RIMINI PROTOKOLL (Helgard Haug, Imanuel Schipper)
09|04|21
It’s always an interesting exercise, reflecting on an experience from a distance – whether that distance is time, space, or both. I always find my thoughts are influenced by the sense of satisfaction and relief that comes with having completed the project for now. Almost like the experience of running a marathon, where you’re hit with a wave of endorphins the moment you cross the finish line and all the pain and struggle you faced along the way becomes almost inconsequential. I begin my reflection like this, because, more than most other times in my life, I have been struggling mentally, and the last few months have been difficult – including this project – and I want to try and separate my personal feelings from the actual experience of the process undertaken. The project itself was, in fact, one of the most enjoyable I’ve engaged in throughout the CPPM, and I find myself looking back on it quite fondly, despite my personal struggles. It’s with this in mind that I explore the following points.
Firstly, I found that throughout the entire project, we worked in a way that emphasised practicality and design as a methodology to create the material, and this really does appeal to my sensibilities not just as an artist but also a person. Even from the first workshop when we were still working towards the in-theatre concept, I found myself most excited by the creative and logistical challenge of bringing an audience member on-stage to perform the material, as opposed to the specific content of the material itself. This is something I’ve known about myself for a while: I’m a form over content kind of creator. I am much more drawn towards the way in which something is communicated, over what is communicated itself. Not to say that I disregard the content at all – if the content and form can become one and the same then all the better. There’s even the argument to be made that in the arts form is content and vice versa. I just find the form more fun. So, naturally, even when we were forced to alter the work to be these walking tours, playing with the form of the walk became the most interesting part for me. It became very freeing in many ways, to focus on this aspect of the experience – and I really stress the word experience – for the participants. When you have a form like the walk, I believe it’s a shame to simply use it as a way to verbally communicate information, and a priority for me became the constant movement or activity of the participant. Again, this was a much more practical task, and consequently much more engaging for me. To try and create an analogy for this way of working, I would draw a parallel to good architecture – designing structures that are highly functional, and also look beautiful because of this. If you can pull off both of these in tandem, you’ve really nailed it, and I see this theatrical way of working similarly: the function and form is fundamental, and the poetry comes through this.
In saying all that, I also found a lot of engagement with the content of coffee production, though I feel there’s more work to be done to merge it with this form more effectively. At the end of the first week, I was feeling quite doubtful about my chosen field. The economics of the coffee production chain just didn’t seem to hold as much weight in comparison to the other topics like suicide bombers and paedophiles. Maybe this is also why I felt so inclined to go deeper into the form of my walk as opposed to the content. Somehow, I was able to go down the rabbit hole of the coffee chain and find myself in a direct, albeit translated, conversation with Maxuel – a coffee producer in Brazil. Being able to hear his story and bring that personal aspect to the journey really helped motivate me to serve his perspective properly. In many ways, I think I started to feel the real-world responsibility of the topic, beyond just this artistic bubble we too often find ourselves in. The challenge then became merging his personal stories with the form I had invested in, and I’m still not wholly satisfied with the outcome. The major obstacle for me is the balance between the interactivity and journey of the participant, and the info dumps. I attempted to make the information as relevant as I could, referencing the immediate environment of the participant or what they’re engaging in – though, I think some of these were pretty big stretches to find relevance. I’m also unsure at how much of an impact the personal material of Maxuel made on the participants, and whether anyone would now be more aware of the consequences of the coffee consumption habits going forward, as there was also a lot to think about with the delivery tasks. The walk ultimately had three streams: the form of the delivery journey, Maxuel’s personal content, and the information about globalisation and environment. To move forward with this project would be to look at this three-way balance and see how they could become intertwined into a more cohesive package.
On the technical side of the project, I have to acknowledge just how fortunate I am to already have many of the skills that allowed me to create the content and form that I wanted. Just simply not having to spend two hours editing together audio clips allowed me to still get an okay sleep each night – which is more than I can say for a number of my peers. On the flip side, this also meant that I became a person to go to if there were issues or questions with the audio technology or Echoes platform. Not that I wasn’t happy to help everyone get what they wanted, but I also felt like for a project of this nature you would really want someone dedicated to serving this function. Of course, this isn’t a normal project, but I also try to imagine how different an experience it would’ve been if everyone was able to record, edit, and fix technical issues at a much faster rate. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of stability issues with a platform like this, including a myriad of variables that are simply out of the control of the creator. As the project continued, it began to feel a lot like a game of Jenga – you remove or change one small thing and the whole tower could topple over on you. In the future, I am actually very enthusiastic about exploiting a tool like this for creative purposes, but I would need more stability or at least a foolproof backup plan to feel comfortable bringing in public or even ticketed participants.
