Stefan Kaegi
Collective innovation
Swiss Grand Award for Theatre / Hans Reinhart Ring 2015
Stefan Kaegi was born in Solothurn in 1972. He studied art at the F&F School of Art and Design in Zurich and applied theatre studies in Giessen, where he met Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel. The trio have formed a team of authors and directors since 2000, working in various combinations: frequently all three together, often Haug and Wetzel as a duo, Stefan Kaegi regularly on his own. Kaegi had established the Hygiene heute label with Bernd Ernst back in 1998, with the aim of bringing everyday readymades to the theatre. Since 2002, all their works have been produced under the label of the German-Swiss theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, which has had its headquarters and production office at the Theater Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin since 2003. The magazine Theater der Zeit has described them as the “protagonists and founders of a new reality trend on the stage” which has exerted a strong influence on the young theatre scene.
For the Theater der Welt festival in 2002, Ernst/Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel teamed up with 200 citizens of Bonn to replicate an entire session of the German Parliament live under the title “Deutschland 2”. Permission for the happening was refused by the Parliament’s then President Wolfgang Thierse citing the “dignity of the house”, sparking a debate about artistic freedom, the relationship between politics and art, and the boundaries of drama and reality. Rimini Protokoll now also produce their theatre pieces, radio dramas, films and installations at established institutions and festivals around the world. Stefan Kaegi’s model railway world “Mnemopark”, which was created at the Theater Basel in 2005, was shown as a live, 1:87-scale film set in over 30 cities from Tokyo to Montreal, while in his 2013 work “Remote X”, a horde of people in each city set out on a virtual treasure hunt. The collective staged “Deadline” (2004), “Wallenstein – A documentary production” (2006) and “Situation Rooms” (2014) at the Berliner Theatertreffen and have received numerous awards, including the German DER FAUST special prize for theatre in 2007 and a European Theatre Award in the “New Theatre Realities” category in Thessaloniki in 2008. In 2011 the work of Rimini Protokoll was honoured with the Silver Lion at the 41st International Theatre Festival in Venice, while in 2013 the multiplayer video installation “Situation Rooms” received the Excellence award at the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival.
Stefan Kaegi
Collective innovation
Swiss Grand Award for Theatre / Hans Reinhart Ring 2015
Stefan Kaegi was born in Solothurn in 1972. He studied art at the F&F School of Art and Design in Zurich and applied theatre studies in Giessen, where he met Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel. The trio have formed a team of authors and directors since 2000, working in various combinations: frequently all three together, often Haug and Wetzel as a duo, Stefan Kaegi regularly on his own. Kaegi had established the Hygiene heute label with Bernd Ernst back in 1998, with the aim of bringing everyday readymades to the theatre. Since 2002, all their works have been produced under the label of the German-Swiss theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, which has had its headquarters and production office at the Theater Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin since 2003. The magazine Theater der Zeit has described them as the “protagonists and founders of a new reality trend on the stage” which has exerted a strong influence on the young theatre scene.
For the Theater der Welt festival in 2002, Ernst/Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel teamed up with 200 citizens of Bonn to replicate an entire session of the German Parliament live under the title “Deutschland 2”. Permission for the happening was refused by the Parliament’s then President Wolfgang Thierse citing the “dignity of the house”, sparking a debate about artistic freedom, the relationship between politics and art, and the boundaries of drama and reality. Rimini Protokoll now also produce their theatre pieces, radio dramas, films and installations at established institutions and festivals around the world. Stefan Kaegi’s model railway world “Mnemopark”, which was created at the Theater Basel in 2005, was shown as a live, 1:87-scale film set in over 30 cities from Tokyo to Montreal, while in his 2013 work “Remote X”, a horde of people in each city set out on a virtual treasure hunt. The collective staged “Deadline” (2004), “Wallenstein – A documentary production” (2006) and “Situation Rooms” (2014) at the Berliner Theatertreffen and have received numerous awards, including the German DER FAUST special prize for theatre in 2007 and a European Theatre Award in the “New Theatre Realities” category in Thessaloniki in 2008. In 2011 the work of Rimini Protokoll was honoured with the Silver Lion at the 41st International Theatre Festival in Venice, while in 2013 the multiplayer video installation “Situation Rooms” received the Excellence award at the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival.
On the stage and in the urban environment, Rimini Protokoll have developed a theatre whose central figures are not laypeople but experts in the everyday. Their work focuses on expanding the resources of theatre to open up unconventional perspectives on our reality. Rehearsals are preceded by exhaustive research, casting and conception processes that account for much of the activity. When preparing “Deadline”, for example, they gathered statistics on reasons for and places of death, the experiences of friends and family, and information about the organisation of funerals. On stage were a mayor, a stonemason, a funeral orator and a medical student who, rather than referring to reality, actually came from it. Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel have turned an annual shareholders’ meeting of the Daimler car company into a theatrical performance, and staged “100% City” with a hundred statistically representative citizens in Berlin, Zurich, London, Melbourne, Copenhagen and San Diego. In Berlin and Dresden they developed Stasi radio dramas in which participants could listen to surveillance reports on Android phones as they walked around. Milo Rau, the winner of the Swiss Theatre Award 2014, summed up the credo of Rimini Protokoll in the NZZ back in 2004: “The best art is reality itself: copied, recompiled, reflected in itself, presented to the viewer for appraisal.”
“The theatrical works of Stefan Kaegi and Rimini Protokoll have baffled and expanded horizons from the outset. In the everyday dramas they discovered for the theatre, experts suddenly transported to the stage reported on the systems and structures of everyday life. This was not only enlightening and entertaining in a novel way; it was also a challenge for everyone who writes about and analyses the theatre. Countless articles, lectures, diploma and master theses, dissertations and several books later, Rimini Protokoll are still busily engaged in revolutionising our understanding of contemporary theatre as a way of communicating with the world.
Rimini Protokoll is a label which allows three artists as much structure as is necessary and as much freedom as is possible. These are neither isolated geniuses nor an indivisible collective: the form of their collaboration itself points the way to the theatre of tomorrow. They have already staged their projects on every continent and, almost in passing, influenced a generation of theatre-makers. Their language, their method and their curiosity are always specific and, at the same time, universal. The Swiss Grand Award for Theatre / Hans Reinhart Ring 2015 therefore goes to a global theatre.”
Anja Dirks, jury member
