Theatre puts real faces to a city's graphs and pie charts

CITIZENS of the Victorian capital are actors in a production that dissects their vital statistics.

100% Melbourne

MELBURNIANS, according to theatre creator Helgard Haug, are some of the friendliest people in the world: "As long as you don't come too close."

Haug allows herself a quiet laugh as she dissects the differences between the people of the Victorian capital and those who populate her home base, Berlin.

"It's is not a bad thing at all but here there is an unsaid agreement that you don't cross your ways. It's very polite," she says. "In Berlin, people are more direct. They greet people and confront people in the same way. It is more blunt, to the point. The people and the society are different."

Difference -- in age, sex, socio-economic standing, opinion, political leanings, to name a few -- is at the heart of the latest international production by Rimini Protokoll, the Berlin-based actorless theatre collective of which Haug is a founder.

100% Melbourne takes the idea of statistical data and gives it a human face -- or, in this case, 100 faces. "We aim to bring the city to the stage, 1 per cent at a time," Haug says of 100%, variations of which have performed to sell-out crowds in Berlin, Vancouver and Vienna. "Our idea was to take these statistics and have the various areas of the society represented on stage by real people."

Using last year's census data, participants were selected to reflect Melbourne demographics. Haug and her fellow Rimini Protokoll directors, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, selected the first participant-performer, a Melbourne City Council number-cruncher "used to working with this kind of data".

The council employee then had to choose someone who fitted into one of the remaining 99 representative statistical categories. And so the process of elimination went until all 100 categories were full of eligible participants willing to act as human graphs and pie charts on stage at Melbourne's Town Hall from today.

"I think the really brilliant thing in Melbourne is we are performing in the city hall. It brings it right into the city's centre of politics and decision-making," Haug says.

When the 100 performers are assembled on stage, the directors throw mostly unrehearsed questions at them, to which they can answer yes or no by moving to either side of the stage.

"They can be personal questions, from a catalogue. It might be about their housing situation, immigration or are you a member of a church? Are you politically involved?" Haug says.

"There are some chances for small monologues, but it's mostly yes or no answers. It's about forming majorities and minorities, actually seeing that in action."

The oldest person in the performance is 89 and the youngest just one; Haug says Rimini Protokoll has worked hard to ensure it has a broadly representative cross-section of the southern city.

"This is a great city," she says. "And numbers can tell a lot about it, and the society . . . but our interest is to find the people behind the numbers here in Melbourne. We want the story behind it."

Rimini Protokoll is recognised as the leader in reality-trend theatre. Last year, it was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale and impressed Sydney Festival audiences with Radio Muezzin, featuring Egyptian Islamic prayer callers talking about their lives.

"When we started doing this kind of theatre with real people 10 or 12 years back, we really didn't want it to be happening on the fringe . . . we wanted to be in big venues and on the big stage," Haug says. "And we found open doors for that. We take a journalistic approach . . . We're always looking for concepts and new approaches. And that seems to work."

Haug says she is looking forward to watching how the big global social questions of immigration, politics and society play out in Melbourne.

But among the questions to be asked, there is one she can't wait to get the answer to: "It seems to be the big question here . . . when will Victoria run out of water?"

100% Melbourne is at Melbourne Town Hall today to Sunday.