From the very first second, this performance has a form: somnambulistic already the performers enter the stage, somnambulistic they remain, even when they pass through the most diverse stages of hysteria and rapture. The faces are made up into masks, the hairstyles locked into a state of stormy dishevelment. There are types but no characters, recurring behaviors but no characters, texts but no dialogue, and interactions but no plot. The elegantly designed stage set in simple cream is itself once again a duplication of a stage, but also and above all a surprise bag that opens, from which the actors climb, but also those objects are taken out that are unquestionably at the center of this performance. What is presented, lovingly, enthusiastically and inventively, is a world of disenchanted everyday things, which, in an ironic way, of course, are to be enchanted again. They are, that comes to the aid of such an intention, things not from our present, but from the seventies, as one could already admire them in the retro-regressively tuned installations of the last two Berlin Biennials. Hideous appliances that one loves precisely because they are so unpretentiously ugly: Vacuum cleaners, plastic glass carrying baskets, an inflatable pillow, bags, sweaters, carpet cleaners, tea cups, and more. All this is released for adoration on the one hand, on the other hand and at the same time for creative play, torn out of all household practical context, put into highly comical new contexts. All use is quotation: falsifying, grotesque, ironizing, leaning on the original context. Sometimes softer, sometimes louder, sometimes more transparent, sometimes absurdly commented, this continuous quotation, cut into individual numbers, this running band of consumer articles, is accompanied by a seamless musical carpet. This, however, consciously sets a counter-accent to the world of goods, just like the performers, whose somnambulistic acting, whose masklike quality still counteracts each of their behaviors to the merely citational. What Nico and the Navigators conjure up on the stage on the basis of this principle, however, is first and foremost one thing: splendid, grotesquely infatuated, dazzling comedy. Be it the loud and eloquent praise of a coat hanger, be it the mini-dramolet about a stolen bicycle with an air cushion fight or a tea bag sales demonstration that ends in chaos and destruction: the timing is always perfect, the absurd-comic accents are precisely set, the direction and actors hit the line between recognizability and exaggeration with pinpoint accuracy, which must be hit if one wants to drift neither into mere satire nor into mere nonsense. Lilli in Puttgarden is clever, unpretentious and funny, in a word: pure joy.

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