Childhood patterns in the breakfast roll

Nico and the Navigators show their new piece "The Family Council". Dessau/MZ. The rolls of childhood are pale and dry, they swell in the mouth like suffocating gags or crumble at the slightest touch. Certainly, you could form small balls of dough from them or pierce them with your finger - but of course you shouldn't want to. And even if you believe the nutrition ideologists, who supposedly prefer healthier bottom halves to the actually more desirable counterpart: Crumbs always remain in the end, which crunch underfoot and can only be removed with great difficulty. With their new piece "Der Familienrat" (The Family Council), which after performances in Berlin and Düsseldorf can now be a guest at the Bauhaus Dessau thanks to financial support from the National Performance Network, Nico and the Navigators search for childhood patterns in a present. In the process, they appear more lost and thin-skinned than ever in the dark corner under the stairs, at the climbing frame or at the festive table - which, of course, does not degenerate into dreariness with the troupe, which is now at home at the sophiensælen in Berlin-Mitte. The ensemble around director and costume designer Nicola Hümpel is already protected from this by Oliver Proskes' stage design, which once again turns out to be a chamber of wonders: double doors here unexpectedly turn into actual wings, solid walls open up into secret chambers and a shoe rack gives itself justified hope of a new life as a show staircase. The dark red and the brass fittings give the room a prestigious appearance that certainly makes one think of a "good parlor". It is also such a protective and shameful space in which the seven performers develop their surprisingly consistent characters. Behind the repressions and compromises that seem to be necessary for the survival of every family, they discover the pecking orders of generations and genders, the culmination of which was last seen in Michael Thalheimer's film adaptation "Das Fest". In the case of the Navigators, however, no cascades of words are needed to stir up or cover up what has been kept silent. The experiences express themselves directly in physical defects that begin as a nervous tic and can end in small disasters. The fact that even from such disasters one has to find one's way back into an everyday life in reality visibly suits the ostensibly anecdotal and yet psychologically interlocking style of the ensemble. The two new actors fit into the acting spectrum in an almost ghostly way: One almost has the feeling as if exactly these two faces had been missing until now. That they now mingle in that "Family Affair", which is once described in the somnambulistic soundtrack as "brothers under arms", remains a happy coincidence.

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