New York’s legendary Wooster Group hiding behind stunning playback virtuosity. The almost-as-legendary British theatre company Forced Entertainment not daring to say word live on stage for almost a decade, only using pre-recorded soundtracks until they came up with the idea of reciting lists and using Q&A games: functional speech instead of feigned psychology. Theatre maker René Pollesch being inspired by the mono-emotional rapid speech of the director and writer John Jesurun. The She She Pop collective rehearsing the quotidian sound of amateurish authenticity that later became mainstream in Reality TV. Rimini Protokoll sending “real people” onto the stage instead of performers. How can one stand in front of an audience and speak without falling into the trap of false representation?

For some years, Zorka Wollny also kept tiptoeing around this problem. When there was voice on stage, there were no bodies. When there were bodies, there was no voice. Silent dancers in galleries; invisible sources of sound. Once they finally appeared together in one space, they still were separated: Some bodies moving, others singing.

It was the form of the choir that finally offered a solution. A solution that had aesthetic and ethical reasons and consequences.

* * * * * * * *

Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Greece. A little later New York, London, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul, then Brazil, Japan, Korea, Argentina . . . the year 2010 kicked off a decade of demonstrations all around the world. The catalysts igniting each instance of unrest may differ, but artists were and are almost always among the first to take up the call for social justice and strengthened democracy. No matter the site (squares and parks like Tahrir, Zuccotti, Syntagma, Taksim, and Maidan), no matter the backdrop (Tokyo after Fukushima, Niemeyer’s iconic parliamentary architecture in Brasilia, or beneath umbrellas in Hong Kong), the same question arose: how could art – how could artistic strategies and tactics – play a relevant role in these movements? A renewed interest in the concepts of gathering and creating public spheres in which society not only is mirrored but constantly tried out, performed, tested, reimagined, or even reinvented, fundamentally changed the artistic discourse.

And so it is neither by chance, nor without larger context. that Wollny’s trajectory of bringing bodies and voices together began around the same time. Oratorio for Orchestra and Warsaw Citizens’ Choir (2011) mixed professional musicians with activists and engaged citizens, translating the genre of the oratorio into a secularized “form of expression for pluralist society, a polyphony of opinions and postulates”. From improvisations and numerous conversations, a libretto of political demands emerged. Behind Oratorio stood the deliberate choice to move orchestra and choir out of the safe space of the concert hall and onto the streets of Warsaw.

Was blieb: Dass wir in deinen Aufführungen immer irgendwie zuhause waren. Deine Realität war unsere. Deine Texte waren unsere Identity Monologe. Du warst das Stadtteiltheater unseres Wirs. Dass es diesen Stadtteil so nicht mehr gibt, nicht mehr geben kann, wohl auch nicht mehr geben sollte, ließ deine Stücke immer deutlicher Versuche der Selbstvergewisserung werden. Immer noch so komisch, wie sonst kaum was im Theater, immer noch so schlau und irgendwie so wahr. (Der potenzierte V-Effekt, wenn Wuttke zitiert, wie man das Zitat eines Slapsticks zitiert und das am Ende natürlich super Slapstick ist.) Aber war da nicht ein Hauch von “früher war’s besser” in deinen letzten Stücken?

Vielleicht war dieser Hauch nur im Publikum. Diese leise Melancholie jedenfalls ist nun alles, was uns bleibt. Denn so ist das in diesem Scheiß-Medium: Immer alles Gegenwart und danach nur noch Erinnerung.

Rimini Protokoll is, in varying configurations, a company of three freelance directors, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who without using actors or existing texts produce work on  major stages in important cities such as Hamburg, Vienna, Düsseldorf and Zurich. Since Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp the work of Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel has become unusually successful for a theatre group that does not work with actors, does not stage dramatic texts and does not fulfil the requirements of repertory theatre as it dominates German and most European stages. The members of Rimini Protokoll have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen twice (where theatre not created from dramatic texts is rarely represented) and recently were awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis and the Europe Prize for New Theatrical Realities. Tours of their new productions typically take place throughout Europe as well as in South America and India.

The reason for Rimini Protokoll’s success is in its presentation of a complex world in which the individual is fundamental and the truth is always a narrative. The company has hit a nerve amongst, somewhat exceptionally, theatre practitioners, critics and audiences alike, with theatre that is documentary in the sense of relating directly to the world as we experience it, an experience that often seems to evade our grasp. War, global market economy, capitalism, unemployment, old age, dying, and death all are Rimini Protokoll’s themes. They stake a claim for the particular, concrete person and against the politically generalized. Their version of documentary is one in which the very notion of documentary is juxtaposed with subjective experiences in which the individual and the social  are combined in a way that expands subjective perception.  While clear-cut theses, messages and opinions are avoided, Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel make, to loosely quote Godard, theatre political rather than political theatre.

Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp was the first collaborative work by Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel, three former students of the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen/Germany. The premiere in November 2000 (before they had even given themselves the name Rimini Protokoll) exhibited almost all of the characteristics that have so unmistakably informed all their subsequent work. These characteristics include using non-professional performers as experts of both their own lives and of the everyday; the examination of the actual performance space and its surroundings (in the case of Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp, an old people’s home next door to the theatre); a text that is simultaneously documentary and literary and blends disparate research material (like old age and the staging of a fiction such as the “Formula 1” race) and bears clear traces of its own production; and, a dramaturgy that, like the text, developed from the material it discovered and  that always simultaneously protects and challenges the performers. Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp was in many respects not only the prototype for a number of major stage productions that followed, but also the starting point for site-specific projects, radio plays, audio installations, small documentaries and short profiles.

