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Rimini Protokoll's Reality Theatre and

Intercultural Encounter: Towards an Ethical

Art of Partial ProximityMeg MumfordPublished online: 27 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Meg Mumford (2013) Rimini Protokoll's Reality Theatre and Intercultural Encounter:Towards an Ethical Art of Partial Proximity, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23:2, 153-165, DOI:10.1080/10486801.2013.777057

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2013.777057

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Rimini Protokoll’s Reality Theatre andIntercultural Encounter: Towards an Ethical Artof Partial Proximity1

Meg Mumford

Since their establishment as a directorial cluster atthe beginning of the millennium, Berlin-basedRimini Protokoll have garnered world-widerecognition for their Theatre of Experts. Thisdocumentary practice is an innovative form ofReality Theatre, a mode of theatre performancethat has been prevalent since the early 1990s andwhich exists across diverse historical and emergentgenres, including: autobiographical, community,documentary and verbatim theatre.2 The mode ischaracterized by: an interest in extending public

understanding of contemporary individuals andsociety; a focus on representing and/or puttingliving people on stage; and an aesthetics of ‘authen-ticity effects’, artistic strategies designed to generate(and then, in some cases, destabilize) an impressionof close contact with social reality and ‘real’ peo-ple.3 A distinguishing feature of Rimini Protokoll’stheatre is the way it both generates a sense ofimmediate contact with living people and truthfulrepresentations of their lives – especially throughcentralizing the narratives, bodies, and places ofnon-actors or so-called ‘everyday expert’ performers –while simultaneously destabilizing that impressionthrough overt fictionality and theatricality.

Rimini Protokoll’s integration of experts of theeveryday can be related to the marked interest of allthree directors – Germany’s Helgard Haug andDaniel Wetzel, and Stefan Kaegi from Switzerland –in engaging with people and phenomena from thecontemporary world that do not often featurewithin the realm of professional theatre and/or areinsufficiently known within the public realm. Todate, a significant portion of that interest has beendevoted to: firstly, strangers to the stage, peoplewho do not usually perform their everyday activitiesand labour within a theatre context; and secondly,

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1. I would like to thank Rimini Protokoll, in particular HelgardHaug and Sebastian Brünger for their dialogue with me aboutMr. Da!açar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash. I would alsolike to thank the experts and all other participants present atthe Mr. Da!açar rehearsal at the Podewil, 6 October 2010, forallowing me to observe their creative work. Thanks also toHeidrun Schlegel for her assistance with DVD materials andimage copyright.

2. The term ‘Reality Theatre’ has been applied in both reviewsand academic discourse to a recent strand of German avant-garde work. See, for example, Tara Forrest, ‘Mobilizing thePublic Sphere: Schlingensief’s Reality Theatre’, ContemporaryTheatre Review, 18.1 (February 2008), 90–98; Peter M.Boenisch, ‘Other People Live: Rimini Protokoll and TheirTheatre of Experts’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18.1(February 2008), 107–13. The term has also been used todesignate ethnographic drama and performance. See JohnnySaldaña, Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre(Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman Altamira, 2005). In our currentjoint research project on the subject, Ulrike Garde and I use‘Reality Theatre’ as an umbrella term to denote a mode ofperformance that exists across multiple genres, including theaforementioned avant-garde and ethnographic forms.

3. Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller, ‘Authentisch/Authentizität’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der ästhetischenGrundbegriffe, ed. by Karlheinz Barck and others (Stuttgart:Metzler, 2005), pp. 40–65.

Contemporary Theatre Review, 2013Vol. 23, No. 2, 153–165, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2013.777057

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people who are perceived by the participants in thetheatre event as cultural strangers – as different,foreign or insufficiently known, due to their occu-pational, class and ethnic background. With regardto this second type of stranger, the company hasparticularly foregrounded migratory subjects whohave moved, or continue to move their places ofwork and living within and across countries. RiminiProtokoll’s nomads have included: long-distancetruck drivers, immigrant workers, diplomats, call-centre employees, cross-cultural adoptees, thirdculture children or airport kids, and members offorcibly re-settled communities.4 As a result oftheir interest in these subjects, Rimini Protokollproductions often generate intercultural encounters– particularly between people from different occu-pational and ethnic cultures, and between peoplewho are themselves polycultural: that is, complexfluid identities who travel between, or combinecomponents from, multiple cultures in their every-day life. The desire to work with these subjects inturn contributes to the company’s own status as aprivileged form of global nomad, one that moveswithin and across national borders in search ofthinking bodies, stories, images and performanceplaces.

Both of the productions addressed in this article,Mr. Da!açar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash(2010–) directed by Haug and Wetzel, andKaegi’s Cargo Sofia-X: A Bulgarian Truck-Ridethrough European Cities (2006–08), demonstratesome of the key ways Rimini Protokoll negotiateencounters with subjects who manifest the intercul-tural condition of our globalized world. Theselected case studies are also well-documentedworks by different directorial teams that utilizedivergent staging strategies – Mr. Da!açar was cre-ated for an end-on theatre configuration and CargoSofia-X is a mobile site-specific work. Consequentlythey lend themselves to a study of RiminiProtokoll’s varied artistic approaches to intercul-tural encounter. In addition, both productions fore-ground subjects who have experienced socialexclusion, and illuminate how Rimini Protokolladdress the way encounters with these subjects areinformed by histories of determination and

accompanying regimes of difference.5 The case stu-dies therefore provide rich sources of informationfor my investigations into: firstly, the way the com-pany creates and destabilizes a sense of proximity tocultural strangers; and secondly, the way theirapproach to proximity encourages theatre partici-pants to unfix oppressive – and experience fresh –ways of engaging with such strangers.

