Beyond the center

"Kain, Wenn & Aber" - Farewell to Nico and the Navigators You turn the semicircularly bent wooden box around for the last time: Just a gray-blue wooden box? Depends on what you make of it. And so the box is suddenly a seesaw, the seesaw becomes a bar, behind which someone is shaking invisible cocktails, while in front someone leans up as only drunks do, and a woman asks for a light with a lascivious gesture, as if it could be all night. This scene is the encore of Nico and the Navigators' new evening, and it sums up with timeless beauty the group's six years of work: figuring out what things tell us about and how they reflect back on people, whose sentences in turn become objects. Director and artist Nicola Hümpel, set designer Oliver Proske, and their seven performers unleash worlds with this style of play. Whereas other independent groups in recent years have resisted psychologizing narrative on stage through experimental deconstruction, Nico and the Navigators have been concerned with unobtrusiveness, designing more than playing, and creating pieces in which people are kneadable primordial matter. On stage, one transforms into a barber, parting his client's hair right, parting it left again, until the decision-making problem dissolves in the dishevelment of the hairstyle. The title "Cain, If & But" suggests that it is about a modern catechism of individual self-assertion in awareness of Old Testament forces. "Do I actually determine what happens, or does my destiny determine?" is the title at the beginning of the evening, which is announced as the last in this ensemble constellation. Nicola Hümpel, head of the group, wants to work internationally in the future, after having won hearts at numerous festivals at home and abroad. So the decision-making process could be tried out right away. Which strategy does one choose? One creeps concentratedly with a pendulum over the stage, another trains box punches, tarot cards are laid. The multi-functional wooden elements on the gray-blue painted stage rise to platforms on which incendiary speeches are held - appeals that are unobtrusively addressed more to the speaker himself than to the audience. A paper that is studied closely turns out to be a horoscope. But things have their cracks, any hope is chilled with gentle irony. "Fucking astrology," the woman later curses, ushering in the second part of the evening: There were once decisions that were made and bring back memories of them being made. The stories that took place in between float silently like balloons above the figures, who move like lemurs in time loops. An oppressively beautiful evening, as true to form as it is gentle, that wrings a few happy moments from human states of exhaustion. Nico and the Navigators are now touring Europe with "Kain, Wenn & Aber" after their farewell piece was first shown at Berlin's Sophiensaele.

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