Too much

There are at least two kinds of too much. One that annoys by exaggeration, that frustrates because you are never able to cope, that feeds you until you cannot swallow any more. Too much of ‘anything goes’, too much gluttony and mindless consumption. And there is too much as a thoughtful offer of possibilities. Not just accumulation but too much that offers choices, that empowers, that frees even when it is overwhelming. Too much that opens a field of thinking, associating, experiencing. Too much that takes its opposite seriously. Too much as a gesture of invitation and generosity.

Tasks for guests and hosts

It is this gesture of sometimes overburdening generosity that characterises many of BADco.’s recent performances. And even though this attitude can be read as the continuation of a specific modernist theatre tradition aiming to lay out a wide semiotic field by producing an excess of signifiers, this is not the full truth. While the work of their predecessors (most famously the New York neo-avant-garde antagonists the Wooster group and Richard Foreman, or in Europe – even though very different in style – the young Jan Fabre, Heiner Müller or Romeo Castellucci, to name a few) has its roots very much in an urge to liberate theatre from the primacy of text, from limitations by causal, linear narrations, by psychology, etc., BADco. takes it for granted that this prominent fight from the 1980s and early 1990s was won long ago. Not only do they use the booty of these struggles in whatever way they need to – they also add to it the attainments of the parallel, often ignored story of the arts and theatre in (South-) East Europe, and especially the former Yugoslavia.

Peter Heller spricht über Geflügelhaltung (Peter Heller talks about Poultry Farming) from 1997 is a candidate for the prototypical origin of Rimini Protokoll’s theatre. The idea arose in a student bar in Giessen, around a large table, over beer and schnitzel. Stefan Kaegi, who had just recently arrived in this small town in Hessen from the F+F art school in Zurich, had a real poultry farmer up his sleeve already. He had actually come for just half a year to see whether there was anything to learn at the institute, founded by Andrzej Wirth in 1982. The conservative paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung later described it as “the greatest source of calamity for German theatre” because this was where, amongst others, René Pollesch, She She Pop, Showcase Beat Le Mot and (some members of) Gob Squad emerged to challenge or undermine conventional state-supported theatre. The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies was, and in this respect still remains, the only German-speaking university department to combine theatre theory and practice and above all to dedicate itself to the production of contemporary and experimental theatre forms.

In this context Peter Heller was a quickly produced experiment, a theatrical game designed to irritate those who, through their studies, were constantly having to deal with the irritation of theatre. A theatrical readymade. For Stefan Kaegi and Bernd Ernst (who came to Giessen in the same year as Kaegi), it was the first in a series of inquiries into how powerful the black box is as a representation machine and how far whatever you place in it automatically becomes theatre. But also how the view of the black box is changed through that which is placed in it.

After Peter Heller, Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi staged productions featuring a pedigree Great Dane and a neurotic ufologist followed. In 1999 they named themselves Hygiene Heute (Hygiene Today – in opposition to dusty old German theatre), producing their first full-length show Training 747 for the Staatstheater Darmstadt’s Cutting Edge Festival. The piece was an intricate and playful story about mysterious parallels between two legendary aeroplane landings: the crash landing of Joseph Beuys’s bomber in the 2nd World War and amateur pilot Mathias Rust’s landing near Moscow’s Red Square. At that point their interest in theatrical readymades had already been replaced by the desire to create complex theatrical events.

There are other precedents for Rimini’s origins however. Fellow Giessen students Marcus Droß, Helgard Haug und Daniel Wetzel had been developing performances since 1995 under the name Ungunstraum – Alles zu seiner Zeit (Unfavourable Space – Everything in its Time). These performances worked above all on discarding or explicitly revealing theatrical mechanisms. In doing so, they also repeatedly put non-professionals on stage as “experts” for particular functions.

The three found each other in the context of a scenic project set by the composer and director Heiner Goebbels who was guest professor at the Institute at the time. The basis for the students’ project was Kafka’s story fragment The Great Wall of China and so the 1st Stage of Ungunstraum led us on an imaginary journey from Giessen to Peking. The group subsequently called almost all their series of related performances and installations at the time stages (Etappen). There was no recognisable narrative – actually almost nothing recognisable at all. Factual train connections to the Great Wall replaced Kafka’s text. The performers too disappeared in an installation made from steamed-up panes that could be written and projected on, as well as all kinds of sound and technical equipment. The performer-self (to say nothing of the actor-self) was regarded very critically. “Something had driven us onto the stage but then we hid ourselves the whole time we were there.” (Haug)

The name Ungunstraum came from a brochure about China that highlighted the “difficulty of transporting people and goods in a country with extremely unfavourable spaces (Ungunsträume)”. Droß, Haug und Wetzel wanted their ‘unfavourable spaces’ to demonstrate precisely where for them, infrastructure appeared to overwhelm form and content more than in other art forms: in the theatre. They were suspicious of technical perfection. Their task as performers was to operate and serve the light and sound equipment placed in full view on the stage and not to play themselves. The more polished and carefully built the settings became, the more their own appearance on stage was mistrusted. They wanted to be “professional dilettantes”, – following the only half-ironic maxim: “rehearsing is for cowards”.