These investigations are informed by aspects ofthe feminist cultural studies framework offered bySara Ahmed in her book Strange Encounters:Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (2000). Myobservation of intercultural encounters in bothcase studies has been influenced by Ahmed’s pro-position that:

An ethical communication is about a certainway of holding proximity and distancetogether: one gets close enough to others tobe touched by that which cannot be simplygot across. In such an encounter, ‘one’ doesnot stay in place, or one does not stay safely ata distance. […] It is through getting closer,rather than remaining at a distance, that theimpossibility of pure proximity can be put towork, or made to work.6

Ahmed’s consideration of how contemporary wes-tern subjects encounter others they configure asstrangers has also contributed to my developmentof the following lines of inquiry: how do RiminiProtokoll’s theatre-making teams enter relations ofproximity with culturally unfamiliar subjects, and dothese relations problematically assert the agency andempowered nature of the company? What sort ofspectatorial encounters with marginalized culturalstrangers does the company facilitate? How and towhat end does Rimini Protokoll negotiate differ-ence and distance between culturally diversepeople?

Rimini Protokoll’s Passion forEncountering the Unfamiliar

In his 2007 analysis of Rimini Protokoll’s approachto dramaturgy, Florian Malzacher includes a com-ment by Haug that clarifies the centrality of thegroup’s interest in das Fremde (relevant translations

4. Relevant projects include: Soil Sample Kazakhstan (2011), Mr.Da!açar and the Golden Tectonics of Trash (2010), Cargo Asia:A Truck Ride through Japan, Singapore, Shanghai (2009),Vùng biên gió’i (2009), Black Tie (2008), Airport Kids (2008),Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play (2008),Cargo Sofia-X: A Bulgarian Truck Ride through EuropeanCities (2006), Call Cutta: Mobile Phone Theatre (2005), andSchwarzenbergplatz (2004).

5. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others inPostcoloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 13.

6. Ibid., p. 157. Henceforth page references to Ahmed’s text willbe incorporated in parentheses in the body of the article.

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include: ‘the foreign’, ‘the unknown’, ‘the differ-ent’, ‘the strange’) and in the maintenance of theirprotagonists’ Fremdheit (‘foreignness’, ‘strange-ness’). The first published English-language transla-tion of Haug’s comment reads as follows (I haveinserted some of the original German terms inbrackets):

The work really starts from detachment, froman interest in strangers [am Fremden]: doingsomething with a Conservative politician or apoliceman. During the production comes amoment of complicity, which is very impor-tant. This complicity is possible because youcan clearly tell people that the reason they arehere is their otherness [das Fremde]. Theysimultaneously search to legitimise themselveson stage, and [the legitimation] lies withinthe fact that they can maintain this otherness[Fremdheit] and not make everything right.7

This translation communicates Haug’s understand-ing that the company’s approach to encounters ischaracterized by a focus on preserving an elementof the experts’ difference, their difference both fromactors and from the directorial team. What neitherthe translation nor the original fully convey is theway Haug often uses the term das Fremde to referto unfamiliar and unknown phenomena, to fluidentities that can be transformed into somethingmore familiar.

Before elaborating further on Haug’s non-fetishistic usage it is necessary to compare it withwhat Ahmed terms ‘stranger fetishism’. Ahmeddescribes such fetishism as involving the creationof a figure of the other that does not belong to agiven space (such as the nation, community, body,etc.) and hence must be either welcomed in orexpelled (pp. 21–22). Drawing on Marxist dis-course, she explains that this figure, which appearsto have linguistic and corporeal integrity, concealsthe material relations and social differentiations thatbrought it into being. Stranger fetishism alsoinvolves the consequent perception that such fig-ures have a nature, are something that simply is (pp.

4–5). An example she uses to exemplify her point isthe stranger within Neighbourhood Watch dis-course, positioned as a loitering individual whoseseeming lack of purpose, and existence outsidelegitimate exchanges of capital, conceals the pur-pose of crime. This loiterer is a fetishistic figurebecause, for example, it conceals and is cut offfrom its histories of determination. In one readingthese histories include the social differentiationbetween the dominant (white, middle-class) man,marked out as the good citizen who protects vul-nerable neighbours, and the marginalized (black,working-class) men (p. 31). Why I contend thatRimini Protokoll are interested in a non-fetishisticapproach is because they both present the stranger-experts in their work as transformable and porousentities capable of becoming better known, andbecause they address some of these strangers’ his-tories of determination.

Haug makes more apparent the group’s interestin a non-fetishistic approach to das Fremde whenelaborating on her use of the term in an interviewwith Ulrike Garde. There she explains that dasFremde

also refers to neighbours or institutions fromyour own country that you want to learnabout. I wouldn’t at all say that it [dasFremde] always has to be something that liesoutside my own reach, but rather something Ihaven’t previously opened up.8

In the same interview she also stresses thatEntdeckerfreude (‘passion for discovery’) is a keystarting point for the company, and that:

One of the things that drives me, or also mycolleagues in our theatre work, [...] is to openup something new – that is, to gain access toa country, a society, to a way of thinking, to away of living.9

Critics such as Katrin Bettina Müller have askedwhether Rimini Protokoll’s invitation to explorean unfamiliar life simply provides compensation fora lack of personal experience, especially for theeducated elite.10 When Mueller’s perspective wasraised with Haug by Garde, who also asked what

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7. Helgard Haug in Florian Malzacher, ‘Dramaturgies of Careand Insecurity: The Story of Rimini Protokoll’, in Experts of theEveryday: The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll, ed. by MiriamDreysse and Florian Malzacher, trans. by Daniel BelascoRogers and others (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008), pp. 14–45 (p. 33). See also Florian Malzacher, ‘Dramaturgien derFürsorge und der Verunsicherung: Die Geschichte von RiminiProtokoll’, in Experten des Alltags: Das Theater von RiminiProtokoll, ed. by Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher(Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2007), pp. 14–45 (p. 33).

8. Helgard Haug, unpublished interview with Ulrike Garde,Berlin, Hebbel am Ufer Theater, 18 September 2010. Unlessotherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

9. Ibid.10. Katrin Bettina Müller, ‘Durch ein fremdes Leben’, Die

Tageszeitung, 2 January 2008, <http://www.taz.de/!10326/> [accessed 5 February 2012].

