgies, and all of this was open to interpretation because it took place inside private homes.
Years later, Matthias Lilienthal took this dimension even further with X-Apartments, commissioning theater directors, choreographers and artists to invent small performances in different apartments. The project offers a set time frame in which different groups of spectators watch short performances, and these groups move on one after another to keep watching. In this way the experience becomes collective. Not only the different locations but also the bodies moving through them from one place to the next become part of the experience, which is far more than the sum of the performances. X-Apartments plays with the spirit of an arbitrarily mixed discovery that connects the audience members with one another.
While the number of apartments, the extraordinary within the ordinary and the shift of perception toward everyday settings play a key role in X-Apartments, Polish curator Joanna Warsza chose a symbolically powerful site for her own project, Finissage of Stadium X (2006-2008), as Ewa Majewska describes in this book. The Tenth-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of the war-ravaged Polish capital. It stood for the idea of communism and of a new Poland, but by the mid-1980s it had been abandoned and had turned into a modern ruin. Vietnamese and Russian traders, who took it over as the pioneers of newly arrived capitalism, brought new life to it. The heterogeneity of the site, the debates surrounding the new national stadium being built for the 2012 European Football Championship, and the absence of a critical discussion about Poland’s postwar architectural heritage inspired the three-year Finissage project, which included acoustic walks, performances, a radio station and tours led by activists and artists.
The Theatre, created by architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer and theorist Mårten Spångberg, gave the notion of site-specificity an almost ironic twist. International Festival, the long-term interdisciplinary project they launched in 2004, positioned itself somewhere between theater, choreography, architecture and curating. In a playful and at times subversive way, they isolated and examined different aspects of what makes up a festival. The Welcome Package (Tanz im August, 2004), for example, was simply a bag, like the ones festivals give to their invited artists, but here it was designed to draw a heterogeneous kind of attention to the conventions of festivals. The idea of curating not only artists but also performance makers and other festivals became even more radical when International Festival handed out the IF logo to theater venues all over Europe for them to use and distribute.
For the 2007 Steirischer Herbst Festival, International Festival developed by far its most ambitious project, building a complete venue as a performance and a curatorial statement. The Theatre was the reenactment of a theater through its construction. Various artists, architects and theorists accompanied this process by holding workshops, forming a kind of social performance with an open outcome. Including a flexible 12×12-meter stage, the theater turned everything in the theater that is not theater into theater. Just as important as this conceptual performance, which turned a different perspective on the idea of space into a performance and thus into a time-based artwork, was another element: its indifference toward the main elements that would normally play an important role. The architectural aesthetics of the venue were highly pragmatic, and its programming was largely left to the festival curators.
Escaping theater’s highly determined and symbolically charged spaces can mean going all the way to even more determined and symbolically charged spaces: the white cubes of museums and galleries. There are many reasons for the growing interest in all things “live” in recent years. Some of them are less noble, such as trying to enter higher-prestige markets. But for many artists and curators, the real motivation remains close to Hoet’s idea of “displacement.” By changing the institutional, aesthetic and architectural frame, the patterns of perception and reflection change as well.
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has for many years been one of the key figures in integrating the performative into visual art exhibitions. Since the 1990s he has collaborated with choreographers such as Meg Stuart and Xavier Le Roy, and in 2007, together with Philippe Parreno, he made several time-based shows such as Il Tempo del Postino. Contemporary artist Tino Sehgal, known for bringing the performing arts into museums and galleries, has always produced his work on the border between choreography and visual art, and he shares his thinking on performance through Xavier Le Roy, with whom he collaborated on the work Project (2013). In 2012, on his website, Le Roy described his first live performance, Retrospective, as “an exhibition conceived as a choreography of actions to be performed by artists for the duration of the exhibition.” Le Roy allows the artists to use material from his solo choreographies, letting them re-create their own memories and the stories connected to them. By producing friction between the experiences of time brought together, he highlights the moment in time. The time span of the revisited show, the time each visitor spends, the artists’ working hours and the duration of the entire exhibition, together with their constant changes, create a dramaturgy of their own.