The trap of representation (and that was essentially the whole of the German theatre landscape) was to be avoided at any price, and was considered at Giessen, more than anywhere else, the primary cause of all theatrical ills. Everything pleasing, everything that could be accused of trying “to give an audience what it wanted”, everything that concerned “purely visual effects and surface, that was to do with conventional dramaturgy stood under the general charge of non-thinking” (Wetzel).

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of the other place.Susan Sontag

Perhaps the most alarming thing is this: that there is a narrative plausibility even to Christoph Schlingensief’s cancer – as if plausibility had anything to do with life and death. We narrate our lives backwards; in retrospect, decisions seem inevitable, coincidence feasible, and the hand of fate consequential. Just as the Romantics believed that illness and early death were the result of a poetic sensibility. Just as we see an inner logic, a dramaturgy in the lives of famous people and are disinclined to read them as mere products of circumstance.

The neo-romantic Schlingensief has, in his work and interviews, always narrated his life in this way: as an ultimately coherent – albeit circuitous – development. He has expanded upon this narrative onstage and enlarged it via his incursions into public spaces, which in turn were taken up by the media so that they, too, have chronicled his life as it were a novel. And because Schlingensief and the world around him tend to notch things up more than just a little, he has considerably overextended the arc between life and art, as was demonstrated (if not before) in his 2004 production of Parsifal in Bayreuth. If an artist and his interpreters equate the two ends of this arc so strongly, couldn’t it be that the work actually writes the life? That life adheres to a desirable (because plausible, because aesthetically beautiful) logic? And, at some point, it seemed as if this life were no longer being narrated backwards, but forwards. Like a serialised novel or a film or, to cite Schlingensief’s 2008 production A Church of Fear for the Stranger in Me:

Are we perhaps a lie? Are we a film, a film lasting barely a moment? Are we the thoughts of a madman? Are we a printing error? Are we a premonition? The picture that forms in one’s imagination much earlier than the events via which we participate in life occur? […] Are we a future fact that has not yet come about?

Parsifal is Wagner’s final opera, an artistic and ideological legacy replete with religious motifs – from the revelation of the monstrance to the Eucharist. Following Schlingensief’s surprising appointment as the director of a new production of this opera, time and again comparisons were made between him and its title figure : Parsifal the ‘pure fool’ who, as a Germanised figure of salvation, redeems the world through compassion, and Schlingensief – for whom compassion and redemption, albeit often misunderstood as irony, were always central motifs in his work – who tilts in apparent naivety at windmills. Or at Klingsor.

The wider resonance of the Parsifal story was also soon to be extended by the concrete situation of the artist himself. Even with someone like Schlingensief, who has effected so many surprising yet convincing artistic turnarounds, it was difficult to imagine what might follow the supposed highpoint of a production at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The enfant terrible, trash filmmaker, scandalous performer, and TV provocateur had entered the heart of bourgeois culture. It would be difficult for an artistic career to reach a more established or esteemed position than this. The life story appeared complete – catharsis had to follow. Schlingensief, too, did not resist the temptation of ennobling his life and art with the possibility of its early end. In fact he repeatedly mentioned that death could, indeed, follow his production of Parsifal.

Theatre as illness, illness as theatre

Schlingensief’s fascination with illness and death did, however, not begin with Parsifal. Rather, it is a fascination that is also apparent in his early films. Blood is vomited in Mother’s Mask (1988) and Menu Total (1986) contains the eerie white-coats-and-doctors scene that would later be incorporated into the video segment of Mea Culpa: A ReadyMade Opera (2009). For Schlingensief, the motif of illness has various functions and meanings. It becomes a symptom of what society has suppressed, of something (the National Socialist past, incest, rape) that breaks out because it can no longer be restrained. But, in contrast to Antonin Artaud (who likened the theatre to the plague with its grotesquely transformative power), the outbreak of illness in these cases does not mark a turning point, a new social beginning, or a resurrection from the smoking ruins. It does not have a cathartic effect; it merely brings the truth to light, without leading to insight. The truth serum of illness does not heal – even though redemption is another central motif in Schlingensief’s work – perhaps for the very reason that it cannot be attained.

The fact that Schlingensief likes to bring up the subject of societal illness has less to do with the desire to provoke than with compassion, indeed with a vicarious suffering that sometimes lends him a touch of the messianic. The supposition of irony or even cynicism is usually incorrect here – techniques of the inauthentic or of distancing are largely foreign to Schlingensief. Rather, it is primarily the techniques of non-integration and non-resolution that are essential to his work.

