Metamorphosis as a continuum: In "Kain, Wenn & Aber" by the Berlin-based performer group "Nico and the Navigators", movements, meanings and images begin to flow. In the beginning there is the confession. There is the chair on stage, behind which the performers step individually, their gaze directed into the distance. The gaze speaks of the decision that has been made. The first one resolutely pulls her beret over her head; the one with the golden buckles on his shoe, on the other hand, seems to have forgotten his mission, hesitantly feels the backrest. For this, his colleague stands all the more wide-eyed with the "Yes, I do" look in the organ sound. "The first decision is to myself - alone," she will say later, when the other ensemble members of "Nico and the Navigators" have spread out on the stage and unfold their parallel worlds there. "Cain, if & but," the Berlin-based performing group's new production, is metamorphosis as continuum. Not a telling of a story, but a succession of scenarios, not so much plot lines as moods, sometimes gliding into one another, sometimes sharply severed. Cohesion is provided by the motifs; sentences that reappear and, spoken by another, change their meaning, or movements. The Basque woman, for instance, hands out leaflets; agitational but silent, she forms her messages from the semicircle of the stage down, while her colleague below shoves a sock into his mouth. Two others wrestle their clothes off. Later, the flyers become passports, then tarot cards, holding a promise in a bygone language: "There's someone in your circle of colleagues who is very fond of you." Sometimes the phrases fall in passing, and when a realization is reached, it remains a bit of a mystery. Ah, one might think, meaning in the balance: drawing an arc of tension from the both to the also and then letting the wide field shimmer. Hasn't one had enough of ambivalence, this most popular of all gentle attitudes? As the play says, "Rien ne va plus, and now." Director Nicola Hümpel is not concerned with the indecisiveness that ambivalence is usually understood as. That is a "nuisance of the times." What does interest her is the "dualistic principle": the simultaneity of pain and happiness, for example. The moment is always decisive, says Hümpel. At this moment, the story begins, but in the mind of the viewer. The stage set, this gray-blue divisible semicircle - gray as the color that leaves everything in limbo - is the open, undecided space. Is it a wall, a grove or a parlor? Everyone may see something different in it, and in any case it is always concretizing itself anew, becoming a revolutionary cellar, a marketplace, or a space station. Hümpel pushes the moment further, then comes the cut. As in the visual arts, from which it comes: the line that is not smothered in ornament. Transferring the pictorial process to theater means "making a poked question visible." The successful viewer thus navigates in the piece as in another medium. In doing so, he follows the procedure of the Navigators themselves: To transfer principles of one medium into another. This leads to the question of how to actually describe what comes out of it: "design theater" sounds just as disrespectful as "puppet theater" and leads to wrong paths: as if it were all about the pretty surface. Hümpel herself does not know how to describe her work. But she is all the more precise about what she wants to achieve with it: to lead the viewer back into thoughtfulness."

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