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pitié!, Les Ballets C de la B, choreography and direction by Alain Platel. Photo: Chris Van der Burght. Courtesy Tanzquartier Wien.

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Call Cutta in a Box, a performance by Rimini Protokoll, Goethe-Institut New York, January 27–March 7, 2009.

A few months ago, needing confirmation of an Amazon.com order, I sat in front of my computer, slightly confused, waiting for my cell phone to ring. I had just entered my phone number into their website—“We’ll call you. Right now. Really.”—and sure enough, in less than a minute, I was speaking to a call center operator in India. Just two or three minutes later, we sorted out the situation, and my order of boxed Indian food (ironically enough) was on its way. In an increasingly “connected” world, we are by no means unaccustomed to Internet-enabled communication, whether through computers, or cell phones, or some mixture of the two. That’s why, when I entered a room alone at the Goethe-Institut New York, sat down on a couch, and waited for a cell phone sitting on a table to ring, I did not feel that anything was out of the ordinary. But instead of speaking briefly with an anonymous Indian call center operator about a purchase, I had a genial one hour conversation with Subhaditya Das of Descon Limited in Kolkata. I was participating in the “intercontinental phone play” Call Cutta in a Box, created by German theatre provocateurs Rimini Protokoll.

In 2002, after years of working together, Daniel Wetzel, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi—all graduates of the Giessen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies—founded Rimini Protokoll in order to better publicize and raise funds for their theatrical creations, which include city tours and radio plays, along with more traditional theatre productions. Fellow Giessen graduates include founding members of the performance groups She She Pop, Showcase Beat Le Mot, and the Gob Squad, along with auteur playwright and director René Pollesch. Like Rimini Protokoll, these groups strive to shatter the conventions of the major state-funded institutions of Europe (which produce new and classical plays in proscenium theatres), combining the shards they find useful with aspects of visual arts, film, the Internet, and “everyday reality” (the quotidian existences we lead outside of the theatre).1 Pollesch’s virtuosic actors, for example, [End Page 46] scream in a language built on quotations from sociological studies, pro- and anti-capitalist tracts, and pop-culture references. These young artists—like the similar American groups Radiohole and Nature Theater of Oklahoma—belong to a generation raised on cable television and the beginnings of the Internet, and show a deep interest in exploring the interplay of performance and reality, and semiotics. Old enough to remember the Berlin Wall, but young enough to have come of age after its fall, these groups chronicle the effects of capitalism in a post–Cold War world.

Working together as directors, dramaturgs, and adaptors, in a threesome and just as often in pairs or by themselves, Wetzel, Haug, and Kaegi frequently create productions starring “experts”—people who may have real-life “expertise” as soldiers or elderly nursing-home patients (they are experts on their own biographies), but have no experience as performers. Rimini Protokoll generates the content for their productions from their experts’ lives and stories—antecedents to which can be found in documentary theatre, influentially pioneered by German directors Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s and 30s (In Europe, Piscator developed the first so-called “Living Newspapers”). In Wallenstein (2005) for example, people recount their biographies (Vietnam veteran, smalltown mayor), which Rimini Protokoll connects to the characters and events of Friedrich Schiller’s 1799 dramatic trilogy based on the Thirty Years’ War.

Alongside radio plays and productions like Wallenstein, which despite its unconventional form still delineates stage and audience, Rimini Protokoll has created live events that either expand the standard definition of theatre as at least one performer and one spectator, or break it entirely. In Deutschland 2 (2002), 237 citizens of Bonn recreated a debate in the German parliament as the debate was happening inside the...

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