Society under Construction · Rimini Apparat – La Villette et Festival Paris l’été –...

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THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNEAV. E.-H. JAQUES-DALCROZE 5

CH-1007 LAUSANNE

STEFAN KAEGI / RIMINI PROTOKOLL Society under Construction

CreationVidy

2STEFAN KAEGI / RIMINI PROTOKOLL SOCIETY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNE

DIRECTION : VINCENT BAUDRILLER

PRODUCTION :DIRECTOR OF ARTISTIC AND INTERNATIONAL PROJECTSCAROLINE [email protected] +41 (0)21 619 45 44

TECHNICS : TECHNICAL DIRECTION CHRISTIAN WILMART / SAMUEL MARCHINA [email protected] +41 (0)21 619 45 16 / 81

PRESS :DIRECTOR OF AUDIENCES AND COMMUNICATION ASTRID LAVANDEROS [email protected] +41 (0)21 619 45 74M +41 (0)79 949 46 93

COMMUNICATION ASSISTANT PAULINE AMEZ-DROZ [email protected] +41 (0)21 619 45 21

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Latest amendment 07.04.20

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SOCIETY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Creation Vidy

Concept / Direction : Stefan Kaegi

Scenography : Dominic Huber

Researches: Viviane Pavillon

Dramaturgy: Imanuel Schipper

Assistant director: Tomas Gonzalez

Sound creation: Stéphane Vecchione

With: Mélanie Baxter-Jones (actress) / Investments Geoffrey Dyson (actor) / Construction law Matias Echanove or Amin Khosravi/ Urban Development Tianyu Gu (actress)/ Migration Laurent Keller or Jérôme Gippet / Human Resources Viviane Pavillon (actress) or Tristan Pannatier / Transparency Alvaro Rojas Nieto / Workforce Mathieu Ziegler (actor) / Entrepreneur

Production : Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne - Rimini Apparat

Coproduction : Rimini Apparat – La Villette et Festival Paris l’été – Bonlieu, Scène nationale Annecy – Malraux, Scène nationale Chambéry Savoie – Fonds de dotation du Quartz (Brest) – Scène nationale d’Albi – Festival de Marseille - Edinburgh International Festival

With the support of: The PEPS project under the framework of the European Programme of Cross-border Coope-ration Interreg France-Switzerland - FVE (Fédération Vaudoise des Entrepreneurs) - Fonda-tion Casino Barrière de Montreux

Based on Gesellschaftsmodell Großbaustelle (Staat 2), a production by Rimini Protokoll and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

With the support of the production, technique, communication and administration teams of Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne


A SOCIETY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

With this immersive show, Stefan Kaegi invites us to consider construction sites as microcosms that contain all of the paradoxes of our contemporary society.

The endless worksite at the Berlin airport, the interminable A3 motorway project in Italy, the squabbles around the future Lyon-Turin tunnel, football stadiums in Qatar, huge cultural complexes in Asia... Today’s massive construction sites suffer from the same issues: late delivery, cost adjustments, and complicated interdependencies or even conflicts of interest between private and public stakeholders. Labourers in precarious employment situations can be found alongside major corruption scandals and individuals increasing their already vast wealth. The interests of real estate capital investors compete against those of city planners in designing collective spaces and transforming cities. In a wider sense, these construction megaprojects reflect how contemporary society operates; there are always multiple parties connected in unseen ways, but their interests often diverge...

Based on information sourced from many fields and from actual documents, Society under Construction invents a kind of playful and symbolic theatre that reveals various points of view and identifies the hidden structures that control construction sites. With the stage transformed into a huge building site, the audience meets the different protagonists and themselves become part of the construction process.

This immersion into the interconnected network of international investors, planners, policymakers, specialists, and workers encourages the audience to question what drives the creation of contemporary public spaces, now that they are only partially controlled by the government and are instead at the centre of contradictory private interests. Is there another way to envisage the transformation of cities – and society ?

ERIC VAUTRIN Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne


IMMERSION IN A CONSTRUCTION SITE

A STAGE TRANSFORMED INTO A CONSTRUCTION SITE

The entire theatre space (stage, seating area, backstage) has been transformed into an immense construction site, with specific areas that intersect with one another: site offices and viewing platforms, a crane and scaffolding, tarpaulins and piles of building materials.

