IDENTITY AND GLOBAL PROSPECTS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE. THE THEATRE RESEARCH OF RIMINI PROTOKOLL
Lecture at EASTAP First Conference Décentrer notre vision sur l’Europe: l’émergence de nouvelles formes – Paris, 25-27 October 2018
What remains of life? What is the meaning of death? How to relate to memory and oblivion? These are the basic questions raised by Nachlass–pièces sans personnes, the performance conceived by Stefan Kaegi and Dominic Huber, created by Rimini Protokoll and produced by the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in 2016.
To start with my brief reflection, I chose this work by one of the most interesting theatrical research groups in Europe in relation to the perspective of this conference, both on the thematic level and the technical-expressive level. I take it as emblematic. For those who have not seen Nachlass (the term is a German word meaning legacy), I will briefly describe the structure, which is as follows.
In the auditorium of the theatre there are eight very small rooms, built out of elegant, plain, light-coloured wood. The rooms converge around an elliptical space under a ceiling that represents the world. Eight time-recorders at the top of the rooms direct the entrances and exits of the small groups (only fifty people in all). The itinerary lasts ninety minutes. Everything proceeds slowly, fluently, with increasing concentration.
In each of the rooms, you meet the legacy of the person the room is dedicated to. They are people who were chosen by the company during preparation for the performance out of a number of respondents. For various reasons, these people felt close to death and wished to anticipate it, agreeing to be involved in the process devised by the authors: to address an audience in the future by speaking to those who are still alive.
Each room accommodates around a dozen spectators. After visiting each room, the spectators reconverge on a central space, like a waiting room. In each room you can feel the presence-absence of the dead person through recorded voices, objects, recorded images: a woollen pullover, photos, pieces of furniture, tools, scientific instruments associated with their everyday lives. The people are: an ambassadress of the European Union in Africa, a secretary whose dreams have been destroyed by multiple sclerosis, a retired Turkish trader who was a migrant in Switzerland, an engineer base jumper, the former director of the Neurosciences Department of Lausanne, who was an expert on brain degeneracy, a retired watchmaker with a passion for photography, a young father and a fly fisherman affected by an incurable disease, an old and very close couple who remember the ideology that caused the World War II with distress and disappointment: they did not immediately recognise the brutality of this ideology and so failed to oppose it. The group is made up of very different characters, but above all they represent different outlooks that make up the mosaic that Western culture and European philosophical reflection have created through the centuries in the attempt to solve what it sees as humanity’s ‘problem’: death. The problem arose after culture had acquired the idea of the human being as individual-subjectivity-person. This is, as we know, the result of the classical-Christian-Renaissance-Enlightenment synthesis.
Death, which in the natural world marks the rhythm of life without breaking the continuity of the species, becomes a problem in human existence bound up with the destiny of the person as an individual. Humanity does not generally accept death as a natural event, but views it as a source of anguish, for which the history of thought has for centuries sought the reasons and the meaning outside the natural order. Western thought and European culture have been particularly insistent in exploring this theme, as we see in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Greek Platonic philosophy, Christianity and Existentialism, in which the being-for-death of man ‘thrown’ into the world is what makes existence free and authentic.
This is opposed to the materialist tradition, which does not abolish the problem, the disquiet, the fear of death. This tradition runs from Democritus to Epicurus, Lucretius and a certain strand of modern scientific thought (represented here by the scientist who studies neuroscience). Seen in this perspective, man’s death has the same value as the death of any finite being; death is the disintegration of the compound, it is the break-up of a biological form. Death therefore falls within the laws of nature. It is nothing, because when we are, death is not, and when death is we are not. This eliminates the problem and destroys the aura of mystery that surrounds it by placing it outside the history of thought and the spirit. This outlooks sees the problem of death as a problem wrongly posed by Western culture.
The fact is that one can have no experience of one’s own death, but can only witness the deaths of others and struggle against it by constructing memory, enhancing one’s own being-with (mit-sein) through traces, through the legacy of affections, knowledge , institutions, artefacts and examples to imitate. This is one of the core problems, a knot certainly not yet loosed in European culture as it confronts the global world and enriches both through exchanges.
It should not be reduced to a theoretical or private issue, but considered as a foundation from which the anthropological and historical project starts. So this is one of the ‘visions’ of Europe by which it is primarily possible to come to a reckoning between cultures. This, and not any colonial idea, I believe (in the performance by Protokoll that I am dealing with here) is the concept embodied in the presence of an ‘expert’ who represents a different culture: the elderly Turkish Muslim Celal Tayip, who has lived in Switzerland for fifty-four years and plans to be buried according to tradition in his own land.