I have certainly produced work that was deliberately and purposefully developed to attract attention and nothing more. But sometimes that was a mistake because doing that turned out to be completely uninteresting. The best things were those that developed unintentionally, where the work, for example, came into being as a result of an invitation out of the blue. That is even more clearly the case with the three pieces about cancer. They came out of nowhere – out of the shock that came with this illness. And, of course, it turned everything upside down. Suddenly all of my 350 kilometre-per-hour plans – my life at the time was super fast – were brought to a halt. But at the same time I didn’t see any reason to brake because cancer has to do with death and with the limitations of time that one has, but that wasn’t really clear to me at the time. It was actually a massive disruption. Like something that wants to prevent you from doing the work that is pulling at you. When I looked at the X-ray, I suddenly became very hot, as if I had made a huge mistake. The first thing I felt was a certain sense of guilt. In that moment, I probably already sensed: This is really such an insane rupture it is almost impossible to imagine. And then a flood of questions followed: What happens now? Operation? Radiotherapy? Chemotherapy? Will I still exist after the operation? And will I still have a voice afterwards? Because the doctor thought that he might have to remove my vocal nerves. And then you wake up and you can speak – that was really such a relief. Then my appetite returned and I came to terms with the whole situation, so I was optimistic. That is something that has remained with me. That is to say: I always have moments when I think: This is great, things go on. And then I fall to pieces again, you know: A complete nervous wreck, with absolutely no idea about how to cope with it, and I just think: It’s all over. And there is no way of driving a wedge between myself and it, or of flinging open a window.

It was thus pure expediency to say: good, if you have fear, then talk about fear. So the old automatism returned: If you have a problem, don’t think it away, deal with it. Then use it, grab it, and channel your sorrow into a comrade-in-arms. So I had to give form to it, create images, in order to cope with it and at first I thought: We will make a film as soon as I get out of hospital. A comedy about someone who has cancer and who only meets crazy people. Then I thought: That would just be the old sales and suppression strategy, ie. how do I give form to it in a way that people notice that I’m in control – and of course I’m not in control of it at all! It’s the complete opposite. It is probably the hardest experience of my life. In this case, I can stand neither above nor below it. This time I have definitely landed somewhere else. I am in it.

You made notes with the help of a dictaphone…

Yes, even in the first weeks, I recorded nearly every day what I experienced there and what happened when the doctor or the palliative nurse came etc. And in the evenings, I didn’t listen to it again. I did, however, cry and talk into the device, when nobody was there. It wasn’t a speech, or material, at that stage, for a book. It was simply a collection of everything that was racing through my head at the time. And then I had the idea of making a piece out of it – which I began to rehearse in the flat…from an automated bed with a remote control from the hospital. That was immediately a flop because, as a result of the Chemo, I wasn’t able to continue. Aino, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, tried to reconstruct the material that I had worked on laboriously in the flat, on the rehearsal stage of the Maxim Gorki Theater. That resulted in the first performance of Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Current State of Things] which took place in a very intimate atmosphere with no press allowed. I made it while still in shock. Guests were invited solely via a text message – no other announcement was made. We had sixty or seventy seats for people including neighbours and friends, but also Bob Wilson and Volker Spengler, Werner Schroeter, who has cancer himself, Martin Wuttke…And because it was an evening without pressure and without a discussion afterwards, it was an incredible source of power for me: We pulled it off. Somehow it worked.

At that point I thought: Stick with this theme. And Zwischenstand was further developed into Kirche der Angst [A Church of Fear for the Stranger in Me] for the Ruhr-Triennale, as a sort of requiem or ‘cancer mass’. It was a huge success yet a different kind of success than previously. Something really happened between the audience and us – it was sincere and, to a certain extent, tragic. I also appeared in a short scene at the end of the performance that utilised the liturgy of a Catholic mass. But on the fifth or sixth evening, I thought: That’s enough. I don’t want to make touring theatre, or something, for people with cancer. That can’t be the case and it has no future. And then came the third part in the Burgtheater Vienna and, with it, the risk that people would perhaps think: Yeah, yeah, here he goes again about his illness…But then the situation changed again. The metastasen suddenly disappeared as a result of a tablet, something which, according to the doctors, wasn’t really possible in that period of time. After four or five weeks, I had a CT scan in which none could be found! How does that come about? The third part of the trilogy is concerned with life going on. What do you do, when you step back into reality, but you can’t perceive it as real because you previously thought you were already dead?

When someone dies, it is the loneliest path there is. It is not about hand-holding or whatever: My father smiled at the end. That was, however, a smile that I couldn’t understand. Was it, perhaps, the smile of someone face to face with a secret society that had taken him in? To see that was a heavy burden for me because he also told us that, in two weeks, he would be dead. And in two weeks he was dead. They are exceptional circumstances and we lack the criteria for working through them.

Can one actually grasp something like that in a production?

It can only function via music, and perhaps also via beliefs, ie. individual beliefs. One couldn’t go further with some sort of objective realism. Only through that which is ritualistic, almost sacred can one produce something that is befitting and moving. And the third part Mea Culpa was perhaps the most difficult: an uncertain resurrection, a celebration of life in the face of the inevitability of death.

In the middle of the stage, almost invisibly, I presided over the church, that is, the Kirche der Angst. Within it the ritual continues and someone there celebrates a requiem while outside are the treatment rooms and life follows its normal course… It is once again an argument [Auseinandersetzung] with the realisation that redemption is actually a concept that is completely misunderstood, and which one connects with something great and sublime. But redemption is the most individualistic, small, and awful step that there is. Because he who is done for, who seeks only to be redeemed gives himself over to total loneliness and surrenders everything that makes him who he is. That he is then told that everything will be fine and that he can cope – this is not really what is on his mind…If one has been through such a situation and come through it, one has more interest in people than before. One sees them differently. I look at them as if I were already standing a step outside of them. One looks at them perhaps not more exactly, not analytically, but longer. Humans and human life gain a different value. Everything is no longer taken for granted.

Sometimes of course, I slip into old mechanisms in my work, but they don’t really come through. It doesn’t become a show, because I don’t want that anymore. The distance is greater.

