Rimini Protokolls Home Visit USA Los Angeles
Rimini Protokolls Home Visit USA Los Angeles
Rimini Protokoll’s Home Visit USA at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles – A Parlor Game Featuring National Discourse, Cultural Identity and Cultural Values
Rimini Protokoll’s Home Visit USA at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles – A Parlor Game Featuring National Discourse, Cultural Identity and Cultural Values
Having been invited to Home Visit USA, an interactive theater by the internationally-renowned German-Swiss artist collective Rimini Protokoll I expected a number of creative and intellectual things to happen – however, arm wrestling was certainly none of those. During the course of my studies of humanities, intercultural studies and literature I have learned much which prepared me for this event. Unfortunately, none of this came in handy for the physical, sweat-inducing and muscle-soaring battle with a stranger on the other side of the table. But I do not want to get ahead of myself but rather start at the beginning.
Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel are the artists behind the Berlin-based collective Rimini Protokoll. Since 2000, their work revolving around the realm of theater, sound and radio plays, and film has shown the theatre’s ability to allow for unusual perspectives on reality. Having been presented and toured around the world, their work has often appeared in public spaces, renowned theater venues, museums, and has been commissioned by major festivals including among others Festival d’Avignon, Singapore International Festival of Arts, and Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York. They have received numerous prestigious awards including Faust Theatre Prize in 2007; Silver Lion of the Biennale for Performing Arts in Venice in 2011; Excellence Award of the 17th Japan Media Festival in 2014; and the Swiss Grand Prix of Theatre in 2015.
Home Visit USA is a participatory performance that can be understood as a mixture of parlor game, theater performance and art piece. Each performance is a gathering at a private home. Set around a living room table, audiences play a game in an informal atmosphere where they talk about the ever-changing ideas of what defines the United States—focusing on issues that include cultural identity, values, and borders. During the two-hour performance, the artists juxtapose the rather abstract and often hyperbolized idea of national identity in the United States. What starts out feeling like a political gathering soon takes a turn: maps are spread out and an acoustic backdrop begins to emerge; challenges arise, and together, decisions are made. Personal anecdotes and the country’s current political climate become intertwined.
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles hosted the first performance of Home Visit USA in Los Angeles on Saturday night, May 6th 2017. Another performance in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles was held at a different Los Angeles home on Saturday, May 13th. Earlier this year a number of performances were held in Santa Barbara where Home Visit USA premiered in January at Contemporary Museum of Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), as part of the exhibition Rimini Protokoll: City as Stage.
On May 6th, there were fifteen participants, most of whom were strangers to each other. When asked about the Goethe-Institut’s role in the performance, Sarah Dildine, a member of staff at MCASB and coordinator of the Home Visit USA performances in Los Angeles, responded that the Goethe-Institut has the ability to reach a broader audience ensuring to host participants who do not know each other very well or not at all. This makes the project even more intriguing. In addition to this, being located at the Goethe-Institut the performance was immediately set in an intercultural context bringing even more awareness to some of the premises and issues posed in the game. While most of the participants had indeed not met each other before, it was interesting to see how quickly an atmosphere of familiarity, intimacy, openness and trust was established, given the rather unusual circumstances. During the two-hour game, participants were asked questions and tasks had to be fulfilled in order to gain points which would ultimately decide how big of a piece of cake the participants would be able to enjoy at the end of the five rounds. I found this division of an actual cake to be a really intriguing allegory to everyone’s participation in society in general, as your perspective on issues and behavior in certain situations decides how highly or lowly you were ranked in the game and with this also decided how much cake every participant would receive. Questions about elites, national identity, trust in democracy, capitalism, violence as a means of solving certain conflicts, and rewarding the underdog by punishing the elite were certainly the most sensitive issues and were picked up in the discussion after the game. The way all these questions and tasks were posed put a transhumanist spin on the entire project: instead of the project coordinator or the MC a small machine generated the course of the game and printed the questions and tasks on a sheet of paper that had to be read out aloud by the participants. The workings behind the machine, also the brain that kept count of and distributed points triggered much curiosity among the participants. Most of these questions did not seem to have right or wrong answers, which made the distribution of points rather incomprehensible for the participants. As it seems, the group rather unconsciously makes decisions of right or wrong and thereby develops an inherent logic for itself, mirroring the phenomenon we call social behavior and public discourse.
Now, what do people take home after participating in Home Visit USA one might ask. Just like many answers to the questions posed during the game, this is, of course, a very subjective answer. Participants might have gained new perspectives on political and social issues, they might have understood how a group of strangers wound up at the same time and place talking openly about private matters and fighting over a piece of cake, for that matter. Participants have probably learned certain things about themselves as the level of competitiveness was rising during the course of the game. All these things are true for my personal experience at Home Visit USA and I have most definitely learned that I can almost arm wrestle a 55-year old tattoo artist from Venice.