Expo Zero (2009-), part of Boris Charmatz’s Musee de la Danse, is an exhibition, a dance, an exhibition of dialogue. Experts from various fields – choreographers, writers, artists, directors, theorists, visual artists and architects – first spent four days together in a kind of brainstorming workshop, and then opened the space to the public, communicating with one another in verbal and non-verbal ways by presenting movements, thoughts, words and more. Since thinking the museum is at the same time creating it, what belongs to the Musee de la Danse? A dance museum can only be transient; the “Zero” in the working title is a reference to the absence of objects here.
Rimini Protokoll’s approach to its themes and protagonists is not simply about showing and never condemning its performers; it is also about empathy and listening. The shift from Hygiene Heute’s early concept of ready-made theater to Rimini’s notion of experts underscores how important it is that the protagonists of the work are the subjects of the production, not its objects. People who, even if it is part of a role, look the audience sincerely and directly in the eye and do things.
But this, too, can bring with it the danger of things becoming harmless, or even of matters on which the director clearly ought to take a stand becoming trivial the moment they become subject to negotiation. Such a dilemma is extremely evident in Stefan Kaegi’s Chácara Paraíso (made together with Lola Arias). The Brazilian police force is often criticized for its Mafia-like structure and for incidents of corruption and human rights violations. Is it possible to place the autobiographies of ordinary police officers at the center of such a piece without this notion coming to the fore? “We wanted to go beyond news about subjects such as Iraq, Israel or the Brazilian police being reported with only one particular message. Instead, rather than the scandals, we wanted to represent everyday life and the scandal of everyday life.” (Kaegi). They let people speak who would otherwise never talk about themselves. They depicted small stories instead of the big system. In this way, even though the police are openly criticized everywhere, they trusted the public to make up its own mind about the facts of the scandals. How much of what the performer says is true; is there something he is not telling? The presence of an improvised shooting range, as well as screens and false names, confirmed that more was at stake than it seemed, not so much because the stories were based on mere stories rather than on biography or fact, but because these stories were also political stories and posed a very real danger both to the police officers themselves and to others. Each person had to decide in a split second whether to aim in self-defense, or at random at the right, or sometimes the wrong, person.
Works like this clearly reveal which barriers Rimini’s theater pushes against. It wants to show rather than judge, but it can only show what people are willing to show on stage. Conflicting views can be placed side by side (as in Wallenstein or Das Kapital), and imperfect things can be made visible. But even if the distancing techniques used in documentary film are brought into play, they can only be used with the participants’ consent. “The aim of our work has never been to stir up resentment, as when a child leaves the theater, sees an actor on the street and says, ‘You were really bad.’” (Kaegi) The audience needs to stay calm. But the question to ask here is: to what extent is it possible to create the conditions necessary for this to happen?