Previously you were always on stage and committed to being involved. It was precisely this lack of distance that defined your work. From the earliest theatre productions on, you had to be able to join in, because otherwise you couldn’t respond to the reactions of the public and the actors’ routines. And now suddenly this composure?

Yes. I already had that with Kirche der Angst, when I simply pull back and my team reconstructs the work. And then I say, let’s put that in for now, and I lean back and look at it. Previously I didn’t permit such a situation. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want anything finished which is why I hesitated until the premiere. I was downright afraid that it would be finished. Now I mould the ‘sculpture’ more in my mind, and no longer believe that I have to work on it with an axe, hammer and a chisel. Now I can turn off more quickly. I am more interested in the total composition, which means that I need to be able to observe everything. And I also don’t fiddle around with the actors’ bodies as I used to and flip out in front of their faces, so that they no longer know how they should act. In the past, I always had muscular pain in the evening, because I actually wanted to play all of the roles. And now I just write the texts and concentrate more on looking. That is my job.

Your previous work was, in part, shaped by a notable paradox: you are, on the one hand, a complete control freak – you can’t leave the actors alone on the stage – and, on the other hand, you produce permanent chaos in order to limit or thwart your own control.  Has control become less important for you?

It could well be. It pleases me when things evolve more from themselves. I have less strength, but I think more. The whole time, I occupy myself with the texts, images and particularly the music. And at night I search for pieces of music, which is something I didn’t previously do. I try to respond when someone doesn’t understand something, whereas in the past, my immediate reaction was: Out! These days, someone will leave rather than me having to say he should no longer be there. But the control is greater, because I see it as an image, as a composition. I have to feel it first. Previously I almost had to catapult myself into a trance at each rehearsal.

The musicality that I have with opera is now more and more important. With theatre, one thinks a lot, und that is something that one can make great use of, but the structure is easily lost. The opera has more stability and provides a framework which is organic and not compulsive. A singer has to accept that he sings, he can’t just jump around. And for that reason, we don’t do a lot of theatrics with them, they should simply sing. I don’t believe them anyway when they start to introduce their pretence of naturalism.

So more the image of the whole – there is still control, but less getting tangled up in the details, in order to see the larger arc…

… and to also accept that this is simply how it is now. And not, as in the past, change something in the last few weeks and cut the text, so that the whole production dies in the process. I don’t do that anymore, because I really fight hard for the subject matter. And even if the text is, at first, a jumble of words, the music clarifies what is happening.  I now think in a very musical way. When you are lying in bed, there are not a lot of alternatives…I thought a lot while I was in bed, spoke a lot, read a lot but also listened to a lot of music. In terms of your question about rhythm, it is also interesting when you are simply lying there with an embolism. You simply do not have any chance of producing rhythm.

Is the work then more disembodied? Less physical?

Yes, I believe so. … In the past we pulled viewers onto the stage, bound them, and then smeared them with Nivea cream; a latent form of rape or something. It was, in any case, so corporeal that people went out and cried, because they couldn’t handle the violence that had befallen them during their visit to the theatre. We found that pretty great and exciting. Although at times we also had a bad conscience. That I hurt people because I pulled them onto the stage was, perhaps, justifiable at the time, but, at the moment, I have no connection to it, even a certain sense of disgust. Because that type of act makes the arrogant claim that: We are the ones who see through everything and will show you that we are breaking the rules and acknowledge no taboos. This attitude has become rather alien to me now. One can also employ theatre as a place where one can think. Back then, however, I couldn’t do that, because I felt virtually compelled to get into fights on the stage. We only enjoyed it when there was a ruckus. I don’t want to say that that was completely wrong – there were indeed great nights. Often, there were metaphysical moments as well. But people change.

The explicitly and concretely political work that emerged in this period – Kühnen 94, the party Chance 2000, the Vienna Container-Project Please love Austria, the Hamlet production with the Neo-Nazis in Zürich: How did these projects develop? Your work in film had often sought to draw mythical, historical connections…

At the age of eight – 1968 – I made a super-8 film with my father’s camera, where a farmer had to wave flags and three children in go-carts knocked him down and ran away. There was also a shootout or something similar. I don’t want to say that that was political, but something is captured in that image. During my school years, I would always have rows with the teachers because, for me they were too political, one-sidedly political. I once started a row with a teacher and had to leave the classroom, because I said that she only approached things from a left perspective, and that was too boring for me. The Oberhausen Short Film Festival also didn’t give me much pleasure because to my mind it was only pseudo political. People were invited from the eastern block to show their boring films. And then our worst filmmakers would show their films in Leipzig or somewhere else.

My father always received telegrams from the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] camp. I partly learned their contents by heart so that I – as a sixteen year old at the SPD [Social Democratic Party] voting stands – could use it in an argument against them. Simply as verbal fireworks. I did, however, always read those telegrams. And in Oberhausen, where very little information circulated, I also played around with statistics that they couldn’t rebut. Or I worked together with the KPD-ML [The Communist Party of Germany/Marxists-Leninists] because they claimed that an egg should only cost two or three pfennigs. At first I thought it was a great idea until I realised: the chicken doesn’t get anything out of it. So it was quite clear that I hadn’t really become political at all – it was rather something like an overarching need for recognition.

