Whole-Body Poets

Nico & the Navigators dazzle in Rossini's 'Small Mass' We will remember how 'music theatre' initially gave good old opera a leg-up onto the merry-go-round of its possibilities and helped it to gather momentum – with each rotation came new images, for each generation its own in-depth sharpening of the image. Nico and the Navigators is the name of this Berlin-based theatre troupe, which, using a mix of styles incorporating song, acting, dance, slapstick and tragicomedy succeeds in producing a music theatre version of a Latin Catholic ritual mass, which had its premiere at the Theater Erfurt, as part of the Weimar Arts Festival: in close to two hours, without an interval, the group of performers, down to the last member of the company, use the expressive force of body language to 'navigate' their way through Gioachino Rossini's 'Petite messe solennelle', here labelled “Oratorio as image theatre”. 
Nicola Hümpel and Oliver Proske, both around the age of forty, are the founders of the collective of “whole-body poets”, which began to develop its aesthetic thirteen years ago. After founding the company at the Bauhaus Dessau they first gained international recognition with their 'Menschenbilder' cycle in Berlin's Sophiensaele. And now, following on from the Schubert production 'Wo du nicht bist' and the Handel pasticcio opera 'Anaesthesia', they have moved onto Rossini's late-period mass, which the composer decided to create 34 years after his last opera. The aged maestro of Opera buffa, mellowed by his years in Paris, dedicated it to his dear God, to whom he humorously addresses the following: 'You know it well! A little science, a little heart, that is all! So may you be blessed and grant me Paradise.' A piquant ambivalence resides in the sentences just as it does in the opening of the performance: Rossini's music nonchalantly mixes melodic fervour with a nod to the most simplistic accompanying passages, Nico and the Navigators bring to it a kind of theatre theology, building up the elements of a staged controversy over image worship that takes in faith, misbelief and superstition, doubtful and dilemma-ridden commandments, questions of religion, ritual, humanity, desire and psychological violence in Christian utopia, jokes included. Yet these 'statements of belief in the 21st century' do not mean to answer anything, but rather to simply ask questions – in a flood of music gently rippling through the parts of the Latin mass for soloists, choir and instruments. 
Nicola Hümpel's conception and direction of the piece, combined with the revolving props of Oliver Proske's stage, offer a round dance of seemingly everyday people caught up in elaborately stylised or trashily exaggerated images and sketches, which don't so much duplicate and update the mass texts from 'Kyrie Eleison' to 'Agnus Dei' as associatively fray them, counterpoint them. Movement pervades the whole: four soloists and eight choristers are constantly at work, even the three instruments, two pianos (SooJin Anjou, David Zobel) and a harmonium (Jan Gerdes), are repeatedly brought on and off the stage. There is no stability; everything flows, even the agile British conductor Nicholas Jenkins alters his position and often lets himself be drawn into the action. One of the principles by which Nico and the Navigators work involves a game abounding with improvisation which has been practiced and worked out in long rehearsals and workshops. The singers of the production are cast according to their ability to perform – singing voice, role playing and individuality are equally important. Before two pianos glide onto the stage and choristers populate it as if by accident for the Kyrie, it begins with informal prose: again and again spoken sections infiltrate the parts of Rossini's mass, with four pantomimic performers acting almost as instances of different situations brought on by life and faith: one who we identify as a sort of priest, psychiatrist or shaman; a rationalist or scientist; a down-and-out mafioso, and a seraphic angel-figure in red, the whirling Yui Kawaguchi, with her wondrously supple mime and dance. Each of them varies the symbols of the schism of human existence, the ambivalence felt in front of the abyss of feelings. It is the lightness of the choreography within the abundance of enigmatic images, the dazzling humour, the virtuoso grotesqueness and the nonsensical, playful activity that make this production so compellingly entertaining, so full of delight and tension in equal measure. And it is Rossini's music, flowing so effortlessly, artfully elegant and yet seemingly artless, that structures this breathlessly disturbing search for meaning within a wide array of images. A philosophy in movement, a dance on the projection screens of agnosticism, perfectly timed imaginings of distractedness – high art indeed from Nico and the Navigators. 
During the 'Agnus Dei' the singer of the aria pulls the performer by the sleeve for so long that he appears to no longer have any will of his own. Performers dislocate themselves in wild rhythms or fall to the floor, two dancers combine in a pas-de-deux-cum-fight. The 'Amen' at the end of the Credo is annoyingly repeated by a single singer until another buys her silence with cash. The end is greeted with an ovation. The Rossini-Navigation project moves to Berlin's Radialsystem in autumn. Next year it will travel to France, Austria and Luxembourg.

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