Helgard Haug

Director and author Helgard Haug works independently, as well as with Daniel Wetzel and Stefan Kaegi under the label Rimini Protokoll. Her internationally acclaimed works in theatre, radio drama, film and installations lie in the grey area between real life and fiction. Since 2000, Haug has been developing pieces for the stage, the urban realm and radio that open up new perspectives on our reality.

The director trio mimicked, for example, an entire session of the German parliament with 200 residents of Bonn in “Deutschland 2”. In central Europe, they brought five experts in the art of dying to the stage in the piece “Deadline”, and they reconstructed the bankruptcy of the Belgian airline Sabena in Brussels in “Sabenation – go home and follow the news”. Other productions include, for instance, “Call Cutta in a box”, a live telephone call from a call centre in India; “100% city”, an active statistical arrangement for 100 citizens on a revolving stage; “Annual shareholders’ meeting”, a parasitic intervention to commemorate the Daimler Group’s shareholder meeting; “Best before”, an interactive video game for 200 theatregoers; and “Home visit Europe”, where a game is played in private living rooms, and the stakes are the biggest piece of cake …

Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel were awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis (Dramatist Award of Mülheim) for their piece “Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Volume I”.

Rimini Protokoll has been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen three times, with the works “Deadline” (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel, 2004), “Wallenstein – a documentary play” (Haug/Wetzel, 2006), and “Situation rooms” (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel, 2013).

The multiplayer video installation “Situation rooms” from 2013 also received the Excellence Award of the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival.

In 2003, the yearbook of the journal Theater Heute (Theatre Today) named Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel the rising directors of the year. In 2007, they received the prestigious German theatre award Der Faust. The following year, they were awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in Thessaloniki, and, in 2011, Rimini Protokoll’s complete works were awarded the Silver Lion at the 41st Theatre Biennale in Venice.

Among other works that have received distinctions are “Shooting Bourbaki” (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel), awarded the NRW Impulse Award in 2003; and “Schwarzenbergplatz” (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel), nominated for the Austrian theatre award Nestroy in 2005.

The work “Quality control” (Haug/Wetzel) was nominated for the 2014 Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, and received the audience award.

Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel have also received acclaim for their radio dramas on many occasions. In 2007, “Offending Peymann” was selected as radio drama of the month; in 2008, “Karl Marx: The capital, Volume I” was awarded the War Blinded Audio Play Prize; and “Quality control, or why I don’t press mute” was audio drama of the month in 2014, and received the Hörspielpreis der ARD (ARD’s audio drama award) in 2014, the German Record Critics’ Award in 2014, and the Hörbuchpreis der ARD (ARD’s audio book prize) in 2015.

Helgard Haug and Rimini Protokoll have been based at HAU, Berlin, since 2003.

100% Stellenbosch: A whole town on a stage

Menán van Heerden, Naomi Meyer, Helgard Haug Toyota US Woordfees 2018-02-23

"What if we tried to get a whole city on a stage! These were the starting questions of the 100% project! What would we face if Stellenbosch was represented by a cross section of 100 people?"

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