BERLIN / Radialsystem NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS „EMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL“
Evil, well-dosed, stirring opera, dance and spoken theatre with arrangements from Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Tartini, Weber, Schumann, Tchaikovsky to Bartók, Britten, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and John Lennon.
"It's much better to be bad than to seem bad, because people think you're bad anyway, so you should be what others think you are and find pleasure in vice! For he that is good is mistaken." Shakespeare Sonnet 121 (transcription by Andreas Hillger)
Nicola Hümpel founded the ensemble "Nico and the Navigators" at the Bauhaus Dessau almost 25 years ago. From 1999 onwards, this music theatre company, now based in Berlin, invented its very own, wondrous world of expression. The team developed a highly poetic, visually powerful theatre and musical language, as Erwin Pilpitz once did in Vienna - in 1973 he founded the "Serapionstheater" together with the stage designer Ulrike Kaufmann - or Ariane Mnouckine, whom I admire so much - in 1964 she founded the Théâtre du Soleil with her own theatre, the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris.
Next year, to mark the 25th anniversary, there will be a new production of "Lost in Loops" together with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin from 18 February.
Until the fourth Sunday of Advent, the little everyday devils and big cynics, dodgy characters and smart alecks, demons and angry citizens, Mephisto from Gounod's "Faust" and Samiel in Weber's "Wolfsschlucht" swept across the stage of the Radialsystem, a former pumping station on the Spree, in a more than successful revival of "Empathy with the Devil".
But because good and evil are as twinned as black and white, cold and warm, day and night, sun and moon, good cop, bad cop, and indeed seem to be terribly ambivalent and multiform in general, evil must be given a specific place in man. Either man is evil a priori, in which case it would quickly become insipid, because then shamelessness would have an unrestricted boom and the whole thing would turn into a thick, unappetising slimy mush.
Nico and her Navigators, on the other hand, rely on the thesis of Rutger Bregman and his optimistic credo "Basically Good" from his book "A New History of Humanity" (Rowohlt Verlag Hamburg 2019). Immanuel Kant also had something similar in mind, locating in human beings not only a tendency towards evil but also a disposition towards good. As free human beings, can we act this way or that, or do we tend to be compulsive bipolar sausages?
From this approach, the troupe distils their self-styled "Staged Concert" with a colourful round of opera arias, songs, pop songs, poems and melodramatically used instrumental interludes. Of course, good and evil are questions of standpoint and location, deception and self-deception their numerous children's flock.
And so the production team (Nicola Hümpel, Andreas Hillger, Oliver Proske, Andreas Fuchs, Hendrik Fritze, Sophie Krause - I haven't forgotten the music, it comes later) chooses a fractured perspective for the visual realisation. Actors, singers and dancers, all on their toes in pantomime, play in and with the cameras set up sideways or placed centrally on the floor in the middle of the stage, which in turn project the looks and gestures into the eyes of the audience via a screen. Image superimpositions and double images are entirely in keeping with the pretty ambivalence, where evil inconspicuously shows its most perfidious expression under a bourgeois mask: To the idyllic chorus from Freischütz "Wir winden Dir den Jungfernkranz" a gang of thugs falls upon a man and 'balls' him up to the last shot: Six hit, seven ape. Hannah Arendt's attribution of the "banality of evil", or at least the appearance of banality, and her assessment that evil has no depth, no demonicity either, but only proliferates as a mushroom on the surface, captures it all quite well.
In "Empathy for the Devil" - a "pathetically ironic salute to the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy'" - elements of movement and spoken theatre mix with musical acts in a highly sensual performance. All 26 numbers, are carried by an excellent orchestra, which owes its specific sound to the combination of piano, harpsichord, keyboard (Matan Porat), electric guitar and other string instruments (Tobias Weber), electric bass, electric guitar (Jonathen Stockhammer), violin (Milena Wilke, Elfa Rún Kristinsdóttir), trumpet (Paul Hübner) and drumset, percussion or synthesizer (Philipp Kullen).
Familiar melodies, the insidiousness of life and its poetically ironic exaggeration: the bassist's body turns into a cello before he takes the bow and strangles the previously smiling would-be demoness in the throat. Changeable is happiness, good and evil, every shrieking jubilant tone can quickly turn into a pitiful howl of "I'm sorry".
No one should feel safe in this ambiguity, in the masks of good and evil. "For singers I set traps, they die in cold music halls." And there is not always a third party involved: What if the order to kill comes from one's own inner voice? People also keep signing the diabolical contracts of short-term gain in exchange for the decay of the soul and long-term annihilation. No matter how hard the unique break dancer and performance artist Florian Vincent Graul struggles in virtuoso contortions and tries to blow the empty crumpled sheet off the stage, it is not only for Wotan in Wagner's "Valkyrie" that this legal law of nature applies: "In eig'ner Fessel. fangen ich mich, ... den Verträgen bin ich nun Knecht" (In my own bondage. I am now a slave to the contracts).
The stylistic versatility with which the three vocal soloists André Morsch (baritone), Peyee Chen (mezzo) and Ted Schmitz (tenor) slip into their respective roles and succeed vocally and dramatically as Peter Grimes, the demon from Rubinstein's opera of the same name, Mephisto, Deianira, Arianna, Eugene Onegin or Lenski is admirable.
The director holds back on political updates. Apart from the black T-shirt with a white federal eagle worn by right-wing groups, the theme remains on an abstract level. Admittedly, the idea for the project goes back to the 200th anniversary of the Konzerthaus Berlin and the almost simultaneous premiere anniversary of the "Freischütz" in 2021. Due to the pandemic, the original idea came to nothing: the cast had to be reduced, the programme sequence corrected and the dates postponed. "The company rehearsed in phases between the greatest hope and the deepest despair, which in a strange way reflected the state of an extremely insecure society," says dramaturge Andreas Hillger.
But aren't the lyrics "Oh no, not me / I never lost control, you are face to face with the man who sold the world" (David Bowie) or the particularly harrowing wording of the duel duet between Onegin and Lenski in view of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine enough of a speechless visualisation of the friend-foe, good-evil scheme in times of war and destabilisation?
"My enemy! Since when has our league of enmity been threatened with a hot thirst for blood! And have otherwise at every hour shared thoughts, our goods and chattels as friends. How, benighted with false hate, each seeks his former friend's blood. And death each of us doth desire. Ah, would it not be wiser now to make peace, and, ere our hands be wet with blood, to unite in old friendship? No, no, no, no!" (Tchaikovsky "Eugene Onegin", Act 2, 5th scene)
Conclusion: A great, important, gripping evening!
LINK to the article: https://onlinemerker.com/berlin-radialsystem-nico-and-the-navigators-empathy-for-the-devil/
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