Deceiving the chaos within

Sophiensaele: "Kain, Wenn & Aber" by Nico and the Navigators Directed by Nicola Hümpel, Stage Oliver Proske At the beginning, order still reigns. Illuminated in blue, the stage in Berlin's Sophiensaele radiates the cool elegance of a showroom. Three movable stage modules give the space a clear architecture: in front of a screen in panorama format, two high cuboids face each other; in front of them is a curved element, a low bench. In the end, disorder triumphs: paper lies on the floor, as if someone in the office had opened the window at the wrong time. The leather seat of the wooden chair, which stood in a cone of light in the foreground at the beginning, has been folded upwards. And a jacket lies crumpled in the stage periphery. "You have to fool the chaos inside you," says a character in Nico and the Navigators' latest production, "Cain, If and But," which revolves around the theme of life choices and the everyday agony of choice. So it's about nothing less than so-called free will. First of all, you can think about it philosophically. And how does one arrive at decisions despite personal chaos? That probably lies again in the psychology of the individual. Nico and the Navigators is currently the most successful ensemble in Berlin's independent scene. The group was founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. It was discovered by Berlin's Sophiensaele, where the young performers with the rather unconventional professional biographies around director Nicola Hümpel continue to produce as artists in residence. This year they will be touring France, the Netherlands, Budapest and Russia. Nico and the Navigators is certainly one of the most striking acts Germany's independent scene has to offer. Why? In a short time, the ensemble has developed an idiosyncratic signature, which in "Cain, If and But" also moves aesthetically between Buster Keaton slapstick, Grand Guignol, dance and precise movement theater and the everyday high-pressure realism of TV shows and German regulars' table speeches: "What's going on in Colombia? And what about the CIA? And the destruction of money? To which account has the money been destroyed?" rages Lajos Talamonti from the ceiling of one of the cuboids. Meanwhile, Peter Stock sits mute and uptight in a pale light in a wooden chair. For in the Navigators, the principle of the simultaneous stage prevails: the viewer looks into a production and improvisation workshop of three female and four male performers, who are not working on an existing play text, but on an impressive image theater. The big meaning is lost anyway. "You must have a vision," Annedore Kleist shouts at her male counterpart. And he remains silent once again. And perhaps this is the recipe for the success of Nico and the Navigators: that the male actors in particular, with their water-blue suits, pale complexions and serious faces, do not embody decision-makers at all, but are dream dancers with diagonally coiffed, subversive hairstyles. This is the identification offer that Nico and the Navigators make to the viewers in this "accredit-me-with-a-couple" world, in this "high-gloss boulevard hustle" world (according to the actress Sinta Tamsjadi): Voilà, the oddball! He caresses a basket, huddled together, with the passion of an autistic person (Peter Stock). And he (Lajos Talamonti) explains the connections of the world with such edgy sentences as: "On the earth hangs man, on him the sky." Then he laughs briefly and brightly.

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