Previous Next

100% Braunschweig
100% Braunschweig

© Pigi.Psimenou@gmail.com
Every use of the photo shall be subject to payment of a fee. Please contact the photographer.

100% Braunschweig
100% Braunschweig

©Pigi.Psimenou@gmail.com
Every use of the photo shall be subject to payment of a fee. Please contact the photographer.

100% Braunschweig
© Pigi.Psimenou@gmail.com
The use of the photo is free of charge.
Download >

100% Braunschweig

By Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel

Braunschweig, also known in English as Brunswick, city of Henry the Lion, a major Hanseatic city in the Middle Ages, centre of the regional planning area of the Braunschweig region, city of research and technology, City of Science in 2007, Lower Saxony’s second-biggest city, had 248,867 inhabitants on 31.12.2010, which is 1,268 inhabitants per km2. Their average age was 43.13, 9.9 % were unemployed, 46 % were of ‘other’ or of no religion, 7.5 % were foreigners, there were more cars (140,773) than flats (140,344), twice as many incoming (53,784) as outward-bound commuters (26,286), and 252,845 visitors from elsewhere, who stayed in Braunschweig for an average of 1.8 days. “Braunschweig in Zahlen kurz und knapp” (“Braunschweig in figures in brief”), a brief portrait compiled by the city’s Referat Stadtentwicklung und Statistik (Department of Urban Development and Statistics), which can be found at www.braunschweig.de, paints a picture of the city based on facts, figures and comprehensive survey data. 



“100 Percent Braunschweig“ is also based on facts and figures. For their theatre piece, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel transferred statistical data collection procedures and scientific processes to the theatre, the classical locus of representation. Hundreds of people from Braunschweig, corresponding with the statistical structure of the population in the categories of gender, age, nationality, marital status and residential district, were recommended, one after the other, and thus found for this performance in a month-long chain reaction. On the 26th of January 2012 the attempt was started with a mathematician from the Technische Universität (Technical University). He volunteered to take part in the performance, representing 2,500 inhabitants as 1% of Braunschweig. He then proposed a second participant, who nominated a third and so on. The longer the search took, the fewer Braunschweig residents could be considered as participants and the more precise the statistical specifications became. The perfect hundred percent had to be a man aged between 25 and 44, divorced, German, and living in the municipal electoral district of Nordost (north-east).



Braunschweig – a city of a quarter of a million individuals. A hundred of them are presented on stage and portrayed in the programme. On stage they present themselves and the aggregations into which they were gathered, and thus also represent the city. “100 Percent Braunschweig” shows a performer with 100 heads playing our city, a choir that has never rehearsed a song, an entity created by a survey, repeatedly composing itself anew into various group pictures, into fleeting portraits of affiliations and contrasts, a ‘people’s parliament’ on 100 square metres of stage. 
Who is missing? Who thinks they give answers on stage that are different from the ones given in response to a phone call from a survey institute or in the voting booth? Who thinks that the city is different because they are there? Who lives in a completely different Braunschweig? And what have the statistics failed to record? 



“100 Percent Braunschweig” is a city-specific version of the “100 Percent Berlin” project. (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin 2008) 



Funded by the NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ as part of the theatre guest performance funding provided by the BKM and the ministries of culture and art of the German states (Länder)