This is because we need to be shown things we do not already know, things that are in no way close to us. “The work really starts from neutrality, from an interest in strangers: as when working with a conservative politician or a police officer. During the production there comes a moment of complicity that is very important. This complicity is possible because you can tell people plainly that the reason they are there is their own otherness. At the same time, they validate themselves on stage, and this validity shows itself in the fact that they can sustain that otherness and do not do everything right.” (Haug)
But experts usually want to “do everything right,” and this becomes especially clear when it matters to observe their own position from a distance. For example, in Schwarzenbergplatz, the piece on diplomacy performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna, how were the disparaging comments some experts made backstage about foreign countries and refugees to be integrated into the work? Would you want such remarks repeated on stage under any circumstances? Is an immigration official talking about the deportation of illegal immigrants while putting on his white gloves enough to show the gulf between two worlds? “In Schwarzenbergplatz, we tried so many different ways, right up to the second dress rehearsal, to bring the backgrounds to light. But as soon as suspicions arose that the piece would criticize the State, the performers began threatening to withdraw. The difference between what they could tell you backstage and what could be said freely was so great that in the end we had to add a video element to the piece. It was prepared so carefully that they could accept it, but it allowed us to show that we did not agree with what was being said.” (Wetzel). A loop of text, running as if someone were talking behind the experts’ backs and containing phrases taken from the vocabulary of diplomacy such as “agreed” – “negotiated” – “pre-printed” – “revised,” took on a different meaning in the context of the performance. These phrases were shown in alphabetical order so that they would not be understood as genuine comments on the texts in question. “Maybe this method only helped us win on points, but we hadn’t actually won” (Wetzel)
Hidden Actors and Expert Experts
There are other reasons why harmony does not always reign in the temporary family of experts. For some, the pressure is too great, or events run counter to the nature of the work, or the roles come too close to the people’s own roles. Deadline ended with one of the female performers walking out, and shortly before the premiere of Boxenstopp, one of the elderly ladies quit. She was replaced by the actress Christiane Zerda, who took on the text without changing it. The cast change was not concealed, but many in the audience did not even notice it, especially since Martha Marbo, very well known to audiences for her vaudeville work, was also on stage. She, too, was nearly eighty and could not stand for very long (essentially an expert on old age, like the others), but in her role as narrator she was also an expert in speaking on stage.
“Using professional actors as understudies was an extremely important political issue for us, even a taboo” (Wetzel). But by the time of the revival of Boxenstopp, when Ulrike Falke ‘came down with the flu, could not go on stage, and her part was played by an actress sent by an agency at the last minute,’ this taboo had already been broken again. The public was informed, but the ratio of professionals to amateurs on stage was now 3:1. Similarly, in Deadline, the expert Alida Schmidt was replaced for the tour’s final performance in Łódź. The understudy actress referred explicitly within the text to the missing performer, and did so in Polish
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
A different kind of replacement took the stage in Das Kapital. Ulf Mailänder is the ghostwriter of the autobiography of Uwe Harksen, a con man and swindler who was in an open prison and could not guarantee his participation in every performance. Mailänder’s presence thus brought in an expert on the expert. Besides knowing everything about the story, he was also familiar with the words and expressions of the jargon. “At the very first rehearsal he could already speak about Harksen’s life in the first person so perfectly that, even though they knew what was going on behind the scenes, all the experts thought he really was Harksen. At the second rehearsal, though, he started to get stage fright, and at that point he began asking things like whether he should keep his hand in his pocket the whole time. He never fully shook off this attitude.” (Wetzel) In the jury debate for the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, the use of Mailänder was a decisive factor in presenting Das Kapital as a dramatic text that anyone could stage, but it was also a rather weak argument. The thinking at this point was: if one of the roles could be taken on by anyone else, what was to stop all the roles from being recast?
In fact, after the use of Martha Marbo in Boxenstopp, there were other attempts to work with professional actors from the start of a project. In Swiss Mnemopark, Rahel Hubacher took on a kind of narrator role throughout the evening, and in Zeugen (Witnesses), professional stage actors were used as experts in examining how people present themselves when their cases are being heard in court. “However well trained actors are in observing and analyzing other people who are playing a role, it was surprising to see how much they struggled in court while ordinary people were strangely trying to be convincing.” (Wetzel) In the end, though, this method did not really work. When the actors were not being used in a specific capacity as narrators, Rimini did not know what to do with their stage voices and trained physical awareness. Eventually the professional actors were placed in reasonable but relatively marginal positions. More like relics of a working process than protagonists of the piece.
Another attempt, with actors from the Vienna Burgtheater, failed during Schwarzenbergplatz. One of the actors concluded that acting with (or opposite) the experts was too risky, and another actor, who was supposed to say everything the diplomats would not dare to say on stage, was rejected by the experts.