Later as a student in Munich, I began to develop a sense of antipathy toward the Film Academy. At that time I became interested in the films of Werner Herzog, because they were so detached. They were so strange. Even Dwarfs Started Small was the kind of film I liked. I found it political. In contrast, I found these explicitly political films by Reinhard Hauff, Margarethe von Trotta and others to be no good at all. I also felt, in part, extremely aggressive towards Wenders: reproducing stupid crap from America, but so badly. But I liked The American Friend, and I thought Alice in the Cities and The State of Things were great. I liked, in a sense, their avowal that someone had failed. That one can’t leave the city. Or that one has cancer and wants to rescue the family.

I actually felt at home with Werner Nekes for whom I worked as an assistant, and I gathered ammunition from experimental films that could be used against mainstream cinema. ie. Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol. For me, that was political enough. My work only became politically explicit with Menu Total – that was in 1986. In this film, Helge Schneider – who was unknown back then – ran around playing a young boy who wanted to become Hitler, and who wiped out his family. And later they all rise again and are redeemed….

Die Bühne, die das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit nicht nur bespielt, sondern mit jeder seiner Aktionen erst erschafft, ist der öffentliche Raum – ein agonistischer Raum, im Sinne Chantal Mouffes, die davor warnt, durch vermeintlichen Konsens unterschiedliche Meinungen nur zu unterdrücken, bis diese sich am Ende nur noch in feindlichem Antagonismus ausdrücken können:

Versuch über das Sterben (2019) ist ein Monolog über den Tod von Nikitins Vater und, darin verwoben, eine Reflexion über das eigene Coming-out als schwuler Mann zwanzig Jahre zuvor. Darüber, wie das offene Bekenntnis zur eigenen Sexualität, erst vor sich selbst und dann vor anderen, nicht nur zum Wendepunkt in seinem Leben, sondern auch zu einer zentralen Metapher seines Arbeitens wurde: “Das Leugnen hat auch bedeutet, nicht zu verstehen, dass die Realität anders sein könnte, als sie scheint – und dass man selbst die Macht hat, sie zu verändern.” Dass Realität nicht fixiert ist, dass es nicht nur eine Realität gibt – und dass das aber kein Grund zu relativistischer Resignation ist, sondern im Gegenteil erst die Freiheit eröffnet, überhaupt zu handeln.

PROBEBÜHNEN

Im Sommer 2001 zog Boris Nikitin mit einundzwanzig Jahren aus seiner Geburtsstadt Basel nach Berlin, um Assistent des Autorenregisseurs René Pollesch zu werden, dessen diskursiv-spielerisches Theater zwar bereits eine eingefleischte Fangemeinde aber noch nicht den Mainstream-Appeal späterer Jahre hatte und der gerade zum künstlerischen Leiter der Nebenspielstätte Prater der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz berufen worden war, die unter der Intendanz Frank Castorfs auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Strahlkraft war – eines der einflussreichsten und meist-diskutierten Häuser weit über den deutschsprachigen Raum hinaus. Seine erste Spielzeit stellte Pollesch ganz ins Zeichen des Gießener Instituts für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft (ATW), einer Keimzelle des aufstrebenden “postdramatischen Theaters”, einer experimentellen, sehr international orientierten Strömung, die den performativen Künsten nicht nur das Primat des dramatischen Textes, sondern vor allem auch ihre Liebe zur psychologisierenden Repräsentation austreiben wollte. Pollesch selbst hatte dort studiert und u. a. durch die Begegnung mit Gastprofessor*innen wie John Jesurun seinen eigenen Stil gefunden.

Passend zum WG-geprägten Low-Budget-Ambiente vieler Gießener Produktionen baute der Bühnenbildner Bert Neu-mann eine Wohnfront als Einheitsbühnenbild in den Prater (sieben Zimmer, Küche, Bad), das von unterschiedlichen Künstler*innen, alles ATW-Absolvent*innen, nach nur je vier Wochen Probenzeit bespielt wurde: Pollesch inszenierte die Prater-Trilogie, Helgard Haug und Daniel Wetzel steuerten – noch nicht unter dem Gruppennamen Rimini Protokoll –  Apparat Berlin bei, She She Pop erzählten in Homestory die Geschichte sechs einsamer Frauen und eines Mannes auf der Suche nach seiner Katze …

This bilingual publication is the first in-depth attempt to address the group’s haunting and original work from the outside; combining essays with academic and artistic reflections on their multi-faceted output in a single volume.

With contributions by Patricia Benecke, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish, Adrian Heathfield, Judith Helmer, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Florian Malzacher, Annemarie Matzke, Andrew Quick, Anke Schleper, Gerald Siegmund, Astrid Sommer. PhotOs by Hugo Glendinning.

Definitely the most charming and clever birthday present for the 20th anniversary of the cult group from Sheffield. APA

Very nicely presented, versatile and comprehensive. Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Required reading! tip Berlin

Behind the heartbreakingly beautiful cover, which shows an exhausted actor wearing an oversized, sad plush horse mask in front of glowing orange show-biz glitter, there are 12 word contributions, numerous production photographs, a bibliography and a complete catalogue raisonné. … For all those who see the existence of Forced Entertainment as a great fortune, this book is at least a small one. Theater Heute

With contributions by Eva Behrendt, Diedrich Diederichsen, Miriam Dreysse, Heiner Goebbels, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Florian Malzacher, Annemarie Matzke, Tobi Müller, Martina Müller-Wallraf, Priyanka Nandy, Matthias Pees, Rimini Protokoll, Kathrin Röggla, Jens Roselt und Gerald Siegmund.