MEETINGS WITH EXPERTS IN THE CONSTRUCTION WORLD

In this space, members of the audience encounter eight “experts” from the construction world : a construction rights lawyer, a worker, an urban planner, an entrepreneur, an expert in worker insects, an investment consultant, a Chinese worker, and a representative from an anti-corruption agency. This group of professionals demonstrates the wide range of sometimes differing perspectives related to constructions sites today.

© Mathilda Olmi/ Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne



GROUPS OF AUDIENCE MEMBERS IN SIMULTANEOUS IMMERSION

The audience is split up into eight groups that move around and cross paths during their visit. Each group meets the eight experts, one after the other. At each station, the audience members not only listen to the expert’s account but take part in an activity that gives them a sense of what the job entails.

Each activity carried out by one group also has repercussions on the other groups: the different stations can all be seen by one another and explanations given by the experts are synchronised. An activity completed by one group at a specific time gives me-aning to another group’s experience with an expert elsewhere on the site. The members of the first group thus become the protagonists in the story told to the second group, who then become the actors for the following group, and so on.


Rehearsal photos, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, March 2020.



THE EIGHT EXPERTS


ENTREPRENEURMathieu Ziegler (actor)

Alfredo Di Mauro is an entrepreneur who was responsible for the design of the smoke extraction system at the long-delayed and controversial Berlin airport construction site. Accused of having installed a faulty and inefficient system, his company finally went bankrupt. The media branded him as an « amateur » who was « responsible for two years’ delay on the site. » In the testimony he gave for this show, Di Mauro presents his version of what happened.

Alfredo Di Mauro himself participated in the German version of the show and in writing his account. He is portrayed by Mathieu Ziegler, an actor from Geneva. Before becoming involved in the artistic world, Ziegler graduated from the EPFL and worked as an electrical engineer.

WORKFORCEAlvaro Rojas-Nieto

Alvaro Rojas-Nieto is a Colombian worker who emigrated to Switzerland seven years ago after having worked in Colombia and Spain. With skills in masonry, plastering, and painting, he could build a whole house on his own. In his account, he shares what it is like to work illegally, the difficulty in being paid because of his status, his experiences in Spain, and his arrival in Switzerland. Despite his years spent in Switzerland, he mainly speaks in Spanish. French is virtually non-existent on construction sites.

As in Rimini Protokoll’s other projects, the protagonists are “experts from everyday life”, who present their personal experiences onstage. In this show, some of these expert roles are portrayed by professional actors, based on research carried out by the creative team.



MIGRATIONTianyu Gu (actress)

In this station, the audience hears the story of a Chinese worker who travelled from his village in the province of Sichuan to the megalopolis of Beijing in the hope of finding work on the construction site of a stadium for the Olympic Games.

The journey is recounted by Tianyu Gu, a young Chinese woman who is in Switzerland studying theatre at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri in Ticino.

URBAN DEVELOPMENTMatias Echanove or Amin Khosravi

Matias Echanove is an urbanologist and founder of Urbz, a planning agency based in Geneva and Mumbai. He promotes a vision of urban transformation that focuses less on an ideal city drafted in a bureau and more on the transformation of an existing locale based on direct communication with its inhabitants.

Co-funder of Urbz, Amin Khosravi is fundamentally interested in the relationships between people and their environments. Amin studied at Manchester Business School where he developed strong interests in strategic design, behavioural change and economic modelling for social impact.

By taking as an example the slums of Dharavi, Mumbai, where they have developed their participatory planning approach, they question the audience on how active they are in the changes occurring in their own cities and environments.



INVESTMENTSMélanie Baxter-Jones (actress)

Gathered around a table, the spectators play the role of high-flying real estate investors participating in MIPIM, an international conference event for property professionals held each year in Cannes. An investment consultant presents several investment opportunities. Each spectator is invited to evaluate the profits and risks, and to establish an investment strategy that will increase their assets.

Mélanie Baxter-Jones, a French-English-Swiss actress, plays the role of the investment consultant leading the meeting. This station was prepared in association with a property developer who regularly attends the MIPIM.