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Rimini Protokoll hoped to achieve through givingthemselves and their audiences access to the unfa-miliar, Haug referred to two potential impacts ofthe work: firstly, the experience of getting to knowsomething for oneself, and doing so through per-sonally looking, rather than say, via a medium suchas the internet; and secondly, the achievement ofnew perspectives through the input of outsiderswho have a certain distance from the people andsituation being explored.

In an interview in September 2010, Haug andWetzel both presented encounter as central to theirwork, which they described as a form of getting toknow people and making observations.11 This form,akin to much documentary performance, sharesaims and methods in common with a sociallyengaged ethnography, one willing to encounterphenomena frequently excluded from the publicrealm. In Mr. Da!açar the social engagement isevident in the presentation of trash collectors work-ing in Istanbul, all of whom experience marginali-zation by state and municipal authorities. In aninterview in 2006, at a time when Kaegi was work-ing with Bulgarian truck drivers on Cargo Sofia-X, ashow about the economic and personal realities ofgoods transportation, he presented curiosity andwonder rather than engagement as the motor ofhis art. Nevertheless, he expressed an interest inredressing the middle-European treatment ofEastern European truckers as an acoustic and eco-logical burden, through initiating what he felt hadbeen a neglected process of dialogue.12

Across their body of work thus far RiminiProtokoll have opened up encounters with theunfamiliar authorities of their own nation – aChristian Democratic Union (CDU) politician andpolice officers from Munich, for example – as well aswith what Ahmed terms ‘stranger strangers’ – thoseothers differentiated as unassimilable by the self,community, and/or the nation (p. 97). In the casestudies analysed in this article, many types of expertsmake an appearance. However, in keeping with theaforementioned lines of inquiry, this article focuseson the issues raised by the presentation of people

who have experienced being treated as the figure tobe fully or partially expelled.

Encounters with Stranger Strangers

In Mr. Da!açar and the Golden Tectonics of Trashthe stage is populated by six experts, the majority ofwhom inform spectators about their experiences ofgeological and economic instability within Turkeyand its largest city. The protagonists include threeKurdish men from an East Anatolian village – theeponymous Abdullah Da!açar (referred to on-stageas Apo), as well as his friends, relatives and collea-gues Aziz "dikurt, and Mithat "çten – and one manfrom southern Turkey of Greek Gypsy heritage,Bayram Renklihava. All of these men moved toIstanbul for financial and family reasons, establish-ing themselves as unofficial trash collectors (seeImage 1). Their experiences are set alongsidethose of Turkish Hasan Hüseyin Karaba!, aKaragöz-Puppetteer who provides his own workand earthquake stories as well as using his puppetsto help illuminate the trash collectors’ narratives. Asixth performer is Pınar Ba#o!lu, a multilingualTurkish directorial assistant who comes out fromthe audience onto the stage to help translate impro-vised dialogue. During the show spectators learnthat the collectors – or as Bayram insists, ‘recyclers’– have been regarded by government authorities asvisual pollution.13 In addition the Kurdish menbelong to an ethnic group that has experienced along history of conflict with the Turkish state that atdifferent points in living memory instituted mea-sures such as the banning of Kurdish language andthe enforcement of re-settlement.

In keeping with its attention to the representationof marginalized strangers, this article foregroundsencounters involving the recyclers. However, its dis-cussion attends more to my own and the directorialteam’s experiences of encounter with these experts,rather than to theirs with Rimini Protokoll. This isbecause, while the rehearsal in Berlin and perfor-mance in Essen that I attended14 did offer insightsinto the recyclers’ experiences of such encounter, dueto linguistic boundaries and temporal constraints, aswell as the production’s focus on the experts’ workand family life, my access to these experiences was

11. Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel in interview with Ralf-CarlLanghals, ‘Inszenierung von Wirklichkeit’, morgenweb, 11September 2010, <http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/web-site/de/article_4797.html> [accessed 16 November 2010].

12. Stefan Kaegi, interview with Nina Peters, ‘Keine Heilanstalt,sondern Museum: Stefan Kaegi über das Theater alsKommunikationsraum, seine Arbeit mit Spezialisten und dasGefühl der Scham’, Theater der Zeit, 1 October2006, <http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/arti-cle_2077.html> [accessed 23 November 2010].

13. English-language version of Mr. Da!açar and the GoldenTectonics of Trash script, December 2010, p. 15.

14. Rimini Protokoll, Mr. Da!açar, rehearsal, Podewil, Berlin, 6October, 2010; and Mr. Da!açar, performance, PACTZollverein, Essen, 27 November 2010.

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comparatively limited. By contrast, through an inter-view with Helgard Haug and an informal conversa-tion with dramaturg Sebastian Brünger I gainedbetter access to the intercultural encounter experi-ences of the directorial team.15

The ‘stranger strangers’ in Cargo Sofia-X are alsothe main protagonists, two Bulgarian truck driverswhose performance task is to take approximatelyforty-five spectators – seated in the cargo sectionof an adapted lorry – on a guided tour through theirwork lives as well as the cargo handling sites withinthe host city. The three truckers who participated asperformers in this project were Ventzislav Borissov(Vento), Svetoslav Michev and NedyalkoNedyalkov. As the drivers’ narratives make clear,their long work hours (much of which is spentqueuing at borders) and shockingly low pay, make

it impossible for them to interact with many aspectsof the countries and cultures they pass through.They tell us that shopping in many WesternEuropean countries is beyond their means, as iseating at McDonald’s or staying in hotels. Insteadthey live in and around the cabin where they bothstore food and sleep.16 In each city that CargoSofia-X was presented, these experts were joinedby a new and small group of people who gavecameo appearances that illuminated their workroles in fields such as haulage and highway patrol.Just like the drivers, the piece crossed many bordersduring its two-year season, touring to something inthe vicinity of twenty-five European cities.17 After

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Image 1 Trash recycling experts: Bayram Renklihava, Mithat "çten, Abdullah Da!açar, Aziz "dikurt (seated at the front ofthe cart-cum-bus). Photo courtesy of Rimini Protokoll.

