Cargo Texas-Toulouse

A documentary truck ride

By Stefan Kaegi

Rimini Protokoll has transformed a truck into a theatre – the seating installed in the trailer takes 46 spectators on a journey to the places of transit and trade at the city’s edges. Two very different truckdrivers tell their stories while they drive the audience.

In Toulouse, Rimini Protokoll met two 60-year-old truck drivers who take the audience on one last virtual trip from Texas via Canada and Belgium to the southwest of France, all the while discussing the advantages and disadvantages of freedom and long hours. On the way, the crafty musician Florent Paris has composed infatuating guitar riffs for every turn of the road.

The truck is converted in such a way that 46 people can look through a 10m long window to see the landscape passing by. Where goods used to be stacked in the past, now the audience is sitting and looking from a changed perspective back at their city. Thus the truck serves as an observatory, a mobile binocular trained at the city like a microscope. The audience is transported for two hours along gaz stations, industrial loading ramps and other hotspots of globalisation, which are live synced with a score composed for the landscape outside the window. On the road cordless microphones will transmit the truck drivers biographies live into the truck. A site-specific performance along the suburbs of Toulouse and feels like a road movie through the flipside of a globalised economy.

Concept / Direction: Stefan Kaegi

Music: Florent Paris

Video: Raphaël Granvaud-Perez

Direction video and sound: Robin Chollet

Assistant: Leslie Hagimont

Production: Rimini Protokoll, Théâtredelacité - CDN Toulouse Occitanie

With: Jean-Pierre Cazé (Driver), Christophe Mazalaigue (Driver), Sarah Lugassy (Singer)

Produced and presented by:

ThéâtredelaCité – CDN Toulouse Occitanie, Pronomade(s) en Haute-Garonne – CNAREP et l’Usine – CNAREP (Tournefeuille / Toulouse Métropole) lors de La Biennale

Supported by Pro Helvetia, Schweizerischer Kulturstiftung

In Collaboration with Le Metronum, Le Marché d’Intérêt National de Toulouse Occitanie, DB Schenker – Schenker France, Le Groupe Seosse (Seosse Eco-Transformation), Lavatrans et Jobtransport

Based on Cargo Sofia-X that was produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and Goethe-Institut Sofia in 2006

Cargo Texas-Toulouse

A documentary truck ride

By Stefan Kaegi

Dates

Foreign language press