CONSTRUCTION LAWGeoffrey Dyson (actor)

Unexpected obstacles and delays on large construction sites result in significant increased costs. Who is responsible for these ? A lawyer specialising in construction law describes the combat between the public sector and private business in the complex context of a major construction site. He compares this battle to the strategies employed in kenpo, a Japanese martial art that he participates in outside of work. Based on the genuine account of a lawyer specialising in construction law, this role is performed by Geoffrey Dyson, an actor and director.



TRANSPARENCYViviane Pavillon (actress) or Tristan PannatierCorruption is sometimes invisible but is often present in the construction industry, even involving people at the highest political level. Transparency International is an anti-corruption body that worked with the show’s creation team to identify certain illustrative cases, both international and local, that provide examples of recurring problems in the construction industry.

This station is led by actress Viviane Pavillon, who also participated in the project’s documentary research or by Tristan Pannatier, a lawyer and lecturer in environment and construction law, who was also involved in the production of the show..

HUMAN RESOURCESLaurent Keller or Jérôme Gippet

Laurent Keller, a myrmecologist and professor at the University of Lausanne, has been studying ants, how they function, and their social behaviour for over thirty-five years.

Jérôme Gippet is a post-doctoral researcher at UNIL in Laurent Keller’s Ecology and Evolution Laboratory. He specialises in the reaction of ants to urbanisation.

In the show, they present the social organisation of ants and way in which they participate in the design and construction of their habitat by comparing them with human organisation and construction.


COMPARING POINTS OF VIEW

Excerpts from an interview with Stefan Kaegi and Helgar Haug about the German version performed in Düsseldorf, published in Theater der Zeit in March 2018.

AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

Society under Construction is an interactive event. This kind of theatre is often called participatory theatre. You can choose between ‘participation’ or ‘immersion’. Which term do you prefer?

Haug: Irrespective of the terms, the aim is to free the audience from pure consumerism. ‘Immersion’ is a term that has recently become fashionable. And anyway, it sounds better than participatory theatre, because many people associate that with the kind of theatre where you get dragged on-stage and made fun of for the enjoyment of others. But we don’t want to put the audience on show; we entrust them with a certain responsibility and offer them an active role in the play. (...) We want to take the audience on a kind of thought experiment.

Kaegi: The audience both observes and participates in the experiment. (...)

Haug: Of course, we could also make a documentary from the same material for you to listen to in the comfort of your own home. But it’s not just the stories that are important to us; it’s also the tense situations that they create. It’s unsettling that there are so many opinions on such complex subjects! That’s why the formats are deliberately demanding; they involve the audience in the stories, and simultaneously the participants have to observe to what extent they are involved. At the same time, they are watching other participants joining in happily, hesitantly, or even choosing not to join in at all. That’s what it’s about: getting a sense of the different positions.

Kaegi: Also, things you experience with your senses you remember differently.

BASED ON THE ACCOUNTS AND PRESENCE OF EXPERTS AND WITNESSES

How do you convince real-life experts you integrate into the performance to share their experiences and opinions with the audience in your theatre productions? How do you manage? Especially with those who know that their attitudes will differ from those in the theatre?

Kaegi: We often think that the people who have these strange-seeming jobs don’t want to talk about them. And it’s true, it’s not easy to have a conversation with, for example, a chief of air force or a lobbyist, when you say that you’re calling on behalf of the House of World Cultures in Berlin or the Schauspielhaus Zurich. But some of them don’t hang up straight away. When you talk to them, you soon realise that nowadays we need to question our own ideas and actions, as well as their consequences for ourselves and others.

Haug: We spend a lot of time with each of our protagonists, as we do with the group as a whole. Everyone gets to know everyone else’s opinions. We then try and develop a form of theatre where these respective opinions become visible and clash, sometimes violently. It’s a question of setting up contradictions and revealing dilemmas. It’s hard to find instant solutions in that kind of situation. (...)

Haug: ... people often put a great deal of thought into things. And we give them the opportunity to express and portray a more subtle image of themselves than the public often has of them.


STATE AND POST-DEMOCRACY

Society under Construction is one of the 4 stages in a project dealing with post-democracy entitled State 1–4. (...) The State should – at least in countries belonging to the EU – safeguard democracy. How then should we understand the title ‘State’ in this context, given that you are dealing with post-democracy? Are you being ironic?

Stefan Kaegi: We are portraying the state as it goes through a process of transformation. And it is transforming into a post-democracy...

Helgar Haug: ... that’s why ‘State’ and ‘democracy’ are not contradictory.

Kaegi: Recently, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, we saw statesmen asking CEOs from major businesses to invest in their countries. It is becoming obvious that it is no longer the State that sets the rules. So, no, it’s not irony. It’s more like a description.

Haug: We’re interested in how various forms of power interconnect.

Kaegi: During our research into the ‘social model for a major construction site (State 2)’, town planners told us that their offices no longer had the resources necessary to develop the master plans for the future development of their city. As a result, the companies that would later become the prime contractor were the ones that would develop the ideas (without a public contract), which were then taken up by city officials, more or less as is. This example clearly shows that the State is abandoning certain domains, which then get picked up by the private sector.

Theatre is also a public space, which enables a democratic form of exchange...

Haug: We see theatre as being a space where different perspectives can be presented and where people can be listened to without being immediately judged. And that’s not always simple. However, we think it’s important not to convey a message that is pre-packaged or moralistic. We would rather give the audience the opportunity to learn about different positions, even those that they might not value. What does it feel like to picture yourself in the shoes of a different person, in a different life? (...) The biggest challenge is to find protagonists that are willing to share their opinions on stage, even though they know that most of the audience won’t agree with them. The fact that we are tearing apart these two separate worlds is in itself a political attitude, and that we create a situation where the audience can listen to someone whose convictions they don’t necessarily share.

INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPH LEIBOLDTHEATER DER ZEIT, 19.02.2018


PRESS REVIEWS

Articles published at the time of the creation of the German version in Düsseldorf (2017) and while on tour (2017–2108).

We find ourselves part of the production itself and move through different scenarios in groups of 30. Sometimes, as construction workers, we build scaffolding, and at other times, as architects taking part in meetings inside containers, we plan the next project. The most impressive aspect: the protagonists are playing their own real-life role, and the audience gets to slip into their daily life. (...) Among other things, we get to hear the point of view of a Chinese migrant worker, or an undeclared Romanian worker. We’re conveyed past huge piles of sand and crowds of people with yellow and blue helmets. We clamber up onto some scaffolding. (...) this visit to a construction site clearly shows us how many different interests are involved in such a project: firstly, of course, political interests, which, according to construction experts, wield too much decision-making power, especially as engineering is not a core skill. And then there’s the Romanian migrant worker who hasn’t been paid the amount that was agreed on. Or the professor that philosophises about the ‘city of the future’, or the building services engineer... (...)

Unlike planning for the BER (Berlin Brandenburg Airport), it is a theatrical and choreographic masterpiece. Nothing has been miscalculated here. The slightest movement, noise or light has been organised to the nth degree. It’s one of the few times where it is fun to be involved with the BER.

LEONIE BARTSCH, DIE WELT, 5.03.2018

The obscene mechanisms that drive the construction industry are revealed in troubling ways: the vanity and mistakes of architects who don’t actually build, but get others to build iconic buildings for them, the power of investors and the way in which the rules of state power are breached. (...) An extremely dynamic production that ends after two non-stop hours (no one notices the absence of an intermission); it’s a production that is enlightening and that clamours for answers; it is ironic and sometimes funny. A work of art that feeds off reality and reflects it, too. This is a true night out at the theatre, acclaimed by audiences – and rightly so.

SEMA KOUSCHKERIAN, WESTDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, 14.05.2017


STEFAN KAEGIConcept and direction

Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, Stefan Kaegi studied art in Zurich before going on to applied theatre studies in Giessen, Germany. He creates documentary theatre plays, radio shows and a great variety of performances in the urban environment. In his work, he gives voice to those he calls ‘experts from daily life’. This is how he created Mnemopark, a scale model of the Swiss train system, filmed live on stage. For the Cargo Sofia project, Stefan Kaegi went on tour for more than two years across Europe with two Bulgarian lorry drivers and a converted articulated lorry. In 2008, he created Radio Muezzin in Cairo, a project about the call to prayer and its technical reproducibility in the 21st century. He developed Remote X, a performance where an audience of 50 takes to the streets equipped with headphones to explore cities and how they change, presented from São Paulo to Bangalore and from Moscow to Houston; the installation Win > < Win about the increase in jellyfish numbers due to climate change; or Situation Rooms, a theatre installation where each member of the audience, in turn and guided by an iPad, takes on the role of a person either involved in the arms trade or that suffers its consequences. Each installation contrasts different points of view that prove to be contradictory and that reveal the paradoxes and impasses of contemporary society and its development..