15. Helgard Haug, unpublished Skype interview with author, 30November 2010; Sebastien Brünger, informal conversationwith author, 6 October 2010.

16. Sara Brady, ‘Cargo Sofia: A Bulgarian Truck Ride throughDublin’, TDR: The Drama Review, 51.4 (Winter 2007),162–67 (p. 166).

17. Stefan Kaegi, interview with Deepa Punjani, Mumbai TheatreGuide.com <http://www.mumbaitheatreguide.com/dra-mas/interviews/13_interview_stefan_kaegi.asp> [accessed 5February 2012].

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two years of touring in Europe, Cargo Sofia-X wasadapted for an Asian context, resulting in a newseries of pieces titled Cargo Asia: A Truck Ridethrough Japan, Singapore, Shanghai. My access tothe various theatre participants’ experiences ofintercultural encounter in the European versionhas been made possible predominantly throughreviews and commentary, as well as documentaryand television footage of the Basel and Essen per-formances which feature Vento and Svetoslav(2006).

The following analysis of Rimini Protokoll’s artis-tic approach to intercultural encounter across twoproductions deals sequentially with three aspectsthat illuminate some of their most distinctive stra-tegies. These are the treatment of: authority andauthorship in the case of text production; of obser-ver and observed roles and relations; and of socialantagonism and cultural difference.

Questioning the Politics ofEthnographic Text Production

In the case of Mr. Da!açar, the directors’ approachto ethnographic textual activities, such as translationand turning life stories into relatively fixed texts, wasmarked by a desire to acknowledge how these textscan dispossess the unfamiliar subjects they are con-nected with. Ahmed points out that translationentails a ‘re-terming of the foreign such that theforeign becomes the familiar’ and produces a‘knowledge which creates the stranger in the famil-ial in order then to destroy it’ (p. 58). What

distinguishes the ethnographer, VincentCrapanzano notes, is his or her task of producingrather than simply translating texts, as well as theparadoxical goal of rendering the foreign familialwhile preserving its foreignness.18 For Ahmed,such textual procedures demonstrate how knowl-edge creates and destroys the stranger (p. 59).

In their productions Rimini Protokoll incorporatemany forms of text, including: translations; statisticaland factual information; autobiographical state-ments; stories co-produced with the experts; andwhat the company referred to in the Mr. Da!açarscript by the capitalized term ‘META’, written andspoken commentary on the making of the work,especially the relation between Rimini Protokolland the experts. Text in the form of spoken,recorded, projected and sung words is a dominantdramaturgical and audio-visual feature of their pro-ductions. One discussion of text during the rehearsalin Berlin that particularly caused me to ponder thepolitics of ethnographic translation concerned a sen-tence that was ultimately delivered by the epon-ymous Kurdish protagonist in the final episode.The German translation of Apo’s comment inTurkish, which was projected on a surtitle screen inthe rehearsal space, read as follows: ‘Wenn jemandkommt und dein Leben aufschreibt, ist es als hättestdu vergessen was du gelebt hast’19 (‘When someonecomes and writes your life down, it’s as if you hadforgotten what you have lived’). At the rehearsal Aposeemed to express uncertainty, at least according tothe translation of his comments provided for RiminiProtokoll, about whether the text accurately repre-sented what he once actually said, and whether heeven wanted to continue to say it.

In her review of an Istanbul performance, SaraHeppekausen singled out this sentence for atten-tion, connecting it with a feeling of discomfort thatremained with her after the show. By the time shesaw the production, the line read differently and asfollows: ‘Wenn jemand dein Leben in einen Textumwandelt, fühlt es sich nicht mehr wie deins an’20

(‘When somebody transforms your life into a script,it feels like it is not yours any more’).21 Both

Image 2 Truck driver experts: Ventzislav Borissov andNedyalko Nedyalkov in Cargo Sofia-Berlin, March 2007.Photo courtesy of Rimini Protokoll.

18. Vincent Crapanzano, ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking ofSubversion in Ethnographic Description’, in WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by JamesClifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley & Los Angeles:California University Press, 1986), pp. 51–76, (pp. 51–2).

19. Mr. Da!açar, Rehearsal Notes, Podewil, Berlin, 6 October2010.

20. Sara Heppekausen, ‘900 Kilo Plastik als Monatsmiete’,nachtkritik, 16 October 2010, <http://www.rimini-proto-koll.de/website/de/article_4837.html> [accessed 2December 2010].

21. Mr. Da!açar, English-language script, p. 23.

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versions of the line present (auto)biographical textas, on the one hand, creative – it can preserve atrace of the past or reconfigure a life – and on theother hand, as a way of dispossessing and potentiallymisrepresenting the one who utters it. That RiminiProtokoll decided to maintain a line of this sortsuggests an interest not only in foregroundingApo’s thoughtfulness, but also in acknowledgingtheir ambivalence about the politics of turninglives into documents. In a recent email exchangethat considered, amongst other issues, this ambiva-lent line, Haug pointed out to me that after asuccessful tour of the show in France, Apo madethe comment, ‘I prefer performing my life morethan living it’, a statement that demonstrates astrong awareness of the pleasure creative reconfi-guration of a life can bring.22

Dispersing and Revealing the Artist-Ethnographer’s Authority

Through their approach to the authorship of textRimini Protokoll display a desire to disperse theirauthority as the knowing artist-ethnographer, andto make knowing a shared enterprise. However,through strategies such as the incorporation of ameta-text that reflects on the way RiminiProtokoll’s Entdeckerfreude affects the trash collec-tors’ lives, they also acknowledge that this dispersaldoes not overcome the power relations that main-tain the ethnographer’s privilege. The company’sscripts contain many texts they have co-authoredwith the experts, sometimes in a manner close toghost writing.23 These texts have much in commonwith recent ethnographic writing which, accordingto Sally McBeth, seeks to ‘legitimise the expertise ofthe members of the culture being investigated’ andto move from the pursuit of ethnographic objectiv-ity to an ‘informed intersubjectivity’ predicated onlistening and collaboration.24 Ahmed contends thatwhen reflexive ethnography presents the nativeinformant as an equal co-author, it conceals ‘the

relations of force and authorisation embedded inthe desire to know (more) about strangers’ (p. 63).

