Buster Keaton sits in the air

Berlin-based theater company Nico and the Navigators performed "Eggs on Earth" at the Muffathalle. Is it too late to start early?" Perplexed, one young man wonders. Another keeps trying to get through on the phone to a Dr. Fock who is in denial. Seven people, visible only from the waist down, parade past a shoe shine machine - one has to look proper when looking for a job. Behavioral rituals and phenomena of the working world are shown in the performance "Eggs on Earth," with which Nico and the Navigators from Berlin made a guest appearance at the Muffathalle. The theater troupe around director Nicola Hümpel, founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, already has an international reputation and could be seen at the last Spiel-Art-Festival in Munich with "Lucky Days, fremder" and "Lilli in putgarden". Both performances form with "Eggs on Earth" the trilogy "Menschenbilder", a bizarre society panorama. The performers move as if on raw eggs, on and in front of a sky-blue multifunctional box (stage design: Oliver Proske). Business suits, uptight grins, correct behavior - the slow egg dance to soft music slips again and again into the grotesque and into the (body) oblique. When Julius Weiland - a younger brother of Buster Keaton - takes a run-up on the roof, you don't know whether he wants to fly or jump. Eventually, he makes himself comfortable on a chair in the air. "I want to go up. Do you want to go up, too?" Despite this credo, heads jam between chairs as if on a guillotine. Surreal slapsticks, dreamy pictorial puzzles, crazy perspectives, objects and bodies that take on a life of their own: Nico and the Navigators invent a wondrous, melancholic-comic world.

<< Back to press overview