Stefan Kaegi created the Rimini Protokoll label with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel. Together they are moving away from a direct representation of reality and are trying instead to depict it in all its facets and from unexpected perspectives. Fascinated as much by the technology in our daily lives as by the power of the voice and images, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel are moving theatre beyond its walls, expanding it into new spaces and networks of globalisation. In Deadline, they presented five experts on death. They have also created Call Cutta in a Box, a telephone conversation live from a call centre in India, and 100% Berlin, a living form of statistics with 100 citizens invited on stage. The project Staat 1–4 (State 1–4) progresses through 4 themed stages that question post-democracy, where the state allows economic players to decide on a society’s future.

For each project, Rimini Protokoll looks for « experts from daily life », questioning them, inviting them to play their own role, often on-stage, and from there, inventing surprising creations that are highly politicised and often immersive. It delves into the fascinating phenomenon of globalisation to draw singularities, particularities and idiosyncrasies from it.

Since 2006, Stefan Kaegi has also worked with Lola Arias, with whom he created Chácara Paraíso about Brazilian police officers and Airport Kids, a performance

created at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne with « global nomads » aged from 7 to 13. In September 2016, also at Vidy, he created Nachlass – Pièces sans personnes, a production that is currently on tour. Again at Vidy, he created the French versions of Cargo Congo-Lausanne (2018), in a long-haul truck converted into a theatre, and La Vallée de l’étrange (2019), a conference with a robot double of German author Thomas Melle. He also presented at Vidy Granma, Les trombones de La Havane (2019), a documentary theatre project about the ongoing effect of the Cuban revolution.

Rimini Protokoll was awarded the Faust Theatre Prize in 2007, the European Prize for New Theatrical Realities in 2008, and in 2011, the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for Performing Arts. The stage installation Situation Rooms was honoured with an Excellence Award at the 17th edition of the Japan Media Arts Festival. In 2015, Stefan Kaegi was awarded the Swiss Grand Prize for Theatre/Anneau Hans Reinhart.


Scenography

Work by stage designer and director Dominic Huber, born in 1972, opens new performance horizons. His stage installations are spaces that can not only be viewed, but also experienced from within by an individual or a group. Like a kind of augmented reality, his installations aim to intensify sensory experiences, by modifying, activating and manipulating actual spaces and situations. The audience therefore actively engages with and explores the surprising features that surround them.

After studying architecture at the ETH Zurich, Dominic Huber joined forces with lighting designer Christa Wenger and founded the company blendwerk GmbH. From 1999 onwards, he began scenography work with independent productions in Zurich, Basel and Berlin.

Since 2008, Dominic Huber has regularly collaborated with Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias, in particular on Airport Kids, Heuschrecken and Familienband, as well as with Sebastian Nübling on Volpone at the Schauspielhaus in Bochum and Carmen Disruption at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Huber has also designed a series of installation theatre projects with Bernhard Mikeska, such as Rashomon :: TRUTH LIES NEXT DOOR, MARIENBAD :: coming soon and at the Schauspiel in Frankfurt Je t’aime :: Je t’aime and Making of :: Marilyn. In 2009, the city of Zurich honoured Huber’s work and granted him a scholarship for a 3-month residency in New York.

With Rimini Protokoll, Dominic Huber created the scenography for the multi-player installation Situation Rooms, which toured the world after its premiere at the RuhrTriennale in 2013. The production was awarded the Japan Media Arts Excellence Award and was invited to be performed at the Berliner Theatertreffen, as well as at the Vidy Theatre in 2014. Another of Rimini Protokoll’s plays, Weltklimakonferenz, was designed for the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. During the In House Festival, part of the Jerusalem Season of Culture, Huber recreated his installation House on the inside and outside of a residential building in Jerusalem. At Vidy in 2016, he designed the scenography for Nachlass – Pièces sans personnes, which he co-signed with Stefan Kaegi.

Dominic Huber regularly teaches at the ZHdK University of the Arts in Zurich.

In 2019, he was awarded the Swiss Theatre Prize for his stage designs.

DOMINIC HUBER

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