Stefan Kaegi

Rimini Protokoll represents a new wave of documentary theatre, never using actors, but people who in one way or another are professionals in the world outside theatre, what Rimini Protokoll calls "the experts of everyday lives".

"Rimini Protokoll brings real life to the stage 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", the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau has written.

One of the projects of the company, Call Cutta, was based on outsourcing of work to low-cost countries. A group of telemarketers was moved to India. The audience was provided with individual mobile phones and guided through Kreuzberg in Berlin while being told the story of Subbash Chandra Bose, a leading character in the Indian liberation movement during World War II and a legend in contemporary India.

In 2006 Rimini Protokoll went out of its way to stage Das Kapital. Erster Band (Volume One). by Karl Marx. The performers were a selection of people who had read and lived with one of the most influential books of world history. Rimini Protokoll was introduced to the Norwegian audience when visiting BIT Teatergarasjen with Shooting Bourbaki in 2002. This was a production about 14 year olds and guns.

"Rimini Protokoll is one of the most exciting companies in German contemporary theatre", the Norwegian theatre critic Therese Bjørneboe declared, after the company had received the major European theatre award New Theatrical Realities in 2008.

Source:

BIT Teatergarasjen, autumn program 2011. 26.09.2011:

http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/408