These experiments (or sometimes emergency solutions) with actors or other substitute experts were not problematic only for artists committed to conceptual purity: the often blatant indignation of the press and the public shows how strong the desire to believe in authenticity is. The difference between the reality of an expert playing himself and the reality of an actor playing an expert has never been addressed as openly as in Boxenstopp. But overt attention and care regarding the nature of representational performance have always been essential to Rimini’s work.
That is why the theater curtain is a recurring quotation. In Sonde Hannover, for an audience looking down on a well-known square as if onto a stage from a tower block, the curtain was drawn back by a window cleaner. Sometimes the curtain is used more symbolically (like the automatic door in Call Cutta). That is also why the techniques of theatrical illusion and what they imply often appear as themes, as in the case of the children performing in Uraufführung and of the European Parliament interpreter in Midnight Special Agency, who suppresses her own views while interpreting in order to convey the speaker’s feelings as directly as possible (even though the speaker might be a far-right Frenchman).
“This was something the people in Deutschland 2 understood too: the more closely they followed the original, the more fluently they could represent themselves.” (Wetzel) Wolfgang Thierse, then President of the Bundestag, did not understand this at all. While Rimini tried in vain to explain that “the actions of a voter representing a delegate bring with them a binding moment of identification that goes far beyond the cheap distancing of imitation, as in comedy shows,” he canceled a performance in the former plenary hall in Bonn. Thierse feared a kind of Brechtian exposure and saw the piece as “a threat to the status and dignity of the German Federal Parliament.” And yet, are the fundamental questions of theater not exactly the same as those of democracy? How does representation work and what does it produce? What does it mean to stand in someone else’s place?
However freely they work with documentary material, Rimini’s works have required extensive research, most of which will never be reflected on stage, and, above all, lengthy interviews with the experts. This additional material has sometimes found its way directly into the performances as video clips or as quotations in the text. Sometimes it has given the directors a feel for how a particular theme might be developed. In fact, it has been less about constructing a coherent story or simply tackling a theme than about exploring potential, about stories being captivating, about the subject being worked like fine embroidery.
The main themes of a work may be there from the outset, before the actual research is done. Sometimes, however, as in Sonde Hannover and Brunswick Airport, a particular location is decided on first, and then specific stories connected to that place have to be found. The local environment is not only significant in projects that are so explicitly site-specific. It is often very important in stage projects too, as with the senior residence at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Boxenstopp), the social milieu in Brazil (Chácara Paraíso), or Mannheim regarding itself as Schiller’s town (Wallenstein). A theater stage itself can also be a site-specific location, as at the Pfauen Theater in Zurich, where the world premiere of The Visit took place: the stage managers’ instructions, the set changes, even the audience are all material that can be used…
Stefan Kaegi often recounts that he once spent a year working as a local news journalist in Solothurn, Switzerland. Rimini Protokoll’s research may resemble journalism, but it has a different aim. “In the end, we’re not really interested in whether someone is telling the truth, but rather in how they present themselves and what role they play.” (Wetzel) Facts cannot be separated from fiction; for Rimini Protokoll, documentary technique (not so different from Alexander Kluge’s narrative approach) focuses on the telling of the story rather than on the truth itself. The truth is often hidden not in the big picture but somewhere else, in the small details. “Our research is often about atmosphere. Or maybe we remember a poster hanging behind an expert’s desk, and that can spark something. What matters is often the small details. (Haug)
From this point on, a striking detail becomes material that reflects reality. This material, like a ready-made, serves as a prop that on the one hand underlines the documentary character of the work and on the other unsettles its balance, since its authenticity is always uncertain. In Das Kapital, the Marx expert Kuczynski contributed to the piece with the meter and a half of rare editions of Das Kapital that sat on his desk at his first meeting with Rimini Protokoll. Once the insurance arrangements had been finalized, he brought two suitcases full of books to every rehearsal and every performance. In the end, though, copies of most of the books were made by the prop makers: authenticity is merely a feeling.
