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Rimini Protokoll's Reality Theatre and Intercultural Encounter: Towards an Ethical Art of Partial Proximity

Since their establishment as a directorial cluster at the beginning of the millennium, Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll have garnered world-wide recognition for their Theatre of Experts. This documentary practice is an innovative form of Reality Theatre, a mode of theatre performance that has been prevalent since the early 1990s and which exists across diverse historical and emergent genres, including: autobiographical, community, documentary and verbatim theatre. The mode is characterized by: an interest in extending public understanding of contemporary individuals and society; a focus on representing and/or putting living people on stage; and an aesthetics of ‘authenticity effects’, artistic strategies designed to generate (and then, in some cases, destabilize) an impression of close contact with social reality and ‘real’ people. A distinguishing feature of Rimini Protokoll’s theatre is the way it both generates a sense of immediate contact with living people and truthful representations of their lives – especially through centralizing the narratives, bodies, and places of non-actors or so-called ‘everyday expert’ performers – while simultaneously destabilizing that impression through overt fictionality and theatricality. Rimini Protokoll’s integration of experts of the everyday can be related to the marked interest of all three directors – Germany’s Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, and Stefan Kaegi from Switzerland – in engaging with people and phenomena from the contemporary world that do not often feature within the realm of professional theatre and/or are insufficiently known within the public realm. To date, a significant portion of that interest has been devoted to: firstly, strangers to the stage, people who do not usually perform their everyday activities and labour within a theatre context; and secondly, C T R D O C U M E N T