Despite my own personal struggles mentally throughout the period when we were working on this project, I really do have to look back on what was achieved quite optimistically. Considering all the limitations we were dealing with, we managed to create something of real substance, that I hope will have a life going forward. I also have to acknowledge and thankful for Imanuel’s physical presence in Tallinn – his persistent enthusiasm and ‘why not’ attitude got me to make choices I might not have alone. There were a number of times where I felt like something was unfeasible or too much organisational work – like hiring someone to sit in their car in a parking lot for three hours handing out packages to strangers – yet Imanuel’s blasé reassurance that it was worth doing ultimately led to making the right moves along the way. Now it’s hard to imagine not having the car package drop-off. I hope I can remind myself of this in the future when I come up against similar choices. I also hope to be able to remind myself that even when I’m in a not-so-great headspace, I am still capable of creating and producing good, impactful work.
24|01|21
Alright, so we did in fact manage to have a relatively successful attempt on using this Echoes platform to create walks and experiences for us to test out. Firstly, I think this is a great testament to the philosophy of just running headfirst into these tryouts – we could’ve spent much longer preparing them and finessing what we constructed, but to be honest it would’ve probably reached a point of diminishing returns for what we would gain from the experience. Having now actually made this test, we can stop assuming things, and fix what we know isn’t working. I think on a personal artistic level, this has encouraged me in my personal project to really try get a first draft of the piece out as soon as we can – then we know what we have, and can finesse and adjust from a concrete base, rather than expectation.
Secondly, the other question that arises for me with the tryouts is how to use this platform to its best capacity. A handful of the journeys I went on felt like they could’ve existed quite easily without the Echoes platform specifically. Some of them did use an alternative method of content delivery, and worked well. The question then becomes around what the specific strengths and qualities that this platform gives, and how we can exploit them to their fullest. For me personally, I tried to use the echoes in a way that ensured the remote activation of certain instructions for my listener. As in, the echoes were invisible, they were following the instructions and were triggering the audio via the guided route they were on. This is in contrast to a number of the walks that really relied on the participant looking at the Echoes app map and guiding themselves into the bubbles.
Imanuel pointed this out in the feedback session: that maybe there’s a more elegant way to guide the audience around than asking them to “go to the next bubble”. In a way, using the Echoes platform as a tool, but not the actual experience itself. I think this is one of the concerns I had about this format of work, that it could possibly become too sterilised and mechanical through the app. That there would always be this visible filter for the audience.
This is why, for mine, I chose to go with invisible echoes and have the participants rely on the audio experience to navigate the journey. I need to talk more to my participants to really lock down what worked for them or not.
I’m also quite excited by the prospect of our group (Lea, Seohwon, Joonas, myself) coming together to really create a journey. I think we’re all interested in this quality of play and interaction – especially Lea’s pairing up idea, which can really create an atmosphere of action if they’re listening to two separate audio files.
Going forward, I really need to tee up a way of communicating with my coffee producer contact – and more importantly, create the questions I would like them to answer, as they’ll need to be translated. I think this will determine some of the choices I need to make moving forward, like: is the participant complicit with the negative sides of the coffee trade? Or are they doing the good thing? Who is asking them to deliver the coffee, and why?
I’m also very conscious of not hijacking the producer’s story. I could fabricate a whole journey with the info I have already, but I really want to stress the significance of my producer’s personal story, and this will be a friction to navigate in the context of this delivery game.
For now, I’m focussing elsewhere, and will revisit this all in a few weeks.
20|01|21
A month later, and we’re back with Rimini.
The project has up and changed on us due to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and no longer are we emphasising the concept of the audience making the show through instruction – which, for me, is a big shame, as I am very interested in how you cultivate an environment and situation where this can happen in a theatre. Maybe it’s something to hold onto for another project down the line. Instead, we’re adapting into making a form of walking tour through the city of Tallinn. This can still have almost all the same elements of audience participation; however, it feels like a different beast since the audience is already placed in an unusual situation and are active through engaging with the project that they will know is a walking tour. I still think there’s a lot of challenge specific to the audience in a (traditionally) passive theatre space which is to be explored.