Just as the human stories in the piece intermingle and shift, and one person’s text can be taken over by another, the authenticity of ordinary objects deemed to have artistic value is also variable. In Uraufführung , the antlers that decorate Alfred Ill’s house in Dürrenmatt’s play actually belong to the hunting enthusiast Johannes Baur, who partly takes on that role. Just as fiction often drifts into reality, authenticity is also constructed.
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
Scripted Reality
Although the 2007 Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis awarded to Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel for Das Kapital came as a shock to some groups of writers, the prize was not awarded by mistake. Watching a Rimini Protokoll work may first of all mean watching the experts, but the perceived authenticity of these characters, who are in fact only characters, is not merely something the performers create physically themselves; it is also the result of dramaturgy, the outcome of a production and the product of a text that did not arise spontaneously, and it is not simply words tumbling out of people’s mouths. People here rarely relate the subject as it is, and the text rarely comes about through improvisation, as it does in Midnight Special Agency. Rather, the texts used are specific theatrical works by Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel that give rise to a particular kind of text. Reality has to be scripted.
And that is what Rimini Protokoll does: as the name suggests, they essentially use the techniques of the protocol (Protokoll) and of diary writing. In Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, Mrs. Falke sat on a raised chair and unrolled the text from a large ball of paper in which it was wound; the records of the mock Formula 1 race were also a chronological history of the events leading up to the premiere. The story of the race was interwoven with experiences from rehearsals, with the making of the piece and, though to a somewhat lesser extent, with the women’s stories. Even if this particular structure would rarely be shown so openly in the future, the logic of the protocol makes itself felt in almost all of Rimini’s texts.
Questions about how it is still possible to speak on stage at all, who it will be when someone speaks, and in what form this speech can exist outside the vast territory of narrative, psychological, dialogue-based drama have been at the center of experimental and non-conceptual theater since the 1980s. Rimini has found its own answers to these questions. The form of the protocol, playfully transformed with reference to the avant-garde theater tradition of strictly formalized or ritualized language (for example, lists, question-and-answer games, or summary descriptions and theses), offers the opportunity to arrange a wide variety of narrative layers within an invented or real chronology. The actual rehearsal process, the participants’ biographical material and the broader overarching fictional or factual narrative become intertwined. This creates a micro-macro structure in which one can move easily between the close-up, detailed anecdotes, and the wide shot, the concepts that make up the big picture: in Boxenstopp, this appears in the slowness of old age contrasted with the speed of motor racing. Shooting Bourbaki connected the violence of children’s computer games to the wider issues surrounding gun shooting. Mnemopark allowed railway enthusiasts’ passion for collecting and building to become questions of memory. Blaiberg set a successful heart transplant alongside romance at a twinned school. Wallenstein categorized former politicians, Vietnam veterans, astrologers and matchmakers according to Schiller’s themes.
The fractures that often arise from such stark contrasts give the audience the opportunity to make new associations. Engaging with the artistic creation in a sustained but often detached way creates a transparency that does not allow for unthinking identification with the events on stage.
The protocol is a monologue, and despite the many voices used, this is also the general form Rimini uses. These monologues are designed as statements and are addressed directly to the audience. Much like Brecht’s pedagogical plays, the experts face us, and they deftly avoid the problems of representation in acting-based theater, where dialogues are performed in order to openly enact conversations, to appear improvised, and to create psychological empathy or at least a belief in a functioning dialectical system. Rimini’s conversations with the audience (who really do feel spoken to and do not have to play the role of spectators), however one-sided, create the atmosphere of a conversation between genuine equals. The fact that their words do not sound improvised, but rather like somewhat vague presentations by untrained speakers, paradoxically makes them seem more honest. Brecht’s alienation effect, designed to prevent the audience from identifying with what is on stage, has long been regarded as a supposed guarantee of authenticity, and monotonous speech, which did not first appear in semi-documentary plays and contrived television talk shows, is automatically accepted as a characteristic of “real people.”