A book for connoisseurs, enthusiasts and those who want to become one. nachtkritik

The great, also emotional, attention to everyday life on the one hand and the enthusiasm for it borne by academic discourse and theoretical figures on the other: this is what makes this book as much as the projects of Rimini Protokoll. Katrin Bettina Müller, die tageszeitung (taz)

A successful work protocol that makes you want to see and hear more from the Rimini Trio. Die Deutsche Bühne

With an introductory essay by Florian Malzacher, conversations by Dirk Baecker, Joy Kristin Kalu and Christine Wahl with Boris Nikitin, original texts, numerous colour illustrations and an up-to-date catalogue raisonné.

The series Postdramatic Theatre in Portraits is dedicated to the development of a new theatre aesthetic since the 1990s. The history of actors of postdramatic theatre in the German-speaking world is told for the first time in the form of monographs. The editors of the series are Florian Malzacher, Aenne Quiñones and Kathrin Tiedemann.

DASS ist das erste Wort: dass etwas entstünde! Das Versprechen, eine Wüste wachsen zu lassen. Dass das da nie ganz voll sein wird, dass irgendwo in der Tiefe hinter diesem Vorhang eine unerschöpfliche Leere herrscht, die immer wider Platz schafft, eine Lücke in der Republik, wo wir hineinpassen. Dass das da nicht damit enden dürfe, dass man sagt, dass man etwas machen müsse, sondern dass etwas gemacht worden sein wird, bevor es zu Ende ist. Dass das also jetzt zu geschehen habe, jetzt. Dass dieses jetzt und jenes jetzt eins werden müsste in diesem Moment, im Moment des jetzt, der gerade dadurch, dass er gegenwärtig wäre, Vergangenheit und Zukunft kurzschlösse im Moment dieses jetzt. Und dass man sich so wie diesen Moment die Revolution vorzustellen habe: kleine schwarze Löcher ins Bild der Welt zu schießen, is sich die herrschende Unwirklichkeit selbst auffrisst. PANDÄMONIUM GERMANICUM: Lenz im Loop (2011)

Es gibt eine Tonaufnahme der letzten öffentlichen Rede des alten Brecht, 1956 vor der Sektion Dramatik beim IV. Deutschen Schriftstellerkongress der DDR. Launisch und genüsslich provozierend spricht er über “kleine, wendige Truppen und Trüpplein”, schnell agierende “Theaterchen” im Geiste des Agitprops, die nötig seen, um den schwerfälligen großen Häusern auf die Sprünge zu helfen. Dort gäbe es zu viele alte Intendant*innen und überhaupt eine große Trägheit. Dagegen setzte Brecht auf Eigeninitiative, auf “Selbstzündung”.

“Theaterchen” als Einsatztruppen performativer Kunst. Dieses Motto gefiel Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord und Sascha Sulimma, schon lange bevor sie sich den Gruppennamen andcompany&Co. gaben. Brecht Provokation interpretierten sie als einen Auftrag ans Freie Theater. Und vor allem an sich selbst. Nicht zuletzt gefiel ihnen, dass der alte Meister das Theatermachen in die Nähe des Aktivismus rückte und dabei doch auf Seiten der Kunst blieb. Die geforderte Wendigkeit ist eine politische ebenso wie eine ästhetische. Die Notwendigkeit, sich immer wider neu zu erfinden, neu zu positionieren. Beim englischen Begriff “devised theatre” schwingt eine solche Definition mit: Jede Arbeit ist neu zu entwickeln, beginnt am leeren Tisch, fängt mal mit einer Idee für das Licht an, mal mit einem Monolog, mal mit bestimmten Performer*innen, mal mit einer konkreten Frage. Theater kann vieles sein, wenn es nicht immer vorher schon weiß, was es ist. Und das sowohl auf als auch hinter der Bühne: Die prinzipielle Freiheit, die Möglichkeiten als Medium auszutesten, zu strapazieren, zu überstrapazieren, zu erweitern, gilt auch für Strukturen, Hierarchien, Rollenzuschreibungen, Abläufe, Kollaborationen. Kunst findet nicht im luftleeren Raum statt, sondern inmitten sozialer, politischer, aber auch privater Zusammenhänge.

The great Theatre of Oklahoma calls you! Today only and never again! If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future, you are one of us! Everyone is welcome. If you want to be an artist, join our company! Our theatre can find employment for everyone, a place for everyone! Franz Kafka, Amerika

Only today, for one time only! The Great Theatre of Oklahoma! Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška had been keeping the name of the immoderately ambitious touring troupe from Kafka’s Amerika in mind for a long time – for the day they would found their own company. Not only because the unfinished novel had served Liška as a kind of instruction manual to his new homeland after emigrating from Slovakia (the same part of the world that both Kafka and Amerika’s protagonist Karl Roßmann are from), but also the grandiose gesture of the poster and the mind-boggling dimensions of the dubious-sounding Nature Theatre of Oklahoma held a powerful attraction for the two unknown theatre-makers who, with a combination of modesty and strength of will, had no doubts that they had something substantial to offer as artists.

