In 2000, Daniel Wetzel, Helgard Haug and Stefan Kaegi collaborated for the first time under the label Rimini Protokoll. Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp (‘Crossword Pit Stop’), a stage production on old age and Formula 1 racing, initiated a string of acclaimed stage productions that have made Rimini Protokoll one of Europe's most prominent theatre groups. Rimini Protokoll is no tight-knit collective. For the founding members, the production of differences is more important than speaking with a unified voice. This model of productive dissent, of questioning and discussion, is also reflected in their work: their collaborations (often in different constellations or with ‘outsiders’) are project-based and pragmatic, often site-specific and focused on the exchange of particular ideas and experiences. Yet, despite their very diverse nature, their projects are mostly clearly recognizable as Rimini Protokoll productions. Over the ten years they have been working together, the group has been experimenting with a distinctive theatre poetics that is often designated as ‘a kind of documentary theatre’.

According to Carol Martin, technological media play a vital role in contemporary documentary theatre as video, film or tape recorders are used to supplement the performed text and the performing bodies on the stage. Technological media are ‘a primary factor in the transmission of knowledge’ of documentary theatre because ‘means of replication and simulation are used to capture and reproduce “what really happened” for presentation in the live space of the theatre’ (Martin 2006: 9). In that sense, technological media in documentary theatre gesture beyond the presence of the performance toward a factual, historical or archival realm.

On 3 December 2010, in the context of this book on mutating media, I had a conversation with Helgard Haug to explore some of the intricacies of the use of different media in the work of Rimini Protokoll and the way in which technology was used to relate to what lies beyond the stage. As will hopefully become clear from the rendition of this conversation below, replication or simulation of reality is only part of the story of Rimini Protokoll's use of media. Rather than replicating reality to the theatre, one could say that they replicate theatre to reality, effectively pushing the boundaries of documentary theatre.