In recent years, face-to-face encounters, dialogue-like moments, have begun to appear in Rimini’s work as representations of different characters’ perceptions. In addition, disagreements between those on stage are nowadays also possible to a certain extent. In Boxenstopp, the sole representative of the “other” group, in other words the racing drivers, was dropped from the play during the rehearsal process because he did not fit the picture. As in Das Kapital or Wallenstein, different approaches and different cast configurations brought with them a wider range of perceptions and internal contradictions. The artificiality of these moments of dialogue (normally consisting of two or three people speaking to each other in full sentences or looking at each other disparagingly) is openly displayed, and it is not only the experts’ lack of stagecraft that makes it clearly visible. Different views, positions and also conflicts are made visible and kept visible. In Uraufführung, performed by children (reflecting the fact that The Visit is a popular play for school productions), one scene literally takes the form of a conventionally presented piece of theater: “We run the risk of appearing to take this form of theater seriously. But since we almost never bring dramatic dialogue to the stage, for us it is just fun.” (Wetzel)
Rimini’s texts come into being through a process of asking questions and listening. Before and during rehearsals, this material that has been heard is transformed into a form that must again and again be reconciled with the performer’s reality. How do the experts’ voices sound, and what feelings does the text evoke, as they read texts that began as their own and were then taken from them, refined and given back to them? The text has been reconciled with what they are both willing and able to say. What kinds of expression do the experts resist? Which grammatical structures do not sound right? Which pieces of content do they insist on changing?
Experts tend to learn the rules of this process quite quickly and to notice how what they say is incorporated into the text and transformed. It is not unusual for things said earlier to be denied: “This ‘I didn’t say it like that’ is often not true. But once it has been said, it is often unsettling, especially at the beginning, because they cannot predict what it will mean in the context of the piece.” (Wetzel)
That is why creating the text is often a process of negotiation that can later lead to marked reactions. An expert such as Marx expert Thomas Kuczynski in Das Kapital may, knowingly, replace the correct word (in this case “use-value”) with a more common but actually incorrect one (namely “value”) in order to assert his independence from the production and to draw a distinction between himself and his role. At times, the process of creating Rimini performances bears some resemblance to family constellation therapy.
Characters in Time
Ten years ago, the rehearsal stage in Giessen hosted what was perhaps the only stage performance of Mr. Heller, the poultry farmer. Martha Marbo, the striking boulevard diva of Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, has since passed away. The children of Shooting Bourbaki have grown up. Amateur pilot Peter Kirschen is still not allowed to fly passenger planes, former mayoral candidate Sven-Joachim Otto has left the city where he was humiliated, and one of the Brazilian police officers is on trial.
Rimini Protokoll’s snapshots can capture the moment only briefly; they disappear along with the production. They focus on the present and store nothing up for the future. A museum of moments brings together characters from our time for a while, arranges them sometimes by field of knowledge, sometimes by occupation, age or fate, and then separates them again.
One of the essential elements of Rimini Protokoll’s success is that its theater depends neither on a manageable stock of existing or newly created dramatic characters, ultimately, nor on performers of the same age group that other independent theater-makers have to rely on. It shows you things you rarely or never see. Unlike reality TV and talk shows, it does not present people (real or artificial) in moments of crisis; on the contrary, it shows them calm and composed. Nor does it try to hide the fact that, on stage, their authenticity is only a role. Even if that role is the role of their lives.
A Rimini performance is never perfect, nor does it have to be. At the point where the performers have practiced enough to feel safe, and begin to develop their roles and to act, the piece starts to lose far more than just its charm. Insecurity and fragility are the moments that define what most people understand by authenticity. Yet these moments, in which timing, tension, empathy and presence vanish, are also excruciating. This is what happens when retired master builder Johannes Baur briefly loses his way in Uraufführung, when Mrs. Düring, nearly eighty years old, strains her memory to recall her next line in Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, or when you hear the performers whispering the text to one another in Sabenation; these are the moments when, as a spectator, you feel uncomfortable. Feeling embarrassed or moved by the efforts of performers who cannot protect themselves through acquired techniques, you too suffer for a moment.
