Bodenprobe Kasachstan

When oil and gas meet hindrances on the way towards the surface, it can move miles away in different directions. This is what the geologists call migration. In the 20th Century people migrated just like oil and gas, shipped between continents just like barrels of oil.

Bodenprobe Kazakhstan follows the journey of oil, through a group of people who are all connected to oil through their life stories. They are migrants. The stories coordinated onstage follow the pipeline from Germany back to Kazakhstan, where the people come from, a country ranged just beneath Russia in a list of the oil reserves of the world.

The trace of oil is followed by a retired German-Russian tank driver who long believed that his grandfather was a SS officer of high rank, but who, as kind of a reversed Lars von Trier, discovers that the grandfather was rather the opposite: A Jewish rocket researcher, later deported to the Soviet Union. It is followed by an Eastern German engineer who has drilled for oil in Kazakhstan, Iraq and Texas (USA); by a young Kazak who deals with mineral oil and sun cell panels in Germany and who knows most of what there is to know about make quick money online; by a woman who lives in Hannover, but grew up in Baikonur, the place where Gagarin was shot into space, and where the Russians held weekly, subterranean test detonations of nuclear weapons; and of a beautician and bank worker, raised in Dushanbe during the Tajik civil war, but now a dancer at Coyote Ugly Saloons in Germany, while dreaming of becoming an actress.

By bringing these five performers back to their home country, Bodenprobe Kazakhstan delivers an intellectually stimulation, emotional sweep through the 20th Century's history, world politics, resource war and economy. The result is a diverse snippet of reality, a tribute to the Kazak steppes in Russian and German, a non-moralising drama about people's lives, oil and power.

Rimini Protokoll represents a new wave of documentary theatre, never with actors, but with people who one way or the other are professionals in the world outside of theatre, what the company refers to as ' experts of everyday-life'.

Rimini Protokoll was introduced to the Norwegian audiences when BIT Teatergarasjen did show Shooting Bourbaki in 2002. Shooting Bourbaki is about 14 year olds and their relationship to shooting weapons. The company received the award New Theatrical Realities in 2008.

Source:

BIT Teatergarasjen, spring program 2012. 19.01.2012: http://bit-teatergarasjen.no/sesongprogram/stefan-kaegi-rimini-protokoll-tyskland-bodenprobe-kasachstan/

Andrew Haydon, The Guardian:

"Bodenprobe Kasachstan is the best Rimini Protokoll show I've seen yet".