Europe offers the world the legacy of its answers, which are provisional yet very serious and mature. Europe is, first of all, an idea, built through the centuries, and a melting pot of traditions. Europe corresponds primarily to its mobile and inclusive culture, its identity. Since it is in progress, it still travels together with peoples, books, artists and actors, after having travelled for a long time also through wars.
The value distilled from this performance-meditation is both being-with and looking ahead in a perspective that does not reject its roots in tradition. In this, the technical-expressive aspect of Nachlass is very significant and confirms that form and content in art are closely interdependent and that the emergence of a new technique can clarify and accelerate the consciousness of a value. Because European integration and European culture, open to a global horizon, are first of all a question of knowledge and understanding.
The great theme is embodied in a form of theatre that tends in many respects to be homologous to the theme itself: the theatre that, according to Kantor’s lesson has to do with death, a threshold between presence and absence, between the ephemeral and the enduring. But in Protokoll’s approach it is a theatre that aims above all at being-with, something more than the simple technical problem of reception. A deeper communicative and community impulse. Here I am not trying to assess when and where the expression of this attempt is most successful.
But how is it done?
By actively involving different kinds of public, in small groups, so as not to disperse and weaken the intensity of the performance. In this way they are driven out of their passivity; the audience members are induced to look at each other, to acknowledge each other, to establish some relationship beyond the usual one of sitting next to each other. They are induced to share the same experience with a different rhythm and a moderate range of choice.
It is a meditation on a thorny issue that has a personal resonance, as well as a historical and even civil significance (there is an open allusion to the possibility of deciding one’s own death in Switzerland, and the problems arising from it), and one that opens out the gaze to take in a universal horizon. People-bodies are called on to overcome their embarrassment and discover each other. Old and new solutions are entwined, adapted to the times and modern languages capable of transforming the past and relating it to the present.
One is a form of ritual processional theatre (reminiscent of mediaeval and Renaissance theatre) revised in a secular way, through technological devices and a stage installation suggestive of modern art. The procession is a great ancient archetype (think of the mediaeval and Renaissance theatre and dramaturgy), which has been taken up again today by artists involved not only in the renewal of forms, but above all in a civic, political and anthropological commitment. Think in this respect of William Kentridge and his fascinating and moving Shadow Procession or Atlas Procession, which have been seen around the world. I thought of him when, in Nachlass, I saw on the ceiling the bright planisphere with dots that suddenly appear and pass away. The mode of the procession moves from vision to experience, from distance to immersion. Other sources are the forms of the open letter, the journalistic inquiry, the documentary and the message posted on the web. All with the eternal power of suggestion of the human voice.
From the reception level, we move on to the dramaturgical construction of the performance. Real people are involved in a theatre that, according to the now macro-tendency of performative theatre (to use Josette Féral’s term) is closer to presence than representation, to the truth of testimony than the mimesis of a character, yet it does not exclude probing the depths of symbolism peculiar to art and the harmony of form. And in Nachlass there are moments of poetry.
On the level then of the genres, it is a kind of theatre that, in keeping with the strand of modernity, ignores distinctions and entwines tragic with comic, cynicism with sadism and piety, comprehension with provocation. There is no lack of humour, lucidly used as revelation, perhaps drawing on Beckett. These ‘experts’ are confronted with their own infatuation or illusion: they want to endure at all costs. Is it narcissism, human arrogance, or a handclasp between generations in constructing human values? Is it an alarm or an invitation from European culture that is travelling around the world?
A similar line of research and a similar working method can be found in their earlier works. I will mention, among those I have seen and analysed, Bodenprobe Kazachstan (2011) and Remote X, in its Italian variant Remote Milan (2014).
Bodenprobe Kazachstan’s innovative focus is on those who act rather than those who receive. The performance begins. Five ‘experts’ speak in their own persons, telling us about themselves. They are the true protagonists of the stories. They were chosen in a preliminary phase of the creation of the performance for their articulacy, the exemplary nature of their stories and the scope for interweaving them. They are the ‘samples’ of humanity, like the soil samples (‘Bodenprobe’) taken from the ground in drilling for oil and alluded to in the title of the work. Just as test drilling reveals the hidden oil, so the characters reveal that the profound significance of their shared experience is migration. They reveal it to themselves and the audience gathered in the theatre, sharing a route of excitement and knowledge that goes far beyond the documentation of a problem in a given historical-political period, in a specific geographic area. These ‘experts’ express themselves in German, in Russian, in Kazakh. They express themselves in monologues, in pseudo-dialogues, in denotative language with a simple, paratactic structure. Gerd is a petroleum engineer in eastern Germany, Heinrich is a truck driver, Lena is a pleasant young woman born in the middle of the Kazakhstan steppe, Nurlan is an energetic young consultant, Helene, finally, is a self-assured, restless girl from Tajikistan, neighbouring on wealthy Kazakhstan and far less fortunate.
