Explorations in Schubert’s Body

"Nico and the Navigators" and the home band "Franui" in Bregenz. The gilding of the past is hard to escape. In Austria, a cultural nation, everything this year is Mozart, which is as beautiful as it is easy, because even the most unconventional attempt to interpret the composer knows that he is on the safe ground of cultural heritage status. That certainly creates identity. But this is born of a distant past. While Mozart's works are juxtaposed with grim, well-honed comedies in Salzburg, in Bregenz they seek happiness in the present. For the sixth time, the Bregenz Festival is presenting the series "KAZ - Art from Time. And it deals with the difference between what is real and what is unreal. If one follows Nicola Hümpel, then this distinction is a science for angels. As an artist, Ms. Hümpel's name is Nico and, together with stage designer Oliver Proske, she has been engaged since 1998 in the physical imaging of a psychological search for traces. Her theater is political, poetic, wondrous, her Berlin troupe an assemblage of behaviorally capital physical theater animals with warped hairstyles and pastel bell-bottoms. Now "Nico and the Navigators" have landed in Vorarlberg on the Werkstatt stage. With Schubert. Where is the difference between Mozart and Schubert? After all, both are Austrian high culture, so again cultural nation identity. Well, the difference is that Nico inevitably had to deal with Schubert at some point, in her own discourse of the shredding of the ego, the fragile possibility of longing, and the question of how the outer and inner worlds are connected. She is concerned with Schubert as only highly insufficiently dwelt in himself; accordingly, the evening is called "Wo du nicht bist," in analogy to Schubert's song "Der Wanderer," in which the quoted phrase is: "Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück." Wandering, searching - a futile endeavor. No manifestation. "Where you are not" is a Schubert evening and then again it is not. It is first of all a Nico evening, with a famously unheimelig-sterile stage, whose full charm will unfold only from August 10 in the crumbling Berlin Sophiensälen, Nico's home. An evening with eight whimsical, crusty actors who come together and drift apart again, who conquer a meaningless balcony, roll down from two small hills, find themselves together for seconds in bent couple behavior. And it is a Schubert evening after all, because Nico has met up with the East Tyrolean combo Franui. This enlightened homeland band sits in a kind of music box, with lots of brass, dulcimer, violin and harp, is virtually wound up with a crank at the beginning and underpins the Nico-specific goings-on with a carpet of sound, finely woven from many of Schubert's beautiful songs, in which the farewell to the beloved self (one's own or someone else's), mourning and decay are inherent. But above all the search, the wandering. Franui once recorded Schubert's "German Mass" in a kind of sonic image of a ballroom on an alpine meadow. The old people in their valley call it the "Compass Mass" because it begins with the words "Where shall I turn". This joke now turns into urgent seriousness. With Schubert's songs, the compass points inside the eight Schubert-Nico bodies. The chords of "Leiermann," the melodic sweetness of "Ständchen," the hoped-for calm in "Wandrers Nachtlied II" - all these are moments in which the actors might find happiness, in an embrace, in the reading of a tattered book, or simply in the realization that one's name actually belongs to one. While all of this is near-death, the ending is by no means depressing, but wrenchingly beautiful: a violin plays the melody of "Farewell," like a floating, superhuman voice. The text, not sung here, reads: "Over the mountains you go. Come to many a green place; must return all alone. Farewell! It must be so."

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