Such concealment in the context of a theatreproduction could include a failure to signpostwhat aspects of the forms of text and staging areproduced by the theatre practitioners rather thanauthorized by the ones who are known. As I discussin more depth below, rather than failing to signpostauthorship, Rimini Protokoll often generate uncer-tainty about who has created what, a strategy thatdraws attention to (if not resolving) the powerrelations involved in theatre production.Concealment in the theatre could also take theform of failure to divulge the social and materialprivilege that allows the performance makers tohave proximity to the experts. In Mr. Da!açar,however, some of the relations of force and inequityare indeed foregrounded through, for example,statements outlining the show’s impact on the recy-clers and the Kurds’ depot (i.e. the collective ofworkers who are housed together and their lod-gings). Both the destructive and creative nature ofthat impact is acknowledged. For example, themeta-text used in the Essen performance informsthe spectator that through the theatre job, Bayram,head of his own unauthorized waste business, hasearned enough money for his wife to do an Englishclass and become a hotel receptionist instead of acleaner. However, as Rimini Protokoll feared, theremoval of the Kurdish recyclers from their workplace did lead to the dissolution of their collective,with most of their colleagues moving to anotherdepot.25 Through their management of textRimini Protokoll display their interest in replacingcentralized authority, and what Wetzel has referredto as Hilfsimperialismus26 (‘imperialistic help’),with a democratic and mutually empowering socialexchange. Simultaneously they acknowledge howthat attempt is jeopardized through the privilegedEntdeckerfreude that first set it in motion.

Challenging the Dominant Subjects’Observer Position

Another method Rimini Protokoll use in their bidfor egalitarian encounter is a play with the positions

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22. Helgard Haug, email correspondence with the author, 8 and10 February 2012.

23. Tan Wälchli, ‘Jäger und Sammler: Theatertreffen Berlin,Festival Avignon: Stefan Kaegi und “Rimini Protokoll” spie-len dieses Jahr in der Champions League des Theaters’,Wochenzeitung, 24 August 2006, <http://www.rimini-pro-tokoll.de/website/de/article_1168.html> [accessed 22November 2010].

24. Sally McBeth, ‘Myths of Objectivity and the CollaborativeProcess in Life History Research’, in When They Read WhatWe Write: The Politics of Ethnography, ed. by C. B. Brettell(Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), pp. 145–46.

25. Mr. Da!açar English-language script, p. 23.26. Christine Wahl, ‘Stochern im schwarzen Loch: Hau 3 Miriam

Yung Min Stein wagt in Black Tie einen mikroskopischenBlick aufs eigene Leben’, Der Tagesspiegel, 27 November2008, <http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/arti-cle_3889.html> [accessed 23 November 2010].

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of observer and observed. Through this play theyquestioningly highlight, displace or re-place theresearcher-artist and spectators’ positions as theones who look and know. Situations are createdwhere spectators are made aware of their voyeurism,where they and the theatre practitioners becomethe ones observed, and experts become expertobservers.

In Cargo Sofia-X Kaegi’s arrangement of spatialrelations helps him to establish myriad performancespaces and viewing relations. Inside the containersection of the converted freight truck there is rakedseating for the spectators, who face an expansivewindow. In the early stages the audience experiencea black box space: the window is covered on theinside by projector screens, and the two mikeddrivers stand in front of the screens and before thespectators, introducing themselves and the journey.Later there are moments when the screens are liftedand something like a proscenium arch emerges. Theaudience in their darkened space are able to lookvoyeuristically through the framing window27 at:highway and haulage sites, the workers who makecameo appearances, and the truck drivers when theyget out of the cabin to make an outdoor presenta-tion to their paying spectators, or to chat to unsus-pecting fellow drivers. At the same time, uninitiatedoutsiders in the ‘real’ world stare quizzically back atthe strange framing window. According to audiencemember Amanda Rogers, who experienced a per-formance of Cargo Asian in Singapore that beganin daylight and ended in the night, the outsiders’ability to view the contents and inhabitants of theadapted truck varied depending on the quality oflight involved.28 When the screen is rolled downand documentary footage is screened about theBulgarian freight company Somat, the wheeling-dealing of its German owner Willi Betz, the drivers’lives on the road, and our ‘journey’ from Sofiathrough Europe to the host city, the theatre turnsinto the cinema. When live footage of the drivers inthe cabin is screened, the cinema becomes the tele-vision. And all the while there is a digital peephole,

a camera through which the drivers are able to lookback at the spectators.

Through Kaegi’s deployment of communicationtechnology, space and lighting it appears that thespectators were moved through various viewing andencounter positions. Reviewers’ comments demon-strate that some spectators experienced a sense ofthe following positions: that of voyeur and consu-mer, and that of the exotic others and cargo that areto be consumed. One of the effects it seems Kaegi’sdeployments achieve, is to create an associationbetween, on the one hand, the spectators’ desireto know unfamiliar others and their (goods andimage) consumption practices, and on the otherhand, the exploitation of the labouring bodies ofstrangers.

In Mr. Da!açar the dominant subject’s exclusiverights to the knowing observer position is chal-lenged through a re-placement of this positionelsewhere. The re-placement occurs when thetrash collectors are presented as capable observersof the directorial team’s viewing activities. Thishappens when it is they who utter those parts ofthe META text that articulate the thoughts andattitudes of the theatre practitioners. In her inter-view with me, Haug explained that while it wouldhave been appropriate for one member of thedirectorial team to appear on stage and deliverthese segments, this option was logistically impos-sible.29 During the rehearsal I attended, this textwas spoken by Pınar, the directorial assistant. Afterthe Essen performances Haug explained that asPınar did not feel comfortable in this stage role,Rimini Protokoll had then suggested the collectorsthemselves could present the directors’ thoughts,using the third person plural to refer to the theatremakers.30 Haug also expressed her satisfaction withthis creation of a ‘Blick von Außen’ (‘view fromoutside’).31 A distance and difference betweenRimini Protokoll and the men was also presentedat content level. For example, the meta-textreferred to ‘their’ uncertainty about the impacton the men of journeying to Berlin for a week’srehearsal, about whether the men would get pass-ports and visas, and to ‘their’ fear that someonewould vanish in Germany.