What confronts us with the banal basic principle of theater are the moments when reality kicks in: being in a room with other real people, with the possibility of mistakes, breakdowns, failure (or even, as Heiner Müller might emphasize, the possible death of a performer or a neighbor). Theater is always flirting with the idea of being transient and fluid, and although it essentially places great value on repeating itself as identically as possible, it argues that these impermanent moments, this unrepeatability, are at heart what set theater apart from the other arts.
It is this paradox that drives many leading contemporary theater-makers, and it is an essential element of Rimini Protokoll’s work. Two years before Rimini Protokoll was formed, Stefan Kaegi and Bernd Ernst (still working as Hygiene Heute) stated that mistakes were their real area of interest. “Our favorite theater moments of 1998 are a fly buzzing aimlessly across the snow-white set of ATTIS, Norbert Schwientek as Krapp when his last tape won’t play, and the coughing fit of an audience member during Jürgen Flimm’s Uncle Vanya […]. We love the possibility that these small, human, devastating moments of embarrassment born of misunderstanding are not actually embarrassing at all but, on the contrary, universally human.”
The fact that those moments in Rimini productions do not give the impression that people are being objectified, or exposed to situations they are unsuited to or that work against them, has to do with the fact that precisely in these moments a sense of shared responsibility can often be detected. Because there is no prompter, the other performers rush to help; and even otherwise, room for flexibility is built into the dramatic structure of the piece itself. Rimini Protokoll’s work has always been a dramaturgy of care.
In Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, they faced this situation as three directors who, without giving up their artistic concerns in favor of social necessities, had to actively assist their experts (four ladies in their eighties) throughout the evening. Because of the performers’ unstable physical condition and living circumstances, Boxenstopp showed more clearly than any other piece what lies at the heart of all their work.
Even the structure of the production process itself is shaped by the particular needs and possibilities of the available experts (and thus by the piece’s “content”). In Boxernstopp, for example, there were clear limits on how much rehearsal was possible each day. This stemmed not only from the ladies’ limited physical capacities but also from the fact that a retirement home’s schedule, given items such as light exercise, memory training, afternoon coffee, music-making and meals, is busier than people think, and that such institutions are rather protective of their residents. Apart from playing a few test rounds of Formula 1 on the PlayStation with the residents, simply walking in and talking to people or organizing a casting was clearly not an option. “Gaining access to the slowed-down world of the elderly” (Wetzel) ultimately became possible only with the help of the leader of the memory-training program, who at least had some idea of what the ladies could and could not do. One of the techniques used to exercise the memory is the crossword puzzle, a kind of pit stop for the brain.
Over this period, Rimini developed a logic that allowed their experts to act confidently during the performance and to integrate themselves into the theatrical system. For example, Helgard Haug gave flag signals from inside the prompter’s box, which on the one hand were an element of the piece’s Formula 1 narrative and on the other were, quite literally, a clear signal of what the next step would be. The reports read by Mrs. Falke were not only the text of the piece but also an explicit record of the race in which the elderly ladies took part (for reasons that were not entirely clear but had something to do with curious scientific research). The small stairlift was not only a real means of getting around but also a playful allusion to motorized technology. Necessity determined the stage events and elements, as well as steering new forms of narration and meaning. The logic of care resembles the logic of the piece’s subject. “Racing drivers survive only if they receive signals from outside. Otherwise they would just go and crash into a wall.” (Wetzel) Ever since that piece, these aids (sometimes overt, sometimes implicit, but never hidden) have found their place in almost all of their works, serving at the same time as support and as narrative. “When the children in Uraufführung get to wear costumes bearing the municipal coat of arms, it fits their understanding of theater and helps them in the same way the flag signals helped Mrs. Düring.” (Wetzel)
This dramaturgy of care applies not only to these aids but also to the nature of the texts. They need to stand on their own on the one hand and serve as support on the other. It is precisely from this origin that some characters in Uraufführung speak Swiss German while others do not, just as verbatim repetitions, cheat sheets and instruction signs appear in various forms. It is not only the performers’ feelings that are at play here. Sometimes they need to be protected from themselves or from being confronted with an unknown situation, and so Rimini Protokoll carefully “watches whether something worrying is developing, whether the play is somehow heading in the wrong direction, and you decide you don’t want to sit across from these people and listen to them this way. This way they don’t express what you want to show about them, from them and of them.” (Haug).
