Breaking News

- A Daily News Show

By Helgard Haug / Daniel Wetzel

A daily news show with 9 protagonists, who re-present the evening news as messengers from their own respective cultural and linguistic areas on stage and let it take effect there.

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The fairly small, shabby box of tricks in which the theatregoers gather is acting today as a pinhole camera: focusing on the constantly fevered displays of the many, bewildering news spectacles, in which images are interpreted as the present and the present is interpreted as a series of images.

Breaking News fills the theatre, usually based on ‘acting-as-if’, with a prism of the mainstream from institutions that send us their version of ‘that’s-how-it-was’ every day – with news broadcasts from many countries, captured live via satellite. What remains of the day in the political news from ORF, Al Jazeera, the BBC or the Pentagon Channel? How much “foreign news” do Iraqis get compared with Icelanders? What images are broadcast in South Africa as well as in Ukraine?
What is the day’s ‘lead story’? What is lost in the hunt for images? When are programmes switched off?

With the experts found for the project, Rimini Protokoll’s theatre opens a sensuous back door to the world-wide image pool of agencies and broadcasters. Does the event continue to exist at all, or does it disappear behind the network of the various reports on it?

In “Breaking News”, the experts involved in the project themselves become special links in the global news chain. They translate, filter, play videoed messages to each other, make comments and as correspondents contribute the perspectives of various broadcasters to this theatrical teleconference from the world’s political stages. Images of the past compete with the flood of current images. War, diplomacy and catastrophe flow into the great news stream from which every event and individual experience must swim free.

Directors: Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel (Rimini Protokoll)
Research and Dramaturgy: Sebastian Brünger
Stage set: Marc Jungreithmeier, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel
Video and Lighting: Marc Jungreithmeier
Sound and Sound Design: Frank Böhle
Assistant Stage Designer: Marie Zahir
Video Assistant: Maria Ochs
Preliminary Research: Christoph Scheurle
Location Shooting: Steffen Dost

with: Simon Birgisson, Martina Englert, Djengizkahn Hasso, Carsten Hinz, Hans Hübner, Marion Mahnecke, Walter van Rossum, Andreas Osterhaus, Sushila Sharma-Haque

A Rimini Apparat production in co-production with Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, schauspielfrankfurt, the Wiener Festwochen, and schauspielhannover.
Funding provided through the Department of the Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs.