Cargo Sofia by Rimini Protokoll as Transit on the Threshold: A Performative Crossing of European Borderlines Within the Own City

• Annika Wehrle ^[1]
  1. [1] Institute for Theatre Studies of Mainz
• Localización: De fronteres i arts escèniques / coord. por Núria Santamaria, Francesc Foguet i Boreu, 2015, ISBN 978-84-943779-0-7, págs. 407-413
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • One of the most striking characteristics of contemporary theatre is the exploration, the playing with and the reduction of borders. This trend includes spatial borders, the borderlines between actors and spectators, between fictional and non-fictional elements. Such strategies tend the blur perception as the habitual process of framing situations as theatrical acts or everyday occurrences. One of the theatre companies who have committed themselves to challenging these borderlines — in a spatial, aesthetic and personal way — is the German director-collective Rimini Protokoll. Based on the example of one of their productions entitled Cargo Sofia — which debuted in Basel/Switzerland in 2006 and toured Europe and Asia afterwards — this paper focuses on the performative ways of challenging borders and thresholds, on the theatrical opportunities for producers and recipients to create, recodify and incorporate the urban space by moving through it and finally on the possibility for theatre to rethink borderlines within its own perspectives. Furthermore, this paper lines out how geographical borderlines can turn into theatrical thresholds and in which ways theatre can externalise the constructive character of borders as such.