In saying this, I am becoming more excited about this walking tour for all its possibilities. Right now, I am most interested in the way we organise the work. What is the foundation in which we place our material onto? I’m being quite vocal towards moving out of just simple walking and listening to audio tracks, and instead taking the audience out of their daily way of being and putting them into a slightly heightened state. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything adrenaline pumping, but something that asks the audience to do something they wouldn’t normally do. I’ve found in past works of this style that I’ve participated in/created, that when the audience has some form of interactivity or agency demanded of them, they are much more likely to remember these experiences. The balance of practicality and creativity is also something very particular to this sort of work, and there’s definitely something about that challenge that tickles my fancy.
I’ve also managed to, finally, get a hold of someone who is very invested and critical of the coffee trade, which is a great starting point, but I’m very much feeling that the material that would engage an audience the most is hearing the story of the coffee grower from Brazil. Helgard stated a similar perspective yesterday: that we are not so interested in just hearing facts or information, rather why this person’s story is interesting for us. This interest for us, will then guide the work and likely make it interesting for the audience.
So then, it becomes a question of how this coffee farmer’s story can be emotionally engaging for the audience. Right now, I have some ideas about making the audience complicit in the journey of these beans eg. delivering them the final step of the journey from Brazil to the coffee shop. Somehow giving them a sense of this distance, and the life cycle of these little beans. There’s something about the poetry that could lie within this relatively mundane, daily object of coffee, that I believe could really hit home.
We had a similar experience with a tea ceremony that we had at the beginning of September 2020, where our tea master explained how the tea we were drinking had gone on a journey of 20+ years all the way to arriving in front of us that evening. The sense of scale, and time, then is called into our consciousness, and created an experience quite poetic for us. I bought some of that tea, too, and am waiting for a special occasion to brew it.
21|12|20
There’s something that has struck me about the process so far with Rimini: there is so much structure, it feels less like an artistic practise and more like a scientific one. Not to say this is a bad thing, at all. In fact, I quite like this way of working. It’s tangible and comprehensible. Goal oriented, task based, but still with all the challenges of creating a performance. The problems are just much more logistical – I don’t feel like there’s a huge amount of opportunity for getting lost in the clouds or in our own artistic desires, which I am not often a fan of.
We’ve made the jokes of this sort of work coming directly from Rimini’s German origins – and that German efficiency. Even from the first hour of the work through Zoom, we were constructing a list of rules, and structures, and technical tools for us. Again, this does really appeal to me, as once you establish these things, you have the room to focus on the more important stuff. As another analogy: I’ve been asked why I eat essentially the same meal every day for lunch, and I always say that it frees me from the decision-making process of what I’m going to eat for lunch each day. I don’t spend any time worrying about it, or making new shopping lists. The structure frees me to focus on other things. I feel like this is similar. You establish a frame, or rules, or structures, and then you have all the freedom in the world within that. This is something I’ve been trying to do with the work I do, although I know sometimes my collaborators have resisted this heavy structure. Sometimes, it’s actually a great help to momentarily break the structure – it adds a little fire, for a moment.
On a less fundamental note, I am just quite excited to see how we can construct this “Theatre of the Absent”. The concept of having the audience “perform” in a work, either by following instructions or playing alongside another actor, is not new for me – but it is very exciting to see how we can construct this work entirely through the audience. Without any of us needing to be in the space with them. It makes me think a lot about this idea of taking care of the audience. As in, how do we seduce the audience into actually making this happen? What are the techniques that we can use to bring them on our side, and feel safe and encouraged enough to participate willingly? I think a lot of videogame theory can be applied to this sort of thing. I have an anecdote that is too long to share here about a moment in a videogame that I always bring up when speaking about audience interaction – it’s a great example of bringing the player into the mechanics of the world without having to say “here, you can do this”. In short, if you feel like you discover something yourself, you are far more likely to retain the information, rather than if you were told. I realised this when I found myself far more familiar with the layout of Perth, than Brisbane. I had grown up in Brisbane, but had spent most of my time there being driven around by my parents, or catching public transport. In Perth, I had to drive around from day one, and therefore had to be much more conscious of what I was doing. Therefore, I retained the information.
So, how do we bring the audience into this game we want to play? I’m excited to find out.