Rimini Protokoll (DE/CH)

A Rimini Protokoll [Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel] production.

What is Europe really? A geographical border, a cultural identity, a coalition of states? It is often said that Europe is too theoretical an idea for individuals to talk about from their own experience. Rimini Protokoll contrasts this abstract idea of Europe with the individuality and intimacy of a private flat. 15 people take part in a living room performance, a sort of guided role play, which interweaves personal stories and political mechanisms of Europe in an attempt to answer the question: how much Europe is in all of us?

 

 

Each show takes place in a different house, travelling through hundreds of flats all over Europe, building a network that extends from door to door across the continent rather than starting from a centre.

The elements and images collected during the visits will be shared, anonymously, online at www.homevisiteurope.org, thus implementing a constantly developing European archive.

 

In collaboration with STANZE

c/o private houses in the city of Milan
The exact address will be communicated by sms the day before the beginning of the show.

30 September h. 20.00 + 1 October 2017 h. 17.00
then every Wednesday and Thursday from 4 to 26 October 2017 h. 20.00

30 settembre: ZONA ISOLA esaurita
1 ottobre: ZONA CENTRALE
4 ottobre: ZONA BOVISA esaurita
5 ottobre: ZONA NAVIGLI esaurita
11 ottobre: ZONA DERGANO esaurita
12 ottobre: ZONA P.TA ROMANA esaurita
18 ottobre: ZONA GARIBALDI esaurita
19 ottobre: ZONA CENTRALE esaurita
25 ottobre: ZONA GARIBALDI esaurita
26 ottobre: in via di definizione esaurita

 

 

Conception, text, direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel Dramaturgy: Katja Hagedorn Interaction Design: Claes Schwennen, Mirko Dietrich, Hans Leser, Grit Schuster Assistant Interaction Design: Philipp Arnold Set Design: Lena Mody, Belle Santos Assistant Set Design: Ran Chai Bar-zvi Production: Juliane Männel, Anna Florin Technical Direction: Sven Nichterlein Web Design: Tawan Arun + Ralph Gowers (Programming) Artistic Collaboration Tour Milano: Anton Rose, Claes Schwennen Web Editing: Anton Rose Photo credits: © Rimini Protokoll / Illustration: María José Aquila, © Pigi Psimenou, © Expanderfilms, © Pigi Psimenou, © Expander films
For Milan: readaptation text Valentina Kastlunger, masters of ceremony Andrea Panigatti and Enrico Pittaluga (Generazione Disagio), technical support Alice Marinoni, Silvia Orlandi

Home Visit Europe is a production of Rimini Apparat. In coproduction with Archa Theatre Prague (CZ). BIT Teatergarasjen/Bergen International Festival (NO). Frascati Teater Amsterdam (NL). HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (D). Kaaitheater Brussels (BE). LIFT London (GB). Malta Festival Poznan (PL). Mungo Park (DK). Sort/Hvid (DK). Teater Nordkraft (DK). Théâtre de la Commune Aubervilliers (FR). Théâtre Garonne (FR). Teatro Maria Matos (PT). A House on Fire commission / co-production with the support of the Cultural Program of the European Union. The project is supported by Capital Culture Fund Berlin.

 

 

Rimini Protokoll is today perhaps the most awarded artistic collective in Europe and a fundamental point of reference for all avant-garde theatre. Its members, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, came together in 2000 to form a collective of writer-directors. Since 2002, all their works – plays, radio plays, films and installations – have been signed Rimini-Protokoll. The focus of their research is the development of the expressive means of theatre to provoke new looks at reality. Each work draws on real life and uses elements and people from concrete situations and specific places. Thus Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel proclaim a general assembly of Daimler-Benz a play and, in doing so, transform it into one; they realise the 100% City project by bringing 100 real citizens onto the stage as a statistical sample to represent, among others, cities such as Berlin, Zurich, London, Melbourne, Copenhagen or San Diego. Or they go on tour with a group of Nigerian-European businessmen for the Lagos Business Angels project and with the paraplegic MC Hallwachs for the play Qualitätskontrolle (Haug / Wetzel) or create soundtracks for the most diverse cities in the world with the REMOTE X project (Kaegi). In April 2008 they won the European Theatre Prize in Thessaloniki in the category “New Realities”, and in 2011 the entire work of Rimini-Protokoll was awarded the Silver Lion at the 41. Venice Theatre Biennale.

Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott (IT/UK)

Documentary, winner of the prestigious 2016 Civis Media Award, awarded by the President of Germany for Best European Information.

A plane, in the midst of severe turbulence, tries to land in various European capitals but no airport gives permission. The old continent fell into total chaos. On board the plane, an elderly passenger tells an unsuspecting girl about a failed Europe.

Fiction, reality or premonition?

 

The documentary film directed by filmmaker, journalist and director of the Wake Up Foundation Annalisa Piras and produced by Bill Emmott (former editor of the Economist and President of The London Library and the Wake Up Foundation) shows a dystopian future in which the European Union no longer exists. Everything is portrayed in a lucid and straightforward way, from the rise of nationalism to seven years of economic crisis and growing dissatisfaction with democracy.

