ABSTRACT
To join The Builders Association (TBA) and Rimini Protokoll is to engage the work of two artist groups that have figured prominently in contemporary discussions of post-dramatic theatre. This is to say that The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll innovate within the theatrical frame even as they trouble it. It is also to say that, unlike some of the other socially engaged, cross-disciplinary artists addressed so far in this book, these are both groups whose aesthetic “measures its distance” from theatrical practice.3 As such they also rely on professional theatrical networks to support their experimentation. While the specificities of their practice will unfold as I continue, TBA and Rimini Protokoll are productive interlocutors for a number of reasons. In similar and different ways, they challenge conventions of theatrical presentation while simultaneously re-connecting us with the fundamental elements and fundamental capacities of the medium. While they make use of the proscenium stage, they often use the techniques of other forms-sitespecific installation, sculpture, architecture, and video-to expand or redistribute the effects of theatrical engagement. Additionally, they both respond in intriguing ways to the changing social landscape brought on by new technologies, whether by incorporating those technologies into the medium of enactment or by offering counter-spaces that anachron -
personal encounter. Finally, these are both international companies companies navigate the politics and logistics of being international touring artists in their modes of address and in the ways that they organize their labor. And, in moves that trouble distinctions between form and content, both companies also incorporate issues of international politics into the structure of their work, whether engaging post-national structures of feeling in a changing European Union or in plotting the economic asymmetries of northern and southern hemispheres in a globalizing world. Both The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll explore the position of workers within globalizing networks driven by the affective labor of a service economy, asking what kinds of materials are still needed to motor this presumably “immaterial” sphere.
