Early on, Rimini Protokoll adopted the term “experts” for its performers, in the sense of people who are experts in particular experiences, knowledge and skills. It is a concept consciously opposed to amateur theater. Those on stage should not be judged by what they cannot do (in other words, acting) but should instead be assessed by the reason they are on stage at all. The experts decided the order the evening would follow, which themes would be cut short or extended, and which characters, texts and spaces were created. In this way, the methods usually used to evaluate a theater performance were rendered meaningless.

Technical skill, nuance, depth, imagination: none of these were satisfactory criteria. Charisma, presence? These are deceptive notions in any case, and they are not enough to define the qualities of Rimini’s performers. What someone has experienced or what wonderful stories they bring with them has never really been that important. More often, what was sought for a project was a relatively ordinary biographical trait or piece of professional knowledge the performer possessed, actual experience, a social function, or a particular relationship between these.

In the beginning, Rimini found people interesting above all because of their particular physicality. The first were the elderly ladies in Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, with their “multiply coded voices” (Kaegi), their slowness and the palpable risk that came with their fragility. They were followed by the restless, energetic and overly eager young men in Shooting Bourbaki. Deadline, a piece about dealing with death; Sabenation, go home and follow the news, about the bankruptcy of the Belgian national airline; Schwarzenbergplatz, a piece about diplomacy; and the model railway world of Mnemopark brought types of work and other areas of interest, in the broadest sense of the word, onto the stage. Wallenstein Eine dokumentarische Inszerıierung (Wallenstein. A Documentary Staging) and Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Erster Band (Karl Marx. Capital. Volume One) are more complex in terms of the nature of their roles: the first dealt with Schiller’s thematic motifs and characters, the second with the various effects of economic theory and philosophy on private lives.

Although there was no actual list of functions, roles or types of performers that had to be present, it was clear that Wallenstein would have been incomplete without certain themes (failure, betrayal, morality, war). In Sabenation, the absence of a real airline pilot was glaring. In the end, the role was played by a man who would have loved nothing more than to fly commercial aircraft but, because one of his legs was shorter than the other, was limited to amateur flying. “He sat there telling anecdote after anecdote, and without realizing it he changed the whole cast and outshone all the other pilots.” (Wetzel) Similarly, the absence of a judge (a role taken on by the audience) created a gap in Zeugen. Ein Strajkammerspiel (Witnesses. A Criminal Court Play). Ultimately, it was the experts who were available who determined the concept.

So much so that when Rimini began work on Urauffuhrung: Der Besuch deralten Dame (Premiere: The Visit), which used contemporary witnesses to reenact a real historical event (the legendary premiere of Dürrenmatt’s play fifty years earlier), the lack of experts led them to consider keeping people off the stage entirely. Instead, they moved silhouettes made from original photographs across the stage in time with voices coming from offstage. But then some suitable performers were found, and the paper figures were demoted to the status of props.

Other projects deliberately set the threshold for selecting experts as low as possible: for Deutschland 2, people were sought to represent every member of the German parliament. In total, 237 experts were reached; anyone who could grasp the idea was admitted to the play. Similarly, Call Cutta, a mobile-phone audio tour controlled from a call center in India, was open to anyone who met the job criteria. “Above all, we had to avoid misunderstandings. Thirty highly motivated young Indians came to the first two castings, and we basically had to explain to them that we were offering no prospects of promotion or bonuses if they landed any job.” (Wetzel). Likewise, 1oo% Berlin, which presented a demographic cross-section of Berlin in January 2008 to launch the Hebbel Theater’s centenary celebrations, did not aim to find special connections between different groups. “Instead, people were to be lined up one after another like pearls on a string; everyone knew why they were there, but they would be arranged without any direct relationship to one another.” (Wetzel) As in Midnight Special Agency in Brussels, the theater was used as a tool to bring to the fore people who would otherwise at most be members of the audience, and often not even that. Rather than adding further layers of narrative, these portraits simply frame what is already there.

The number of characters they used in their stage productions increased considerably over the years. In 2000, Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp featured four people; the 2007 Uraufführung featured 21. The team around the directors expanded to include dramaturgs, set designers, assistants, company managers, interns… For a while, casting was organized by others, who placed the advertisements and spoke with candidates on the phone. “That really changed the work. Before, the way we approached people and how we found them somehow became part of the text. That way we had some material even before the first meeting.” (Haug) That said, it is no longer even necessary for all the Riminis involved in a project to be present at casting.

At the same time, the growing professionalism of the casting process and, even more noticeably, Rimini Protokoll’s rising profile also increased the number of experts to choose from. The foundations of the trust that outsiders placed in the directors were strengthened by invitations from the Berliner Theatertreffen and the Mülheimer Stücke festival. After all, Rimini’s experts are (even if they are theatergoers) conservative theatergoers. Some of the performers in Uraufführung, as season-ticket holders of the Züricher Schauspielhaus, had passionately opposed Christoph Marthaler’s Artistic Dictatorship.

Fame in the German-speaking world does not mean much beyond its borders. This did not change much, especially when Stefan Kaegi worked in South America and Eastern Europe. The infrastructure was generally kept smaller, and neither Rimini Protokoll nor the Goethe-Institut paid Argentinian porters, Bulgarian truck drivers or Brazilian police officers very much. The job offer takes the form of a newspaper ad and is nothing more than an opportunity to scrape by. “Even so, or perhaps for that very reason, castings often ended in absurd scenes of relief when applicants realized that something else was going on. In Córdoba, the doormen in Torero Portero, all of whom thought a caretaker was being sought for the theater, immediately formed a brotherhood through their own life stories, which resulted in the spontaneous founding of a kind of union of unemployed doormen.” (Kaegi) During preparations for the Matraca Catraca bus tour, rumors began to spread in the theater scene of Salvador da Bahia that a foreign director had come to town.  Kaegi, who had lived in Brazil for a time in his youth and speaks fluent Portuguese and Spanish, had to explain to the assembled actors that he was looking for someone with ten years’ experience as a bus conductor.

Ultimately, the real motivation for taking part as an expert in a Rimini production is the same in Western Europe as everywhere else. Rather than a particular interest in new, contemporary forms of theater or a desire for art, that motivation is the chance to tell one’s own story. This is as true for the conservative politician Sven-Joachim Otto in Wallenstein, who had the courage to appear on the stage of an institution whose budget he wanted to cut as part of his own election campaign, as it is for the police officers in the Police Training Opera in Caracas or in Chácara Paraíso in São Paulo.  “At last, for once, to be understood as a police officer without being immediately met with hatred.” (Kaegi) What is at stake is a certain freedom of speech that no one wants to take official responsibility for, yet which everyone (even superiors) accepts. Unofficially and privately, everyone could do whatever they wanted. “That said, what a Brazilian police officer is or is not allowed to do when off duty is a fog of unwritten rules.” (Kaegi) To protect the participants, Stefan Kaegi and his Argentinian co-director, the writer Lola Arias, allowed the participants to remain partly anonymous, or even entirely hidden behind frosted glass. Police officers in a witness protection program.