In rehearsal this meta-text, spoken by Pınar,seemed an act of self-reflexion created by RiminiProtokoll. One of the sentences in the German-language translation of Pınar’s text, which was pro-jected on a screen during the rehearsal, was clearly

27. Jörg Järmann, ‘Ein gerüttelt Mass LKW-Theater: StefanKaegi hat ein neues Doku-Fiktions-Theater geschaffen:Cargo Sofia-Basel’, Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, 2 June2006, <http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/pro-ject_108.html#article_1484.html/de/article_1484.html> [accessed 5 February 2012].

28. This comment was made by Amanda Rogers when sheattended a guest lecture on Rimini Protokoll that I gave:‘Rimini Protokoll’s Fascination with the Unfamiliar: StagingReal People as a Mode of Intercultural Encounter’,Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway,University of London, 6 December 2010.

29. Haug, Skype interview with author.30. Ibid.31. Mr. Da!açar Rehearsal Notes.

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marked by the directors’ German cultural heritage:Das letzte Rädchen der türkischer Gesellschaft auf dieBühne rollen – was ist das für eine Geste?32 (‘To rollthe last small wheel of Turkish society onto thestage – what sort of gesture is that?’) All partiesdiscussed whether or not this phrase was descriptiveof a socio-economic structure or potentially pejora-tive. Ultimately the line was removed, a decisionHaug attributed to the difficulty of translating thecog-mechanism imagery.33 The disappearance bothof Pınar and of this clear mark of the directors’voices contributed to my initial erroneous beliefthat much of the directorial commentary had beenremoved. It also heightened the uncertainty Iexperienced during the Essen performance aboutexactly who had devised the text segments beinguttered. That uncertainty was first set in motion bywhat I experienced as a tension between, on theone hand, the analytical tone and content – whichmany spectators such as myself would prejudiciallyhave thought the collectors did not have the knowl-edge or educational background to create, and onthe other hand, the men’s delivery of the texts as ifit was indeed they who had authored them. Thanksto this destabilizing tension I found myself neitherto be a knowing observer nor one free from poten-tially oppressive perceptions.

Highlighting Social Antagonism andComplicity in Exclusive Practices

Rimini Protokoll’s play with viewing positions inboth case studies demonstrates their awareness ofand desire to unlock the concealment of socialantagonism. The company seem aware that, asAhmed puts it, encounters are not simply meetingsin the present, but meetings which ‘reopen the priorhistories of encounter that violate and fix others inregimes of difference’. They involve both ‘thedomain of the particular – the face to face of thisencounter – and the general – the framing of theencounter by broader relationships of power andantagonism’ (p. 8; emphasis in original). Duringthe Mr. Da!açar rehearsal I attended, when con-fronting aspects of the meta-text were discussed,such as the sections dealing with the doubts andsuspicions Rimini Protokoll and associates of theexperts initially had about one another – a marketseller had warned Aziz that Germany is the mafia

and you will have your kidneys sold during surgerythere – Daniel Wetzel defended these sections.34

He expressed the belief it was important not tobow down to political correctness and instead toexplore how great the distance initially was betweenthe collectors and Rimini Protokoll. In the inter-view I conducted, Haug also mentioned the impor-tance of presenting material that revealed RiminiProtokoll’s moments of arrogant scepticism towardsthe men. For her such a demonstration not onlyacknowledged a social division, but also the factthat Rimini Protokoll were no better than thosespectators who have similar arrogant thoughts.Here it seems Haug views the meta-text strategyas a way of highlighting, and therefore as a steptowards changing, those shared and ongoing prac-tices that fix unfamiliars in place as the excluded andunassimilable.

In Cargo Sofia-X it is the simultaneous layering ofcontrasting journey experiences and the division ofspace and labour that contribute to the foreground-ing of social antagonism and to the revelation of theaudience’s complicity in exclusive practices. Duringthe production the audience experienced at leastthree journeys: their approximately two-hour citytour with the drivers; a fictional long-haul journeyfrom Sofia to the host city that the drivers create withthe help of video footage and commentary; and thedrivers’ personal narratives of their own ‘real life’journey experiences. The fictional and personal nar-ratives describe journeys that are long, filled withinterminable hours spent waiting in border controlqueues, and undertaken as part of labour that ispoorly paid. As a consequence the drivers experiencea high degree of confinement, social isolation andexclusion. On the road they live for long hours in aconfined space owned by a multinational corpora-tion. In contrast the spectators experience a shortand social ‘pleasure’ ride. The drivers’ maintenanceof service industry roles throughout the performanceand their moments of sustained physical separationfrom the auditorium area, underline the differencebetween their economic situation and that of thepredominantly middle class cargo-consumers. As inMr. Da!açar, the approach to intercultural encoun-ter with marginalized unfamiliars is characterizedboth by the pursuit of democratic and fair exchangeand an acknowledgement of the social antagonismthat makes that same pursuit both necessary andchallenging.

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32. Ibid.33. Haug, Skype interview with author. 34. Mr. Da!açar English-language script, p. 20.

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Highlighting the Ethical Role ofDistance and Doubting the Possibilityof Pure Proximity

Rimini Protokoll’s mode of proximity is also char-acterized by an interest in the contribution distancecan make to an ethical encounter, and by a doubtthat pure proximity is possible. In her discussion ofethnographic modes of proximity, Ahmed asks: ‘Ifwe cannot overcome the relations of force andauthorisation implicated in “knowing” itself, thenis the answer to come to know how not to know?’ (p.72; emphasis in original). Such knowing wouldinvolve, for example: admitting the impossibility ofbeing or being with the unfamiliars; ascertainingand acknowledging what we can and cannotknow; and/or recognizing the unfamiliars as theknowing. In other words, it would involve recog-nizing distance.

