Education in times of zapping

Celebrated in Berlin as stars of the independent scene: "Nico and the Navigators" make a guest appearance at home Every era weaves its own network of coordinates: Where stars and sextants were enough to set off for new shores in the unmeasured world, people now turn to GPS guides and search engines on their journey into real or virtual expanses. In the new confusion, there is apparently no room for human signposts and pathfinders. Unless, that is, they would call themselves "Nico and the Navigators" and purposefully act out the problem of general disorientation as self-confident representatives. Since its founding at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1998, the group around Nicola Hümpel has become the audience and critics' favorite of Berlin's off-stages with only three productions. In the process, the increasing foreignness has apparently served her well: after bringing back only the idiomatic greeting "Lucky days, stranger!" from her first excursion "Ich war auch schon einmal in Amerika" ("I've been to America once, too"), she now stoops to the cryptic neologism "Eggs on Earth" in her current work. But it is with this cheerfully cheeky language and image puzzle, of all things, that the final breakthrough has been achieved. The Navigators now fill their new home in Berlin's Sophiensaele effortlessly, and a few weeks ago they were invited to the renowned "Impulse" festival of the independent theater scene in North Rhine-Westphalia. What can also be seen today and tomorrow at its place of origin in the Bauhaus presents itself as an educational program in the age of zapping: short, sharply cut slapstick scenes tell of the lives of those young up-and-comers who have to distance themselves from themselves with every step up the hierarchy. In the weird chic of trendy magazines, they costume themselves to the point of uniformity, from which even their language is not unaffected. And when they're not anxiously wondering about the moment they've missed or struggling for an appointment with a higher being called "Mr. Fogg," they're writhing on designer furniture to more or less discreet background music like they're on a Procrustean bed or fighting with a fax paper snake like the legendary Laocoon once did. The 33-year-old Nicola Hümpel, who after studying fine arts gained her formative theater experience with Achim Freyer in 1991 during the notorious stage class at the Dessau Bauhaus, is now a master at developing concentrated images from joint improvisation. She is supported above all by her partner Oliver Proske, who has developed from an industrial designer into an imaginative scenographer and has designed a multifunctional box full of surprising play levels for "Eggs on Earth". This is the ring for the seven sad clowns, whose loss of reality leads to the pas de deux with simple household appliances or to the cruel disinterested groping of other people's bodies. The fact that this melancholic-grotesque portrait of a generation is drawn on the fringes of the subsidized German theater landscape is, of course, one of the paradoxes of cultural policy. For although Nico still describes the handmade makeup of her actors as a "tender gesture," the ensemble, which is fed by embattled funding pots, still functions according to the principle of self-exploitation. The aphorism that a smile at the foot of the career ladder is inevitably paid for by foregoing one's own advancement seems merely cynical. For between the interim venues in the Sophiensaele and the Bauhaus, the navigators would have long since deserved a permanent domicile. Especially since, as is well known, there are all too many stage ships in this country that cruise aimlessly on the open sea.

<< Back to press overview