Are we now King Lear or just ourselves?

What times those were, the 90s in Berlin!, shouts Amelie Deuflhard enthusiastically into the foyer of the Sophiensäle. The former boss is sitting high up on one of the enchanted futuristic building blocks that set designer Oliver Proske has been making for his company Nico and the Navigators to play with in all possible variations for twenty years. And yes, a little bit of the pastel-colored multiding makes the fantastic of that time vivid once again even now. "The city was open, curious, wild," Deuflhard enthuses further, "new foundations were being formed everywhere!" and one almost felt one could grasp it, as she described Berlin as a "completely different city." The performance theater was blood young. No wonder the crumpled figures of the first navigators Martin Clausen and Patric Schott hit like comets back then. They danced pas de deux with vacuum cleaners, joined bodies and objects in intimate rupture pilot marriages, and dreamwalking slapsticks became an entire world of human imagery. Tati, Bach and Cindy Lauper A long time ago, one thinks now, watching the new play "The Future of Yesterday", with which the director Nicola Hümpel celebrates the 20th founding anniversary of her Nico troupe. For the melancholy rippling dance-music-memory-potpourri in front of a video wall revolves only around its own picturesque niceness. A table drumming becomes a body of fate, a bag a woman's mania. The Navigators have made themselves comfortable in their cultivated oddity. Nevertheless, with their professional interdisciplinarity, their work on the Gesamtkunstwerk between Jaques Tati, Bach, Tiergarten and Cindy Lauper, they remain something very special. And if only because they lack the usual theory connection of the performance culture. Emotional, touching moments Something you can't accuse their older step-siblings She She Pop of, who already started talking their heads off five years earlier in the theory forge of the Giessen Institute for Applied Theater Studies, got together to form "Kollektiv!" and are now celebrating their 25th anniversary at HAU at the same time. Unlike the Navigators, She She Pop is a theory theater animal as written in the book of post-dramatics. And yet, in their extra brittle, discursive play arrangements, they create emotional, even touching moments that immediately make you understand how communication can make you a better person. May sound naïve, but it is especially difficult and was just again amazingly clear in the festive revival of their successful play "Testament". Generation and art dispute "This isn't funny at all now, what's happening here!" an older gentleman is outraged in it. "You can't treat us like this!" Dragging all the weaknesses of age, all that is thoroughly private, out into the open - "that's not theater!" His name is Theo and he's approaching eighty, with two other gentlemen perched in armchairs beside him, nodding. The three are the fathers of the performers Ilia Papatheodoro, Mieke Matzke and Fanni Halmburger, who are looking for "King Lear" in their fathers. Just a moment ago, all six were reading the Shakespeare text from the wall projection, but every few verses the stern daughters intervened, trying to nudge their fathers out of the role of king and into the experiential world of their own aging through merciless questions and comments. Theoretical theater animal She She Pop Until the old people's collars burst: what are we here, "Lear" or just ourselves? A question that leads right into the dazzling heart of She She Pop theater. It is therefore a quite wonderful idea, in addition to a book presentation and a "gala" next Saturday, to celebrate the quarter century with the revival of the emblematic work. Eight years old now, "Testament" has lost nothing of its former freshness: a playful essay on the value and transformation of life and of theater itself. For the generation and art dispute that they fight out in it is as real as it is staged. It is an excerpt of the tough, unresolved dispute between the performers and their fathers, which they wrote down during rehearsals and now make into another theme of the evening. A power and self-empowerment game And while they argue about what is imposition, what is challenge, what is "playing," what is "performing," the fathers incidentally accomplish both: they search for what of Lear is in them and "play" what of them could be in "Lear." When She She Pop steps onto the stage, first of all nothing is stage anymore, and yet everything. The beloved distance between spectators and performers is eliminated and the freedom of art is unhinged by the direct contact with non-art. A game of power and self-empowerment, then, that jumps back and forth between literary, personal and political levels and renders the predicates "real", "fake" meaningless.

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