Rimini Protokoll

Rimini Protokoll is the label for the works of artists Helgard Haug (female, German, born 1969), Stefan Kaegi (Swiss, b. 1972) and Daniel Wetzel (German, b. 1969) in various team constellations related to theatre, live art, radio plays and installation. They are often mentioned as inventors of a new wave of documentary theatre.

They met during their Applied Theatre Science & Performance Studies at the Giessen University, Germany. They are a team of authors, directors and designers of sound, stage and videos, who work in this constellation since 1999. The name of the team was created in 2002. "Protokoll" does not refer to the so-called of 2003. It is a programmatic term marking reports and (their own) protocols to be their sources of inspiration and stage text, rather than drama.

They have been invited twice to Berliner Theatertreffen, Germany's most important festival featuring the 10 best performances of Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Since 2003 their projects rather take place in the framework of big national theatres like Vienna's Burgtheater or Schauspielhaus in Zurich.

They are often described as the inventors of a new form of documentary theatre, exploring a theatre of performers who are not professional actors but experts or specialists out of their particular spheres of life—professionals of a theatre of the real world. So, instead of presenting actors performing characters as parts of drama texts they present people whom they find through elaborate research and casting procedures and with whom they develop theatre performances according to their abilities and skills to convincingly and strongly present themselves in front of a national theatre crowd used to watch the perfect fake instead of the unperfect but real. "Rimini Protokoll brings real life to the stage", states German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, "in a way that no other theatre form has been able to. The unmistakable strength of these performances lies above all in the fact that in spite of the proximity to the persons whom they portray a rift appears between the role and the personality, and with it an awareness of the risk, that life could gain the upper hand, and theatre could lose control over itself."

"Call Cutta", one of their recent works, was based on outsourcing: The performers or 'experts', who were employees of a call center, were located in Salt Lake, Calcutta, India, providing the audience in Berlin, Germany with individual cell phone performances, with each call center agent guiding just one spectator solely through the remote maze of lanes of Kreuzberg, Berlin, narrating the story of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian revolutionarist freedom fighter.

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