A scenic birthday present – 20 years of Nico and the Navigators: “Yesterday’s future”

For two decades the members of "Nico and the Navigators" have performed, toured and won awards. In the anniversary show, the performers review their impressions in a very personal way. For critic André Mumot a great evening. They deserve to celebrate themselves: for twenty years now, Nico and the Navigators have been making theater, intertwining performances with dance and musical theater, winning prizes, touring the world. So now it's time for a retrospective, for the big anniversary event, which will premiere where the ensemble achieved its first great successes as artists in residence in 1999, in Berlin's Sophiensälen. Melancholy discourse on one's own origins In "The Future of Yesterday," director Nicola Hümpel gathers seven fellow performers in front of a stage set by Oliver Proske to begin an intimate as well as melancholy discourse on their own origins, both familial and artistic. That is what is really enchanting about this production, that it revels in memories and at the same time makes remembering itself its theme. The relationship to the past, to one's own family history and to one's artistic career. These reflections are not only addressed in detail, they are translated by the dancers Yui Kawaguchi and Anna Luise Recke into ravishing movements, into a catalog of their different forms of expression, their roles and choreographies, which they let briefly flare up in a commentary and self-ironic manner. A revue of the "Revue-passieren". In a ravishing number, founding member Patric Schott reviews all the phrases he was allowed to utter in 19 productions, and Martin Clausen explains, quite casually, what they would never have tolerated in a "Nico" performance in the past: a song like "Time after Time" by Cindy Lauper, for example, which Anna-Luise Recke turns into a danced, tragicomic love duet together with Israeli dancer Michael Shapira. This evening is about more than just the personal. It's about migrations in family history, about European Jews who emigrated to Israel, about Nazi and postwar pasts in German families, about the American melting pot, which singer Ted Schmitz recounts by listing the interconnections of his own family lineage. A weightless anniversary evening

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