For more information about the work, which has been performed in twenty-three European cities in collaboration with numerous esteemed theater venues, please visit the Home Visit Europe performance website.
Having been invited to Home Visit USA, an interactive theater by the internationally-renowned German-Swiss artist collective Rimini Protokoll I expected a number of creative and intellectual things to happen – however, arm wrestling was certainly none of those. During the course of my studies of humanities, intercultural studies and literature I have learned much which prepared me for this event. Unfortunately, none of this came in handy for the physical, sweat-inducing and muscle-soaring battle with a stranger on the other side of the table. But I do not want to get ahead of myself but rather start at the beginning.
Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel are the artists behind the Berlin-based collective Rimini Protokoll. Since 2000, their work revolving around the realm of theater, sound and radio plays, and film has shown the theatre’s ability to allow for unusual perspectives on reality. Having been presented and toured around the world, their work has often appeared in public spaces, renowned theater venues, museums, and has been commissioned by major festivals including among others Festival d’Avignon, Singapore International Festival of Arts, and Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York. They have received numerous prestigious awards including Faust Theatre Prize in 2007; Silver Lion of the Biennale for Performing Arts in Venice in 2011; Excellence Award of the 17th Japan Media Festival in 2014; and the Swiss Grand Prix of Theatre in 2015.
Home Visit USA is a participatory performance that can be understood as a mixture of parlor game, theater performance and art piece. Each performance is a gathering at a private home. Set around a living room table, audiences play a game in an informal atmosphere where they talk about the ever-changing ideas of what defines the United States—focusing on issues that include cultural identity, values, and borders. During the two-hour performance, the artists juxtapose the rather abstract and often hyperbolized idea of national identity in the United States. What starts out feeling like a political gathering soon takes a turn: maps are spread out and an acoustic backdrop begins to emerge; challenges arise, and together, decisions are made. Personal anecdotes and the country’s current political climate become intertwined.
The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles hosted the first performance of Home Visit USA in Los Angeles on Saturday night, May 6th 2017. Another performance in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles was held at a different Los Angeles home on Saturday, May 13th. Earlier this year a number of performances were held in Santa Barbara where Home Visit USA premiered in January at Contemporary Museum of Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), as part of the exhibition Rimini Protokoll: City as Stage.
On May 6th, there were fifteen participants, most of whom were strangers to each other. When asked about the Goethe-Institut’s role in the performance, Sarah Dildine, a member of staff at MCASB and coordinator of the Home Visit USA performances in Los Angeles, responded that the Goethe-Institut has the ability to reach a broader audience ensuring to host participants who do not know each other very well or not at all. This makes the project even more intriguing. In addition to this, being located at the Goethe-Institut the performance was immediately set in an intercultural context bringing even more awareness to some of the premises and issues posed in the game. While most of the participants had indeed not met each other before, it was interesting to see how quickly an atmosphere of familiarity, intimacy, openness and trust was established, given the rather unusual circumstances. During the two-hour game, participants were asked questions and tasks had to be fulfilled in order to gain points which would ultimately decide how big of a piece of cake the participants would be able to enjoy at the end of the five rounds. I found this division of an actual cake to be a really intriguing allegory to everyone’s participation in society in general, as your perspective on issues and behavior in certain situations decides how highly or lowly you were ranked in the game and with this also decided how much cake every participant would receive. Questions about elites, national identity, trust in democracy, capitalism, violence as a means of solving certain conflicts, and rewarding the underdog by punishing the elite were certainly the most sensitive issues and were picked up in the discussion after the game. The way all these questions and tasks were posed put a transhumanist spin on the entire project: instead of the project coordinator or the MC a small machine generated the course of the game and printed the questions and tasks on a sheet of paper that had to be read out aloud by the participants. The workings behind the machine, also the brain that kept count of and distributed points triggered much curiosity among the participants. Most of these questions did not seem to have right or wrong answers, which made the distribution of points rather incomprehensible for the participants. As it seems, the group rather unconsciously makes decisions of right or wrong and thereby develops an inherent logic for itself, mirroring the phenomenon we call social behavior and public discourse.
Now, what do people take home after participating in Home Visit USA one might ask. Just like many answers to the questions posed during the game, this is, of course, a very subjective answer. Participants might have gained new perspectives on political and social issues, they might have understood how a group of strangers wound up at the same time and place talking openly about private matters and fighting over a piece of cake, for that matter. Participants have probably learned certain things about themselves as the level of competitiveness was rising during the course of the game. All these things are true for my personal experience at Home Visit USA and I have most definitely learned that I can almost arm wrestle a 55-year old tattoo artist from Venice.
For more information about the work, which has been performed in twenty-three European cities in collaboration with numerous esteemed theater venues, please visit the Home Visit Europe performance website.