In 1991, at the age of 18, an obscure job offer suddenly gave Liška, who had grown up in a small town in Slovakia, the opportunity to move to the USA. He had never been abroad before, spoke no English, and was actually supposed to join the Army – but instead, a few weeks later, he ended up in Oklahoma. He learned the language at night (when he wasn’t working) to be able to follow his classes in Philosophy and Writing at college during the day, constantly afraid of losing his student visa if his grades weren’t good enough. After a year in a rather desperate work and life situation in Oklahoma he transferred to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he met Kelly Copper in a seminar on Dadaist performance (a remarkably unpopular course with only three students in attendance) and the two became an inseparable pair. Copper graduated in 1993 and moved to New York.

While Liška was visiting her over Christmas that year they had seen Frank Dell’s the Temptation of St. Antony by The Wooster Group, Reza Abdoh’s Quotations from a Ruined City and Richard Foreman’s My Head was a Sledgehammer – in a kind of crash course one after another – and their entire concept of theatre was turned upside down. Liška, who was busy directing one of his own plays at college, came back and immediately told his fellow students: “that we have been doing it all wrong, and have to change everything. These three shows I saw in New York really made me realize what theatre could be.”

Since then Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, who have called themselves Nature Theater of Oklahoma since 2004, have themselves created some of the most remarkable theatre works to be seen in the former capital of the avant-garde in recent years: unmistakable in their combination of conceptual rigour, an idiosyncratic mix of modernist art strategies (at times closer to the visual than the performing arts) and exultantly theatrical performance that refuses to shy away from apparently trashy surfaces while uninhibitedly poaching from all manner of theatrical traditions.

Even if their greatest success has come in Europe, their theatre remains unmistakeably North American – not least because in their works they draw on typically Anglo-American genres such as dinner theatre (in No Dice), musicals (Life and Times – Episode 1), show choirs (Episode 2), vaudeville mystery theatre (Episodes 3 & 4), Western movies (Pursuit of Happiness), Hollywood classics like Citizen Kane (Episode 7), North American landscape painting (Episode 8) and gangsta rap (Episode 9).

Most of all, however, they have been influenced by their home city of New York. Most of Nature Theater’s idols live or did live in Manhattan: Marcel Duchamp the inventor of the readymade; Andy Warhol, who turned the everyday into art; John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who made chance a protagonist; Ken Jacobs and Joseph Cornell and their filmic compositions of found materials; The Wooster Group with its fascination with technical perfection and information overload; and not least the unique Jack Smith, who celebrated trash and camp as original aesthetics – all of them have influenced Nature Theater, that consciously and enthusiastically roots itself in these traditions.

Among theatremakers it is first and foremost Richard Foreman and his handling of props and the audience that has left the most evident traces. Pavol Liška joined the legendary director’s team in the mid-1990s and helped on several productions: “It was the most formative experience for me, and sometimes I feel like I learned everything I know about directing from Richard Foreman.” Foreman was also the one who gave them the chance to show their first work in New York at his theatre in 1996. “Our first 3 or 4 shows in New York were an attempt to imitate him.” And even later, long after they had found their own highly individual artistic path, Foreman remained a mentor and role model: “I learned from him to shape every small unit of time, to be rigorous, and never make compromises. His shows were built like sculptures out of words, gestures, movements, props, scenery. He built perfectly constructed worlds, and we struggled to do the same. Richard Foreman is never too far away from my mind when I direct.”

Now the couple live in Long Island City, Queens – Manhattan with its famous skyline is now more distant but remains in view (at least for the moment) until the crush of constantly expanding skyscrapers will hide it finally from sight.

This first monograph on Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s work offers a lively insight into its broad artistic practice. Essays by critics, theoreticians, fellow artists and participants in the various projects are accompanied by a series of contributions from Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška together with numerous colour illustrations and a comprehensive index of works.

With contributions by Elfriede Jelinek, Joris Lacoste, Florian Malzacher, Bonnie Marranca, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Claus Philipp, Tom Sellar, Karinne Keithley Syers, Pieter T’Jonck.

Guest appearances by Jérôme Bel, Romeo Castellucci, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Liesbeth Gritter, Richard Foreman, William Forsythe, Faustin Linyekula, Rabih Mroué, Meg Stuart, Mette Van der Sijs, Sarah Vanhee.

The lovingly designed book is a successful mixture of analysis, biographical material, and voices of artist friends. Karin Cerny, Profil

It was high time. Now, however, the first monograph on the New York City-based theater group is finally available. Der Standard

A beautifully designed monograph. Arnd Wesemann, tanz

The texts in which Copper and Liška have their say and reflect on their artistic methods resemble a veritable cornucopia of insights and ideas. nachtkritik.de

Volume 3 of the Postdramatic Portraits roams through the genesis of the collective and its particular artistic signature and way of working.

With an introductory essay by Florian Malzacher, an extensive conversation by Luise Meier with andcompany&Co., a contribution by Alexander Karschnia, original texts, numerous colour illustrations and a complete catalogue raisonné.

The series Postdramatic Theatre in Portraits is dedicated to the development of a new theatre aesthetic since the 1990s. The history of actors of postdramatic theatre in the German-speaking world is told for the first time in the form of monographs. The editors of the series are Florian Malzacher, Aenne Quiñones and Kathrin Tiedemann.

Relaxed, knowledgeable and analytical. Ralf-Carl Langhals, Mannheimer Morgen