The trust the participants place in the directors has to be rebuilt with every production. The long runs and extensive tours of Rimini productions have meant that experts have often seen other Rimini works and built up a so-called parallel expert knowledge before starting work. “Uraufführung was extreme; everyone had already seen Das Kapital and so had a sense that ‘we’ve got this figured out.’ But even in the case of Das Kapital, a few people had seen Wallenstein and approached things much more comparatively. Basically, on the one hand they’re almost spoiled by it, and on the other it helped in times of crisis.” (Haug)
That said, the Rimini directors did not have to be nice people. They pushed their performers extremely hard, just as much as they protected them and met their needs every evening. During a performance at the International Summer Academy at the Mousonturm in Frankfurt, the experts in Physik had begun to feel very safe and could therefore babble away quite routinely throughout the show. Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi then confronted them, just before the start of the show, with the idea that the performance would be in English because of the large number of international guests. At that point, the struggle with language became the theatrical experience.
Such spaces of insecurity, working against the performers’ daily routine, became part of the craft of Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel. Some experts were given small tasks to carry out and, from time to time, the chance to ask a different question or answer a question differently. They were encouraged to depart from the script for a moment and to set both themselves and the other performers in motion. They took this as far as having the students in Apparat Berlin and the children in Shooting Bourbaki actually start wrestling (stage direction: really fight, but don’t hit anyone wearing glasses).
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
These spaces must be clearly defined. “It’s fine to make a joke on stage that only the performers are in on, but it’s very important to understand that there is an audience off the stage too and that you can’t keep fooling around forever.” (Haug) On the third anniversary of the bankruptcy of the Belgian airline Sabena, the former employees who were the experts of Sabenation took the stage at PACT Zollverein in Essen and, naturally, wanted to make that particular historic date the focus of the evening. But reliving the day they had stood in bewilderment in front of the company’s locked doors was not something they could cope with. In a performance where former flight attendant Myriam Reitanos could not hold back her tears, the other performers also told excessively emotional stories, causing the piece to lose its form, which had been designed so that its sense of pathos was never hidden from the audience.
The care Rimini Protokoll shows its performers is professional in nature. They are there to make art, not to make friends. The connections they form have rarely been entirely severed, and although the experts make offers to meet, these meetings are limited to purely chance encounters. “Our complicity is temporary” (Wetzel), and the work has long since moved on elsewhere. At times there have been human reasons for turning a new page, as in cases where a show’s success masks the fact that the experts were chosen not for any fundamental talent for theater but solely for their expertise in this one piece.
Keeping a distance was especially important in Midnight Special Agency, part of the Kunsten festival in Brussels, in which each night another twenty-three experts spent five minutes on stage without much time for preparation or introduction. “They seemed very unprepared, and for many of them it was like bungee jumping. Afterward they immediately wanted to change their lives.” (Wetzel). As in other productions, it may not be easy for everyone to understand that the interest in their lives is limited to a single project. “The fact that we go our own way is often perceived as an insult.” (Wetzel) What was at stake was a partnership limited to a certain period, not a lifelong one.