Bitef

THE AUTHORS Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, both alumni of the Gießen institute for applied theatre studies have teamed up for work in 1995. Ever since they have attracted a lot of attention in completely different constellations and as interventionists in public space as well as with stage plays and radio drama. Their performers being mostly what they call "experts of everyday life" set up as readymade actors impersonating their own biographies in theatrical coherences. No images or artworks are to be staged but reality itself - an approach that strikes us as simple and consequent. In 2002 they founded their label "Rimini Protokoll" together with Stefan Kaegi and Bernd Ernst which in no timeachieved recognition by alternative drafts to common stage presentation and its strong leaning towards drama. Shooting Bourbaki by Haug / Wetzel for instance, won the 2002 prize of the NRW-Impulse festival and the Rimini Protokoll productions of Deadline (Haug / Kaegi/Wetzel) and Wallenstein (Haug / Wetzel) have been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen even though there was no play, nor were actors found on stage. The projects merely footed on journalistic research, discussions with people which delivered the text to be staged by the artists of Rimini Protokoll. That designed the form "Expert Theatre" a "renaissance and newly defined version of documentary theatre" (Süddeutsche Zeitung) because the sources of all texts will be seen on stage themselves and the text is not presented by professional actors. Nor do the "experts" try to act but merely present themselves as they are never having been on stage before but having gotten their training on the stages that life provided for them. In the Rimini Protokoll production of Deadline (Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg a. o.) five experts for middle-European ways of deaths appeared on stage, in Bruxelles seven of the bereaved by the bankruptcy declared by Belgian airline Sabena were presented in sabenation and that play has been staged in theatres all over Europe ever since, at the Burgtheater in Vienna a play about diplomacy with people from diplomat's backgrounds (Schwarzenbergplatz, 2004) could be seen; at the Schauspielhaus Zürch Blaiberg und Sweethearts was created, a production in which people with a heart implant and people who search the Internet

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