[...] The times may have changed greatly but many patterns of behaviour encountered in opera persist with us to this day; closeness and distance balance each other out. But anyone wanting to know more will have to take to the search himself. That is exactly what the Berlin-based performance troupe Nico and the Navigators, under director Nicola Hümpel and stage designer Oliver Proske, has done. “Anaesthesia”, a pasticcio in honour of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death, is the heterogeneous, tentatively probing résumé of a journey into the world of the baroque. The fact that most of the actors as well as the musicians of the Franui ensemble (with whom the Navigators have already collaborated in a performance dedicated to Schubert) are dealing intensively with Handel for the first time is clearly noticeable in this ninety-minute musical theatre medley that will travel on from Halle to Hanover, Bregenz, Luxemburg and Berlin. The awakened curiosity, the intelligent mixing of dance (Yui Kawaguchi), narrative (Adrian Gillott), pantomime, drama, song, (Theresa Dlouhy, Clemens Koelbl, Terry Wey) and adaptations, skewed to differing degrees, of thirty-two Handel hits (for instance played on the dulcimer and accordion) is for all its craziness filled with an earnestness that realises Handel’s microcosm and the contradictory character of his time more accurately than any corny popular humour. Not everything works, some of it does appear to be overloaded, but at no point do the Navigators draw on Handel’s vocabulary of sounds, gestures and emotions simply as a model for trite amusement or crass updatings. [...]

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