Rimini Protokoll is not a theatre collective in the conventional sense. It’s rather a label – or more precisely, a working “protocol” – that guides the collaboration between Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. For over two decades, the three Berlin-based artists have been reinventing documentary theatre by bringing real people to the stage – so-called “experts of the everyday” – and frequently using complex tools, from audio-guidance systems and databases to algorithms and, more recently, artificial intelligence, to shift our perspective on the world.
I spoke with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel over Zoom, just before they headed into rehearsals for “Futur4”, their most recent performance, included in this year’s programme at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS). The two speak with warmth and precision, finishing each other’s thoughts and sometimes gently disagreeing – the way colleagues do when they’ve been working side by side for over 25 years. “Maybe the term ‘collective’ doesn’t fit us”, says Wetzel. “We don’t work in a way that’s based on full consensus… It’s more of a process of convincing each other. And prioritising.” Haug jumps in: “I like to compare us to a band. We each have different instruments. Sometimes we release solo albums, and other times we come together as an orchestra.”
Following “Black Tie” (2008) and “Quality Control” (2013), “Futur4” continues an informal trilogy of monologues about women and their life stories. At the centre of the piece is Ursula Gärtner, a woman of Transylvanian Saxon origin, whose story is brought to the stage with the help of Xenia (an expert in AI and large language models) and a trained bot. Together, the three presences explore what it means to remember, to belong, and to leave behind a legacy – not only through people, but perhaps even through a form of digital memory.
In our conversation this May, Haug and Wetzel reflected on how their approach to their work has evolved over time, the relevance of theatre in an age of increasingly blurred truths, and the possibilities and risks of AI – which, in the meantime, has become a performer in its own right.
Teia Brînză: Rimini Protokoll has been expanding the definition of theatre for over 25 years. Looking back, what has fundamentally changed in your approach since the early 2000s – and what has remained constant?
Daniel Wetzel: There are things we keep rediscovering and try to maintain. But a key element of our work is also to always try something new. That’s a bit of a paradox: the constant is to try something new. So some things don’t remain – because we’ve done them, and then it’s time to move on. From the outside, though, people often say, “Oh, this is a typical Rimini thing.” So there might be a difference between how we see the work and how it feels to others.
Helgard Haug: I think our motivation to make theatre has stayed the same. We use theatre to dis- or uncover something, to connect to what feels urgent in a given moment – whether that’s a political or social issue or a new technology. Many of our projects are about how we communicate, how we use and play with certain tools, or repurpose them for theatre. In that way, we link the old medium of theatre with something very current.
TB: When you began, putting reality on stage felt like a provocation. The world has changed – everything today seems performative, from social media to politics. You used to expose the theatricality of public systems, but now it feels like we’re dealing with over-theatricality. Do you agree?
DW: Yes, I think so. Life has become more performative – both in how we’re seen and how we see ourselves. When we started, it was exciting to play at the boundary of reality – using real-life material or staging something in the street. It was about discovering where the real ended and performance began. It was about expanding the notion of what reality could be. Now, especially with social media, the idea of reality has flipped. It’s the artists who are trying to reclaim facts, to cut through all the narratives running wild. The line between opinions, feelings and facts has blurred. So today, it almost feels radical to stick to facts in art. Not to open fantasy windows, but to ask: what are valid ways to describe reality?
HH: But if we look beyond the stage – at the audience – I think theatre still has a crucial role. It’s not only about who is performing or representing whom. It’s about who gathers to witness something and participate. That frame – the moment of gathering – has become more important, especially as other forms of gathering are fragmenting.
DW: Exactly. When we’re in the same space, sharing the same moment, we have a much better chance of arriving at a shared sense of reality – or at least a common sensation – than when we’re isolated in front of our devices, trapped in our own news bubbles.
TB: Your interest seems to lie not in staying ahead of the curve technologically, but in bringing local, lived experience to the stage.
HH: Yes, of course. We ask: what stories are we telling, and are they surprising? That’s when we start imagining whether something could become a theatre piece. And then: how do we tell it? We work in many formats – site performances, venues, installations, audio. Sometimes the format comes first, and the story later.
DW: We’re not trying to be ahead in terms of technology – at least not compared to the standard drama stage. What’s stayed the same is that we work with technology as soon as it enters everyday life. Not high-end tech, just what’s already in the user sphere. Right now we’re working with ChatGPT, like many others. Once something becomes part of daily use, it’s on our radar. Our interest is more in shared life practices than in predicting the next big technological thing.
TB: “Futur4” is your new project, with TNRS as a co-producer. How did you come to the story of Ursula Gärtner?
DW: This project started from an external impulse – through the Goethe-Institut, FITS, and a European project on East–West dialogue called NARDIV. We were asked: what would be a Romanian perspective on a theme we could explore?
That led us to the history of the Romanian Germans. In Germany, they’re known as people who were “bought out” of Romania – West Germany paid per person so they could emigrate. It’s not something many people in Germany know. Why did West Germany recognise these people as German – because some ancestors settled in Transylvania 700 years ago? That strangeness created a kind of Verfremdungseffekt – an alienation that lets us look on nationality, from a different angle, and ask: what does it even mean to be “German”? We started by speaking to people from the community. That’s how we found Ursula.
TB: How did you work with Ursula to bring this history to the stage? What was the documentary process?
HH: We try to talk to people and research more – rather than having a distant, third-eye perspective. We engage in conversation, follow many different stories, and try to understand what happened and how it felt – what were the specific and personal stories behind this huge wave of displacement.
