A play of sound, light and movement

The Bregenz Festival presents the sensual, enchanting Handel pastiche "Anaesthesia" by Nico and the Navigators & Franui. Bregenz - "Power is like powder, when the wind chances," muses the dandy, and "Anaesthesia" comes across as feather-lightly and subtle, as a narcotic of movement, images, sound, light, philosophy, quotations and irony. Cult director Nicola Hümpel and her music-, dance- and actor-tested Navigators roam Arcadia in search of traces of what the typhoon of history has left for us: "Left for a while, soon will be back." The scene traces the Baroque attitude to life in a historically informed way, while Franui makes use of Handel's music - 32 pieces from 24 works. The arias, sung delicately and devotedly by Theresa Dlouhy, Innsbruck's Clemens Kölbl and countertenor Terry Wey, like other numbers, remain largely untouched; others are broken up. Eventful, how the saxophone mixes into the melismas, dulcimer and accordion open a new sound world, the tenderness of the tuba, the quality of the violins. Finger play over soprano pearls, disturbed affects, the discovery of the material and the intensity of body language, raging forces, the ceremony of melancholy and the singing Kölbl, hanging upside down from the stage portal: a baroque personage tests in loose scenes without external effort highly aesthetic and ravishingly sensual awareness of life, art, poetry, brutality and the amazement of an epoch.

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