The lives of the experts/characters converge indirectly only because for some reason they are all connected with Kazakhstan (Gerd is an oil driller, Heinrich an oil transporter, Lena and Nurlan were born there and Helene sees it as a rich and more fortunate neighbour of her homeland). In various ways they are all related to Germany, as their homeland or a place they have returned to as ethnic Germans or Germans by adoption. The formal convergence reveals the substantial analogy of a condition and a destiny.
The combination of story, song, video and all the codes of stage writing are the perceptual analogue of the process of reworking memory and imagination, which records not just by photographing facts, but facts closely bound up with emotions, feelings, judgments, decisions, insights. In this way they construct an identity organised around steady fulcrums of subjective consciousness and also a sign of clear and incisive significance: almost a distant echo of the Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. Other elements are the sounds of voices and instruments and the myth of petroleum, which overwhelms everything else. ‘Life’ is brought to the stage, but within the enclosure of the stage and art, it automatically reveals a significance that goes beyond the surface of what is presented. Migrating in time and space is the human condition: it emerges as problem and conflict when myopia, selfishness, violence and humanity’s thirst for power intervene. Migrating is a theme that the philosophical, anthropological and religious culture of the European West has explored extensively and linked to the theme of time (I see it as one of Stefan Kaegi’s leitmotifs).
He accompanies the ‘experts’ of life but not of theatre, taken from real life, and helps them make a journey of reflection and knowledge. The journey grows with profound sadness to comprise the history of the generations, of traditions, of Germany and Eurasia, and becomes a philosophy of life. It unites the life of humanity and the life-forms of geological eras before humanity existed. They are alluded to in the title, ‘Bodenprobe’, which means core drilling in the search for oil: petroleum as a myth that overwhelms everything else and a symbol of the subterranean undercurrents of our age, like the underground veins through which it flows.
What makes Rimini Protokoll’s research particularly interesting is the group’s ability to entwine a historical and philosophical problem that is rooted in a place and a culture by relating it with extreme flexibility and adaptability to all latitudes. Here it is the movement of migrating in space and time. The performance can theoretically go anywhere in the world by changing the ‘experts’ and their stories.
We walk continuously. Ours is an eternal migration while standing still, as indicated by the technical solution of the performers, who tell their stories while walking on a treadmill. One is analogous to the other, but this analogy does not guarantee understanding and solidarity between people. Yet on the plane of civic commitment and its meaning for the younger generations, here it seems to convey a constructive and combative message. We can avoid being taken in by appearances and falling into the same trap.
The focus, by contrast, is again on the audience in Remote X , which I saw in the version Remote Milan. The performance contemplates the rigidity of a structure of thought with the flexibility of an experience adaptable to the involvement of different audiences around the world.
Fifty performers (the audience itself) are isolated from each other by the headphones they wear, in which the voice of the navigator speaks, guiding them, giving them with peremptory instructions and treating them as a horde as they move through the places of the city. These places are a cemetery, a car park, a railway station, a futuristic business centre, an ancient city gate, a church, a hospital, and a terrace on the void. This tourist excursion or reportage or pilgrimage is configured as a ‘test-tube experiment’ of the relationship between modern man and the artificial, with the apparently innocuous and captivating manipulation of a device that recalls Michel Foucault’s prophecy. But it is also configured as the experience of a live art in which the artist guides the opening of a line of thought. It is a reflection on the idea of the city, where the performers are guided to see what they normally see and do not see, to feel it as a story written in stone, a living form, a place of effective communication of forms of associated life, not a ‘non-place’ (to use Marc Augé’s term), but an ‘oeuvre’, a dynamic community, active citizenship. It is also the coexistence of different layers and times, the materialization of eternal questions unresolved in time .
What is left of life, what is memory? The circle closes on the question with which we began in this brief paper.
In conclusion.
Rimini Protokoll’s quest is the search for live theatre as an artform suitable for the new times.
Technically it adheres to the new sensibility and perceptual modality. Produced by a collective, its work holds to a flexible idea of authorship. The artists are responsible for devising, selecting and editing the whole work, but the scoring of a performance is devised in close collaboration with the performers or ‘experts’. Its development is not dramatic but narrative, being produced by a combination of all the dramatic codes, treated as equivalent and functioning synaesthetically. They embody a constant dialectic between presence and representation, between reality and symbol. The public are involved in various ways, themselves becoming performers. The media interface with the live presence without distorting it, but strengthening, revealing or problematizing it.
Thematically, the performance responds to the need for live art, less subject to the conditioning of the culture industry, together with the need to contribute to raising awareness by both diagnosis and by raising the alarm about the urgencies of modernity, although inscribed in man’s eternal problems.