In the beginning, we were looking for someone younger – born in Germany, with Romanian-German roots, someone just starting their adult life but carrying a family legacy. We met Ursula’s son, among others, but when he found out he was going to become a father around the premiere, we asked his mother if she would consider stepping in. That substitution – her taking his place – already touched on themes we were working with: time, continuity, legacy. And her story, while unique, resonated with a lot of people. After seeing the performance, someone wrote to us: “That’s exactly our story.” We’re curious to see how it will be received in Sibiu, where the context is different.
DW: Yes, we’re curious to know how visible the German community in Sibiu is today.
TB: The German community is shrinking – many moved away. Still, in the past, it used to feel natural to be German in Sibiu – to learn the language, go to German schools. Now, the city has become more diverse. That sense of a defined community is less visible. It’s more about global influences. People want to move, and many do.
DW: That’s exactly the question – what remains of that community in daily life? When I visited Sibiu, it reminded me of places where post-colonial communities still have a presence. In Sibiu, I noticed a small shop selling German products – soap, household brands. A niche place, like the Polish shops in Berlin where people go to get dumplings – the kind Germans might not care about. It’s about the return of a story and a person to a society that has moved on. There was a funny word used back then for West Germans visiting Romania, as tourists or relatives – “Neckermann”. So now someone like that returns to Transylvania and they narrate how they remember their life there. What happened after they moved away?
HH: And the question becomes: how do you pass that legacy on? The performance is framed around Ursula’s granddaughter. Could we create something – not just a photo album, but something interactive – that connects her to the history of her ancestors? And could a digital double make that possible – staying in open dialogue even after the grandmother has passed away?
TB: AI is often seen as erasing heritage and breaking the connection between generations – there’s a big gap between those who use AI and those who don’t. What role does AI play in your project? Is it a kind of counter-narrative, where AI actually connects people rather than alienates them?
HH: For us, AI is like a third performer. On stage, it’s Ursula, Xenia, who is an expert for AI and LLMs, and their creation, UrsulaBot. The project became a kind of experiment: what happens if we create a bot? Which rules do we want to apply? Which character should it have? What knowledge do we want to insert? What if it has a voice? What if we speak to it instead of typing? On stage, we go through these questions again and again – how we developed it, what worked, what didn’t, what it opened up. By doing it, we learned a lot – about its strengths, its limits, and also the critical questions it raises.
So yes, in a way, it does bridge generations. In real life, Ursula would never want a bot of herself. But within a theatrical space, that question becomes interesting. What happens if we do create digital doubles? It’s a playful relationship with technology – but one that helps tell a story.
TB: AI is trained to give us mostly the answers we expect. In “Futur4”, does that make the story feel more coherent? Or does it end up filling in the gaps?
DW: In a way, yes. It can feel a bit cheesy at times, like AI trying to echo Ursula’s words. It’s our first time working like this, and it’s a step towards exploring what theatre can become. With the bot, there’s room to laugh – with it, at it. That laughter helps – especially when you think about how fast AI is evolving. Already, it outpaces what many human minds can process. Like the early days of the internet – it’s always a bit vague in the beginning. What functions will stay? How can we cope with it? What will be the limits? What will be interesting? What will be forbidden? What will be too risky?
Apparently, it will find a balance. It will be helpful in many ways. The question is: how can we make an experience of that, as performers? And theatre is always about representation. Someone is always performing someone else. Even in documentary theatre, that’s true. Now there are two Ursulas: the person and its copy.
HH: And we’re very interested in the details of how it can be developed. We created and trained a personalised model. We started with simple prompts, quickly saw the limits, and began feeding it personal material: stories, personality traits, reactions. That’s part of the show too – shaping the bot’s voice, testing it, failing, trying again.
TB: We’re having a lot of heated conversations in Romania right now, especially after the elections, around identity, migration, traditions. Maybe you didn’t stay too long there, but I was curious, as observers: if you were to create “100% Romania” – in the spirit of your “100% City” series, where 100 statistically representative residents come together on stage – what kind of questions or themes do you think would emerge?
HH: We would love to explore that…
DW: Romania is such a complex country, we’d never claim it could be fully represented on stage.
HH: Yes, we would need to focus on one city. It could be 100% Sibiu. The specific situation – political, demographic, social – matters so much. Migration, who holds power, where tensions lie between certain groups – between men and women, for example – all of that would be very interesting to expose.
DW: I think what’s really essential – maybe even existential – in Romania right now is the division between media and knowledge. I heard the Minister of Education say that the state of literacy in schools was a matter of national security. Not just illiteracy, but functional illiteracy.
TB: Yes, that was Daniel David.
DW: Right. And that’s where the “100%” format becomes very relevant. It asks: who actually gathers? On what basis can we speak to one another? Does that old model of society – workers, clerks, students – still apply? Is there still a shared knowledge base that allows us to talk about who represents us, who decides how we live, and why? And how can it be validly improved?
Because foreign policy, for example, no longer explains itself to citizens. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should help us understand how different countries see the same issue. What’s the Romanian perspective? The German one? The Hungarian one? How do these positions diverge, say, on the war in Ukraine?
If people are excluded from those conversations – not just emotionally, but because they were never informed how to engage – then we’re not just talking about integrating foreigners. We’re talking about reintegrating ourselves.
And then we come to AI. Is it already replacing what we would once have held in our own heads? Picture a 12-year-old in Sibiu or Berlin – how long before they ask a chatbot instead of their teacher? Can they still sit down with a text, understand it, question it, without relying on digital help? What conversations are they having with their parents, grandparents, uncles? Are those still happening? There’s a massive shift underway. And perhaps the biggest danger of AI might not be what it does, but the gaps it fills in. When communication and shared understanding break down, that’s when weapons get used. That’s when AI becomes truly dangerous.
Header image: Max Borchardt
