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?