The stories told by five citizens from five EU countries make the whole thing true.

In English with Italian subtitles 

Christophe Meierhans (CH/BE)

Some use for your broken clay pots is a performance that involves the audience in a collective debate lasting about two hours, around an imaginary democratic system that the performer tries to “sell” to his audience as a better alternative to our current democratic regimes.

The script of the performance is a real constitutional book imagined for a democratic state, made available to the audience during the performance. This constitution and the democratic institutions it prescribes were developed and written in close collaboration with a team of jurists from several Belgian universities.

It is a work of ‘constitutional fantasy’ that includes all the organs, procedures, assemblies, rules and regulations necessary to define a complete democratic system that is, in theory, functional. It was developed with the intention of producing something as different as possible from our current regulations, to discuss what democracy represents using a possible logic of defence from the public, through a method that is as rational and strong as possible.

 

 

Some use for your broken clay pots is thus an exercise in constitutional creativity. Challenging the ability to imagine an alternative to our current (universally understood) political system, artist and spectators together confront the limits of our understanding of democracy, experimenting with an amusing, surreal and highly topical idea of participatory performance.

 

In Italian

 

Conceived, directed and with: Christophe Meierhans Dramaturgy: Bart Capelle in collaboration with: Rudi Laermans Advising team: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux(ULB), Rudi Laermans(KU),Jean-Benoît Pilet(ULB),Dave Sinardet(VUB) Constitutional jurist: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux Scenography: Sofie Durnez Conception & graphic design publication: The Theatre of Operations Illustration: Nuno Pinto Da Cruz Co-production: Kaaitheater(Brussels), Workspace Brussels, Vooruit Arts Centre (Ghent), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) Production: Mokum / Hiros with the support of: de Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie & Government of Flanders Production Italian version: ON (Bologna) with the participation of Festival di Santarcangelo (2015)

 

 

Christophe Meierhans (Geneva; Brussels) works with and through performance, public space, installation, sound, music and video. His work mainly consists of developing strategies of intervention in everyday life, through the manipulation of accepted conventions, social habits or simple customs. Fragments of reality become the framework for artistic operations that redirect banality in order to make it reappear from unexpected angles. His work raises questions about norms and conventions, confusing a random context with different ones, and confronting the viewer with something else, with the strangeness of being in the “wrong” place, or the possibility that the place may become something different. In 2015, he presented the project Some use for your broken clay pots at Santarcangelo.

 

FOCUS DEMOCRACY

In 1988, Gorbachev saw in the Great European House, founded on democratic values even before economic values, the idea and the direction to be followed for the construction of a great European continent.

Thirty years later, the great expectations seem to have imploded and the new ‘great sickness’ is increasingly the victim of populist attacks.

How many ‘exits’ await us? Is this then the result of democracy?

There are those who say that voting no longer leads to anything, that power now lies elsewhere, in the upper echelons of the economic powers. There are those who believe, instead, that it is still possible to make a difference. Demographic and sociological analyses show that the categories most at risk (the poor, the unemployed, the elderly) are the most distant from the ballot box, and that the spread of democracy is leading to an ever-widening economic gap in society.

So where does democracy lie? In complex bureaucratic institutions with no direct relationship with the citizens, but who nonetheless adorn themselves with the name of representatives of the people, or in the voice of new nationalist and revanchist barkers with no vision of the future?

“Tocqueville said: “To go forward, one must learn to look far. We want to try to look far ahead, with the disruptive force that only the artistic imagination can have. We want to seek affinities, accept changes, broaden our view by testing alternatives that are more or less possible in view of the future, not only the immediate future, but also the more distant future.

 

 

The events:

17 – 18 March 2017 h. 20.30
SOME USE FOR YOUR BROKEN CLAY POTS
Christophe Meierhans (CH/BE)
[performance]

17 – 30 March 2017 h. 10.00 – 19.00 (Mon – Fri)
Poster(s) from pro-EU/anti-Brexit campaing!
Wolfgang Tillmans
[photo exhibition]

19 March 2017 h. 18.30
LA POLITICA E’ REALE?
[incontro con aperitivo ]

19 March 2017 h. 20.30
NO55 ASH AND MONEY di NO99 (EE)
[film]

from 23 March every Thursday until 15 June 2017 h. 20.30
EUROPA A DOMICILIO/HOME VISIT EUROPE
di Rimini Protokoll (DE/CH)
[theatrical board game for 15 spectators c/o private houses]
In collaboration with STANZE .

29 – 30 March 2017 h. 20.30
INTIME FREMDE di Welcome Project (DE)
[show]

 

 

Eventi KIDS

19 March 2017 h. 11.00
THE MOVIE BAND La democrazia si fa musica
organised by ZONA K with Francesca Badalini and Monica Galassi
[workshop 4 – 7 years]

26 March 2017 at 17.00
EUROPA A DOMICILIO/HOME VISIT EUROPE
by Rimini Protokoll (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel) (DE/CH)
[theatrical board game for 15 people – 11<14 years + adults c/o private houses]
In collaboration with STANZE