While something similar to the third approach ismanifest in the presentation of the experts as know-ing observers, aspects of the other strategies emergein, for example, Rimini Protokoll’s approach tolinguistic competency. The latter is characterizedby an openness to working in environments withpeople who do not share their languages, and whereconsequently it is impossible to achieve verbal ortextual exactitude. In the Mr. Da!açar rehearsalsthe directorial team used English or German tocommunicate with the assistants, who then commu-nicated with the East Anatolian men in Turkish,who in turn spoke amongst themselves in Kurdish.Haug has explained to me that when the Kurdish-German translator responsible for the surtitles pre-sented his script in Istanbul, this text varied signifi-cantly from what the team had been working withduring rehearsals, which may explain the aforemen-tioned differences in Apo’s line about transforminghis life into a script. She also acknowledged that thetranslation process during rehearsal both providedthe directors with much valued time to reflect, andled to losses and misunderstandings on bothsides.35 The company often re-invoke the rehearsalenvironment of linguistic polyphony and partial com-munication during performances through the use oflanguages other than the performer or spectators’mother tongue. For example, Kaegi’s Bulgariantruck drivers speak to their (predominantly)European spectators in English and German, anddirectorial assistant Pınar often provides German-lan-guage spectators with her English-language

paraphrases of the dialogue improvised live inTurkish. While working without linguistic exactitudeis hardly new in the performing arts, especially in fieldssuch as dance and physical theatre, it is noteworthy ina theatre that gives text centrality.

Rimini Protokoll’s willingness to work withapproximate verbal communications can be relatedto their interest in creating a form of dialogueinvolving different and excluded voices. This inter-est and the obstacles that sometimes stand in its wayare exemplified in Rimini Protokoll’s attempt tohave the Kurdish recyclers speak in their first lan-guage. Initially a Kurdish-German translatorattended rehearsals, partly as a recognition andcounter to a long history of banishment ofKurdish from the Turkish stage. However, the dif-ficulties that arose when combining four differentlanguages in the rehearsal space proved too over-whelming. In the end the recyclers spoke predomi-nantly in Turkish, though their Kurdish voiceasserted its presence during an early scene wherethey recall and literally count the steps in their livesthus far, during moments of improvised dialogue,and in an important scene where Apo tells of thenightmare he experienced one evening after areturn from Istanbul to his village.36

Like their acknowledgement of social differenceand the distance it brings between people, RiminiProtokoll’s accommodation of linguistic differencereminds me of a point Ahmed makes when she isanalysing philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ versionof the ethical encounter. According to Ahmed,

his ethics is about finding a better way ofencountering the other which allows theother to live, as that which is beyond ‘my’grasp, and as that which cannot be assimilatedor digested into the ego or into the body of acommunity. (p. 139)

In his work ‘the other’ refers to the weak, poor andmarginal. Ahmed questions his protection of theotherness of the other, arguing, amongst otherthings, that it fixes the other as an alien being thatexists prior to encounter. However, she welcomesthe acknowledgement of ‘a sense of that whichcan’t be grasped in the present’ (p. 148). Otheraspects of the company’s work that to my mindgenerate precisely that sense include their approachto authorship, especially those moments when theywithdraw some of the signposting of their inputs,

35. Haug, Skype interview with author. 36. Ibid.

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which can create uncertainty for the spectator aboutthe nature of the performing subject in front of her.For example, when the recyclers utter the meta-textsections about Rimini Protokoll’s initial attitudetowards them, as a spectator I am not quite surehow the self-reflexive words are connected to thebodies uttering them. As a result I jump from onepossibility to another, thinking: ‘These words com-municate the men’s thoughts. No, they communi-cate the company’s thoughts. Wait on, no, theycommunicate the company’s thoughts as observedby the collectors.’ And so on. My uncertainty notonly illuminates my prejudices about what perspec-tives and wording both parties are capable of pro-ducing, but it makes me aware I cannot fully graspthe person I am together with in this face-to-faceencounter.

The sense of ungraspability is also created inRimini Protokoll’s works through an insistence onshowing the partial nature of their and the audi-ence’s proximity. By partial I mean both incom-plete and biased. In Cargo Sofia-X, for onereviewer of a performance in Basel it was the inser-tion of moments of fiction that drew his attentionto the incomplete nature of his access to the dri-vers’ lives.37 In particular he referred to the appear-ances of the mysterious woman who intermittentlyappeared outside the truck, singing Balkan songs ata microphone in the middle of a traffic round-about, cycling past on a bike with parcels in hercarrier, singing next to a Swiss flag-bearer who hasfallen asleep. For the reviewer, these theatricalinterludes, which spoke to him of desire and yearn-ing, and also mirrored the world of the truckers,made him aware that one can only get a smallinsight into, and not a full knowledge, of what itis like to live in this foreign world. They alsoprompted his recognition that Kaegi’s mode ofoperation was to refuse closure, make offers,show excerpts, stimulate.38 In other words, thatKaegi is an artist of the partial.

In Mr. Da!açar similarly overt moments of arti-fice reminded me that I was looking throughRimini Protokoll’s glasses at the collectors’ world.One vivid moment of artifice occurred during therehearsal and staging of a group folk dance, wherethe three Kurds dance with closely joined bodiesthat create a moving mass. It was the use of con-temporary music technology and gestic prop selec-tion during the dance that made me very aware ofthat mediation. During the rehearsal Wetzel

explained that the music he wanted to try out wasa traditional Kurdish piece that had been reworkedso that there was a focus on the bass part. The menstruggled to move in time to this music and claimedbetter results could be achieved if they could usetheir own traditional music, which they producedafter carrying out a search on a mobile phone.Volume problems made it difficult to use thispiece at that moment. At the end of the dancerehearsal Aziz asked Wetzel not to change ‘ourdance’, and referred to the fact that RiminiProtokoll had already changed many of the thingsthe Kurds regarded as theirs. With a smile, Azizadded that he could change the show with thisdance.

