Vote for the horizon!

"Nico and the Navigators": One of the most original German troupes gets famous. Some noticed them just late, others knew it immediately, but everybody agrees: A spectre is haunting Europe, needing no manifesto to earn adoration, and it answers to the name of Nico and the Navigators. While sounding like a pop group, they are a troupe, most likely the best in the off-scene of Berlin and beyond. Their career developed rapidly, and this story of success culminates in the fact of being so untypical and contrary to the Zeitgeist, being without any calculation. Everything you do on stage nowadays, the video-grumbling and the blood-sperm-adulteration, they refuse it right from the beginning. Instead just old fashion: Humour and poetry, stubbornness, melancholy and misfortune. Again this Swiss way of soft subversion, one tends to believe, Häusermann, Kienberger, Marthaler – and now this: They are from Lübeck, from Hamburg, Dessau and Berlin. But nevertheless: Nico and the Navigators are Swiss by honour of their art. “Why deny your descent at the slope” – thus, they say it themselves! That sentence originates from their scenic setting „Lucky days, Fremder!” (Lucky Days, stranger). Red carpet, a green wall, and in between six solitary islands in man-shape. The wall consists of several drawers, which are sometimes bright yellow and moreover not really reliable: When needed most, they stay shut or, one needs to see it by himself, they swallow the staircase. “Never again forever proud” says a beautiful sentence in this play, in which the distance already starts with the next human being. “Vote for the horizon” is only another way of saying “I love you”, it just sounds cooler. „Lucky days, Fremder!” dealt with parting, came out at the Sophiensæle in Berlin in 1999 and succeeded, soon becoming a sleeper. Previously there had already been two productions at the Bauhaus Dessau, “DenkVorGang” in 1996 and “Ich war auch schon mal in Amerika” (I have also been in America) in 1998. Like everything that followed they were directed by Nicola Hümpel, with stage design by Oliver Proske, and illumination by Peter Meier. In 1997 the name of the group emerges, and from then on they gain momentum : Every year a new production, all of them modules for a monument of Sisyphus-like size called “Menschenbilder” (Images of man). “Edith, the pharmacy is arriving!” The director, born 1967 in Lübeck, took courses at Achim Freyer and at the Bauhaus in Dessau. But you cannot learn how fantasy makes fools of everybody and doubles. You cannot learn it anyway, at best the method you need. The performances are coolly composed, they are alert, clever and sly, their Dada-like logic makes the universe and the perception at one, and the perspective resembles one of a somnambulist shortly before the fall. Wonderful sentences like Morse messages out of the gutter or from outer space are announcing what nobody understands but what is evident to everybody: “comparatively temporary accomplished” matters to be a legitimate statement, and a threat (or maybe promise?) is “Edith, the pharmacists are arriving!” At the same time there are games almost without words, through which each nested sentence doubles its significance. Tamer of speech and miming are at work here, poets of the absurd working with their whole body, who are taking each sense as literal as possible until it evaporates. It is shown how one walks, lies, dreams, and why one aspires upward but never succeeds, but also why just this quickens one. Contradiction as aim in life, the brightest smile as the most toxic arrow, and a consequence is anyway just shown in a mess - many silent, evil picture puzzles about failing and its glory. In the first scene of Eggs on Earth (2000) the actors are approaching a shoeshine machine like one finds in hotel corridors. They use it and disappear. Only the legs are still visible, and they are delivering chased character sketches by striding to the machine or by philandering, by maltreating the on/off switch or by caressing it and then starting the day shining freshly. When one sees the legs again afterwards, one knows already everything about those they carry. They are creatures who intend to get ahead. One sees them already tumbling upstairs, in free fall. Hümpel does not denounce her characters, she just exposes them, but still loves them. Her mockery is tender, not cynical; the butcher knives nevertheless are sharpened. “We want to show the bare human soul”, she says, “to take away all possibilities of shelter and stabilisation, so that the actor is reduced just to his face, his existence and his two sentences.” The character, settings and situations are created by improvisation. One agrees about a topic, a colour, a taste, and than one starts to spin, each for himself and everybody together. A controlled collective frenzy, not adding but multiplying the creativity of the individual, and catapulting them in not anticipated levels of inspiration and association. Such a method can only work in a group being old enough to be connive together but young enough to surprise each other. In the spirit of Tati, Allen and Keaton Additionally there is the work at the table, an écriture automatique, where countless pieces of phrases are de- and each time newly reconstructed until they finally have attain the obviousness of the abstruse for which N & N are famous. We construct our productions like a painter is constructing his paintings,”, Nico Hümpel says, “which is a complicated process concerning instinct and intellect, where you should never yield to the desire of finishing something.” By composing the performance out of the abundance of the material she pays attention to keep everything in abeyance. She avoids motivations and messages. ”It is important to find the second where a scene has to be stopped in order to stay open.” The method reminds of Pina Bausch, and the results therefore are often labelled as “dance theater”, sometimes also as “image theater”. But this crazy mixture of ordinary life and crash can of course not be pegged as something . Where “the meaning of an item proves itself merely after its use” (Oliver Proske”, there is each attempt to characterize in vain. Logically The Items, following Parting and Work, the topic of the next production Lili in putgarden in 2001. It deals less with the functional, but more with the emotional added value. After all one can fall in love with a vacuum cleaner. It just depends on the story by which one is tied, and on the degree of sentimentality one permits to oneself. “Tyrannical souvenirs” and unfamiliar teacups are able to complicate life quite a lot, and the foldable stage design, partly tent, partly bed for lolling and lounging, is swallowing people and spitting out coat-hangers. In 2002 originated “Familienrat” (Family council). Proskes stage is now a particularly cunning all-purpose trap, where shoeshelves are mutating to staircases, tables to shower booths and swords not to plowshares for a long time. Here the items are changing and not the people. Only the fortress family is eternal and invincible. Christmas, the festival of fear, makes flakes of bread snow and unites the cripples of the family in an affectionate mendacious round. Evil to him who evil does, nonsense to him who doesn’t. But they are not opposed to families, they are one for themselves, merely without any tenure. This includes surrendering of internal copyright; each scene invented by an actor may be used by each other, may be changed, and plagiarized. This works for the trust they have for each other, on stage and in real life. While talking to them they revel about their honesty and their liberty in their relations, about love and security which does not cramp, and loyalty which does not lead to indifference. A group of commons, each one a poet and athlete, in the spirit of Chaplin, Allen, Keaton and Tati. All are about 30 years old, and only few of them are actors by education – maybe therefore they appear to be so authentic and clear: each face a landscape, each body the tempest raging over it. Their names are: Martin Clausen, Annedore Kleist, Lyon Roque, Verena Schonlau, Patric Schott, Peter Stock, Isabelle Stoffel, Lajos Talamonti, Sinta Tamsjadi, Julius Weiland. One should remember these names, for it is possible to encounter them elsewhere soon. Their newest production, having its first night on December 6th at the Sophiensæle in Berlin, will be the last one in this combination. With growing success, already across Europe, the horizon widens and the desire for discoveries increases. Therefore Nico Hümpel will participate in an international coproduction next. The old productions are being played – there is no lack of invitations. But now there will be the Navigators once more, pure. “Kain, Wenn und Aber” (Kain, If and But) is the name of the new play, being about decisions and their impossibility. To be or not to be has never really been answered – maybe it is easier by slapstick than by Shakespeare. All great questions have a slightly nagging core. So then: “The first decision means: to myself – brave – alone”, thus the play begins, and one anticipates already how the tiny eyes are sparkling, while fidgety fingers are disproving it at the same time.

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