A dangerous bedazzlement

ON LITTLE CLOUDS OF POWDER Here’s to losing control: Nico and the Navigators ignite the Radialsystem with their intoxicating "Anaesthesia", based on the works of G. F. Handel "Why does a rabbit running across a country road at night suddenly freeze in the middle of the road and get itself run over?" asks our guide through this “Anaesthesia”. He himself gives us an immediate answer: "It is spellbound by the beauty of the headlights that are racing towards it and about to tear it to pieces." With "Anaesthesia" director Nicola Hümpel and her crew, alias Nico and the Navigators, tread a line that passes between "Memento mori" and a state of narcosis: a menacing yet tantalising spiral out of control that is at once full of joy and sorrow. Just as the anaesthetised patient casts a final look at the neon lamp hanging over him before falling into wonderful worlds and bottomless depths in which body and mind become one, so the audience is to be brought fully out of its senses. "Et in Arcadia Ego" is written across the torso of one dancer, who was previously even carried around like a statue but is now to be seen bounding across the stage of the Radialsystem. "Anaesthesia" is a baroque dance on the edge of a precipice that brings comic potential to music taken from over twenty different Handel operas. This operatic performance – with the subheading "Handel with care" - premiered in June at the Handel festival in Halle on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the death of George Frideric Handel. In 17th century London, if the opera house programme was less than well received, the baroque opera director would obtain the scores of successful productions from other opera houses in order that the new set pieces should give a boost to the director’s own less popular works. And so the pasticcio opera came about. Nico and the Navigators, together with the thirteen-man Austrian musical troupe Franui, use the form to bring together fragments of Handel’s work in a production that will give an idea of what baroque is to opera novices without ever shying away from those preconceived ideas we use to compose a picture of this historical and artistic period. Men in sheep’s clothing We see men in sheepskins alongside the most formidable frills, out of which hands poke and look about, we see and hear energetic dance and song solos performed in tandem and duets for three. Lovers, rivals and acrobats sway in and out of line and into round dances. There is a constant blowing into cupped hands to produce little clouds of powder that soar into the air then float down to the ground particle by particle. At times everyone moves as if in slow motion, coming together to form poses like tableaux in gold frames. Sumptuous group images of ladies and boys, man and animal emerge and disintegrate. Then an explosion of movement and voices. Youths dangle from the ceiling, feathers are plucked from every nook of the stage. The number of performers on stage and the number of intertwined limbs never seem to logically correspond... It would be easy to drift off and get lost in this baroque cathedral of sounds and images, were it not for Adrian Gillott’s sarcastic and clownish commentary: "So that is what baroque looks like(?)" The plush battlefield of associations, lying somewhere between absolutism and bewigged splendour, makes one crave yet more kitsch and more knock-out punches, until in the midst of this delirium the programmed reawakening is effected. Gillott, the only speaker, leads us through Nico’s multi-dimensional jungle of images but is also liable to freeze from time to time, needing to be “freed” by his buddies on stage. Because language does not go a long way in wild Arcadia, where everything is feeling, movement, sound. Only poetry can be of help, and maybe irony too. Nico and the Navigators prove themselves to be masters of both over the course of the evening. To say nothing of the feats of singing and dancing of both troupes.

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