During the performance Aziz was given room toexpress his frustration at the company’s approach tohis culture’s traditions during the episode when heexplains why the Kurds did not want RiminiProtokoll to dismantle their abandoned depot andput it on stage. He states that while his brother whoran the depot was not against the re-placement ofthe depot, the performers felt: ‘We don’t want to beconfused with this kind of work. We want to standin front of you as just human beings with ourtraditions and culture.’39 In the Essen performance,Aziz performed the role of leader, waving a trashcollectors’ glove in his right hand (rather than theplastic bag used in rehearsal), to a soundtrack thatfused old musical forms and new digital technolo-gies. Both the music and the glove, which made mewonder if the leader of this dance form usuallybrandished a piece of material or scarf, spoke tome too of the hands of the directorial team. Theincomplete authenticity of the dance both dispos-sessed the experts and acknowledged that disposses-sion at the same time.

However, the partiality of the dance was alsoconstructive, contributing to the production’s crea-tion of something new and empowering: a portrayalof the trash collectors that challenged an abjectimage of downtrodden eyesores with a counterimage of an energized and creative collective, onethat earned large rounds of applause the night Iattended, both after the dance and at the finale.Even if this dance did not change the entire show,it certainly changed the familiar showing of trashcollectors! In many respects the dance was a hall-mark of the way the production, as reviewer SaraHeppekausen put it, brings out the recycler’s artis-try rather than having them wallow in rubbish.40

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37. Järmann, ‘Ein gerüttelt Mass LKW-Theater’.38. Ibid.

39. Mr. Da!açar, English-language script, p. 22.40. Heppekausen, ‘900 Kilo Plastik als Monatsmiete’.

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Throughout Mr. Da!açar the audience witnessskilled and beautiful work, including: the swift andexpert sorting of recyclable materials, and an acro-batic dancerly interaction with the metal bin carts,involving acrobatic leaps into and out of the binsand choreographed wheeling in cart ballets. Theaudience are also presented with what I and othersfound to be an unexpectedly clean and attractivelandscape, one that again forced me to considermy prejudices: the bodies, clothing, plastic bottles,aluminium cans, and cardboard are not soiled (seeImage 3). In a conversation after the Berlin rehear-sal, dramaturg Sebastien Brünger spoke of the char-ismatic nature of the men. He also mentionedApo’s talent as a folk singer, and the surprisinglywelcoming nature of Apo and his friends towardsmembers of the directorial team during a chanceencounter at night on the streets in Istanbul. AsApo explains during the show, the other collectorsthe theatre makers had approached had run away,being too focused on their work and unused to

someone taking an interest.41 Apo’s description ofthe encounter, through drawing attention to someof Rimini Protokoll’s casting methods, is anotherreminder to the audience that the performanceoffers a partial perspective.

The focus on artistry reminds us too of theimpossibility of pure proximity given the performa-tive nature of both stage and everyday life, given theway we construct, rehearse, and display our actionsand interactions for specific audiences. Throughfeatures such as the display of rehearsed scriptupon surtitle screens, overt choreography andorchestration of props, and the open display ofsound and lighting operators and design, the com-pany and their experts repeatedly remind us theyhave carefully crafted representations of themselvesand each other, in this case for mass display. WhileRimini Protokoll employ modes of proximity that

Image 3 Mr Da!açar and his clean on-stage trash. Photo courtesy of Rimini Protokoll.

41. Mr. Da!açar, English-language script, p. 2.

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do not involve such overt reminders of distance –including moments of performer improvisation,autobiographical statements, and documentary foo-tage of the performers’ everyday contexts – theywork very consciously with the frame of theatre.This frame, as Rimini Protokoll commentatorGerald Siegmund puts it, ‘affords an undeniabledistancing. It turns the trusted into something for-eign: as “real” as something seems, as “real” as itmight sound, it is here closely related to the possi-bility of fiction’.42 As both case studies testify, thiscompany engages with both the distance that comesfrom fiction and the distance that comes fromacknowledging cultural difference.

In conclusion both of the productions analysedhere suggest that Rimini Protokoll practise a modeof proximity that strives to achieve a democratic andmutually empowering social exchange. To this endthey engage in dispersing the dominant subject’sauthority, and troubling the viewing and consump-tion practices that fix marginalized unfamiliars intoa place of exclusion and total knowability.Ethnographic and artistic strategies that facilitatethis engagement include: the exposure of text’sambivalently creative and destructive potential; theinsertion of a meta-text that exposes the relations of

force that inform intercultural encounter; a form ofcollective authorship that challenges centralizedauthority and preserves the ungraspability of theunfamiliars; a spatial and textual play with obser-ver–observed relations; and the layering and juxta-position of fictional and documentary narrativesthat reveal the audience’s complicity in exclusivepractices. Rimini Protokoll’s mode of proximityalso embraces certain forms of distance as usefulfor ethical encounter. These include the distancescreated through: admitting social antagonism andthe impossibility of being or being with unfamiliars;and through acknowledging the partiality of anyinsight into foreign worlds. Rimini Protokoll createssuch distances through, for instance, opening upinexact linguistic communication, withdrawingsignposts of authorship, inserting overt fictions andartifices, creating hybrid expressive forms, andacknowledging casting and choreographic proce-dures. In her discussion of ethical communication,Ahmed calls for a getting closer that yet takes up‘the impossibility of that very gesture, at one andthe same time’ (p. 148). To my mind, RiminiProtokoll’s attempt to get closer, with its respectfor distance, moves some way towards answeringthat call.

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42. Gerald Siegmund, ‘The Art of Memory: Fiction as Seductioninto Reality’, in Experts of the Everyday, ed. by Dreysse andMalzacher, pp. 188–211 (p. 190).

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