Radio Muezzin

Radio Muezzin by Rimini Protokoll springs out from the fact that the prayer calls over Cairo, the city of the thousand mosques, are mixed into a multi-faceted landscape of sound. But this is about to change. The government wants one centre muezzin broadcasted at the same time to all national mosques. Will thousands of Egyptian muezzins be brought to silence?

In Radio Muezzin we meet four of the prayer callers about to be made redundant and an engineer able to code radio signals. Onstage a mosque is made of carpets and fans and all five prayer callers are made into main characters in the reconstruction of their lives. Between the words they convey and the video images from their daily lives new voices rise, voices describing the transformation of the prayer calls in the age of technical reproduction. The main characters are individual representatives of a religious culture which, despite its many faces, often is reduced to simple images of the enemy in the Western world. 

Rimini Protokoll was established in 2000 by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel. They have caught international attention for their works often playing out in the colourful landscape between fiction and fact. In the self-made genre expert theatre the scientific expertise is not what is sought, but ordinary people’s knowledge about own daily lives. With the theatre's means of expression Rimini Protokoll brings unusual perspectives of our reality to light.