Enthusiasm for "Nico and the Navigators" at the premiere of their new play "Der Familienrat" at the sophiensælen in Berlin Berlin. "Family ties" is a word with a double meaning, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once sined. Der Familienrat" (The Family Council), the title of the latest creation by "Nico and the Navigators", which was acclaimed at the Berlin sophiensælen, also carries such family ballast that leaves one perplexed. Frustrated, one carries around the relentlessly well-intentioned burden of parental upbringing on the youthful hump of life, feels how it prevents the upright walk, the leap into the air even. And almost wants to go crazy. Nico and the Navigators" do not do that. The small, fine, original and special ensemble around Nicola Hümpel started in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau and quickly found itself in the dilapidated charm of the avant-garde breeding ground at Hackescher Markt in Berlin-Mitte. In the new play, the actors show once again that they are no iconoclasts, no protest criers, no profile neurotics. No longer an insider tip, not yet in danger of becoming routine, their trademark is the fine humor, the quirky poetry, the quiet thinking around the corner, the wafting of at first glance confused, at second glance abysmally thoughtful slivers of language such as "They know what they should want, but they don't want anything at all". They are pedestrians in the air, pathfinders of bliss, astonished, confused, bewildered, and show that on this thoroughly organized earth one can indeed be - indeed must be - of the other star. With them, everyday tasks take on gently crazy slapstick dimensions. They stumble, they float through life, unthreatened, because dozens of guardian angels catch them again and again. They fit into no grid, no scheme, no system. They are immune to education and standardization, gifted with scatterbrainedness, dreamy smiles, thoughtful wit, beautifully unworldly, because such a cruelly bland world does not exist in their poetic imagination. These knights of the cosmic-comic shape, in which ground and abyss, sense, background and nonsense imperceptibly merge into one another, therefore also live in a cabinet wall furniture with an astounding life of its own, again deviously ingeniously constructed by Oliver Proske. The austerely beautiful wooden wonder bag is a surprise coup. Exactly the right playground for this art crossover, which Annedore Kleist, Verena Schonlau, Patric Schott, Peter Stock, Isabelle Stoffel, Sinta Tamsjadi and Julius Weiland perform in eighty thoughtfully amusing minutes. What goes on there in small stories, gentle dramas, laughable catastrophes under the seal of family custody and forced administration, will now also cheer up contemplatively between Krakow, Granada and Groningen, between Mulhouse and Montreal. It ends in Christmas peace: the snow quietly trickles as a freshly grated breadcrumb blessing and lambs bleat and mow softly and stupidly "Silent Night".

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