Full bath in melancholy

Berlin, October 2, 2018: The heroes and heroines of Berlin's independent scene are getting on in years. While last weekend the performers of She She Pop celebrated their 25th anniversary at HAU with a huge multi-part party, it is now Nicola Hümpel and Oliver Proske who have officially passed their teens with their "Navigators". Twenty years have passed since Nico and the Navigators were hired as artists in residence at Berlin's Sophiensälen to become famous with their novel hybrid of dance, music and performance theater. A cause for celebration. Eternally moving landscapes And so the ensemble - a few mottled temples wiser - returns to the scene of its first successes for its birthday. This evening has become soufflé-light and sugary-sweet, which already carries the retrospective in its title: "Yesterday's Future. Images of People 2.0. Because "Menschenbilder" was already the title of the cycle at the Sophiensälen with which the company moved between 1999 and 2005 into the focus and onto the longlist of the Berlin Theatertreffen. "Why don't you audition for the Navigators?" the dancer Anna-Luise Recke recalls being advised on stage at the time. A sentence of such insane matter-of-factness that it can almost resurrect an entire era. Berlin was big and gray, and art lurked everywhere. Today, as we all know, Berlin is big and even bigger, which is why the Navigators, in keeping with their birthday, prefer to talk about yesterday. Oliver Proske has placed three transparent mobile video screens in the dim light of the high room. On them, time melts away: landscapes, house facades and rivers drift by, eternally moving as in a particularly supple installation by Bill Viola. In between and above them, the performers dance, speak and sing, with music playing on the right. Of course, there is a lot of meta-joke, gratefully appreciated by the graying fans in the audience. Sugar-sweet stories of self-assertion Because back then, when they started, you weren't allowed to leave the stage shaking your head, the "neutral stance" was the basic pose of all acting, as Martin Clausen demonstrates at the beginning with his colleague Patric Schott. In between, he tells how he appeared in most of the troupe's plays over the years - but was only allowed to speak a total of eight sentences. But he was very often naked. It is stories of self-assertion of this kind that give the sequence of numbers their humanistic glue: coming to the theater, finding love. And so, along with the video landscapes, the performance standards of the last twenty (and more) years pass by. The private becomes theater, the theater private. During Annedore Kleist's performance, which is also lyrically touching, a prosaic stretched wooden table transforms into the heavy oak table of the Christmas dinners of her childhood, before drummer Philipp Kullen and Michael Shapira drum away the furniture in a strongly improvised theatrical way. Later, Shapira and Recke virtuously knot bodies and jap "Time after Time." Darker sounding time Time, anyway: it sounds darker in the last third of Birthday, even as death gently peeks over the shoulders of these friendly forty-somethings. "To die and to my rest...", Annedore Kleist declaims from the Bach aria "Bist du bei mir". Yui Kawaguchi sings a Japanese song to the tune of the (actually quite impossible) Pachelbel canon. This has always been a thing with the "Navigators", this certain tendency towards the random classics from the 5-Euro sampler shelf. The full bath of melancholy turns out a bit too hot for a twentieth birthday. But maybe that's just one of the peculiarities of this specific idea of theater: that it can never really be younger than the people who make it. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Happy Birthday.

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