100% Berlin

- A Statistical Chain Reaction

By Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel

“100 Percent Berlin” – a gathering that is a city, a group, just beginning to experience itself, a choir that has never practised, an impossible entity with many faces is always assembled into ever changing new group pictures. Group pictures as fleeting portraits of belonging, as a replacement for family or as a “micro group”. Sorted according to age or address, gender, political leanings, preferred local pub, means of transport, sandwich spread, playwright and then, bit by bit, as a sea of voices, as a geometric body on 100 square metres of stage...

For 100 years the Hebbel Theater has been a playhouse for pieces in which the individual is portrayed in relation to his surroundings. The Hebbel Theater’s stage has also always been a platform for particular individual fates for the audience to examine. The audience represents society, the actor represents the individual. On the political stage and in its media setting figures are what counts. Society is a flickering image of counted, estimated, calculated and representative values.

“100 Percent Berlin” invites 100 Berliners onto the stage. But who are these 100 Berliners? How does a cross section of society emerge and how can it be “portrayed”? In contrast to other Rimini Protokoll projects, in which the work was preceded by a comprehensive casting, only one person was cast for “100 Percent Berlin”. This person proposed another participant from their circle of friends, that person proposed another, and so it went on until 100 Berliners, “100 Percent Berlin”, were gathered together. This chain reaction was controlled by a series of search criteria, which were developed after the examination of surveys done by the Berlin Brandenburg Statistics Office. Every ‘link’ added to the chain had to provide information on their gender, age, marital status, nationality and type of income. In accordance with statistical ratios of Berlin’s population in these categories, the search for a new ‘link’ in the chain became increasingly challenging towards the end.

by Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel)

Directed by: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel
Stage: Mascha Mazur
Research + Dramaturgy: Cornelius Puschke
Live Music: Di Grine Kuzine
Choirmaster: Bernd Medek
Assistant Director: Julia Schulz
Assistant Stage Designer: Dennis Dellschow
Interns: Ariel Davila, Laura Kraus
Production manager: Heidrun Schlegel

A Rimini Apparat production in co-production with HAU Berlin, funded through the Capital Cultural Fund (Hauptstadtkulturfond).

See also:
Video interview with Frerk Lintz at:

http://www.folge-mag.com/rimini_protokoll.html