FULL-BODY POETS The music theatre company Nico and the Navigators celebrates its 25th anniversary
Where are you, my promised land, /Sought, suspected and never known? I walk in silence and little joy, / And always the sigh asks: where? / The air brings back the breath: "There, where you are not, there is happiness!" These are the words, accompanied by an urgent quaver, in Franz Schubert's "Der Wanderer" - a song as vainly urging for light as a foggy November day. For Nico and the Navigators, innovators on the independent theatre scene since the early noughties, it marked their departure into the world of musical theatre in 2006.
Under the title "Where you are not", the company set out in search of happiness and wove Schubert's songs into a post-dramatic-poetic collage of dialogue, movement and music for the Bregenz Festival. The instrumentation was unconventional: the Austrian music band Franui arranged the whole thing for violin, hammered dulcimer, zither, saxophone, trombone and tuba.
"Right from the start, our work was praised for its musicality; the characters followed their own inner melody," says Nicola Hümpel, who has been directing the ensemble together with set designer Oliver Proske since 1998. Even back then, music was an integral part of the Navigators. The breakthrough came in 2000 with a theatre performance about the humiliating banality of the corporate world. "Eggs on Earth" made do with just a few words, but featured all the more music - from Chopin to the Beatles. The audience loved it: people stood in long queues outside the Sophiensäle, where Nico and the Navigators are artists in residence.
Since then, the company has increasingly ventured into the operatic genre For the Handel Festival in Halle (Saale), they created the exuberant baroque fantasy "Anaesthesia", oscillating between vanitas and frivolous joie de vivre; With a staged version of Rossini's "Petite Messe solennelle", where performers spat holy water and danced for their salvation, she embarked on a tongue-in-cheek search for spiritual meaning; and in cooperation with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, she ventured into Gustav Mahler in 2011. With "Mahlermania" at the latest, the navigational spirit has also infiltrated state-funded cultural institutions.
The boundaries are also blurred musically. Whether it's a pleasant baroque aria or a profound pop ballad - Nico and the Navigators make no distinction between the styles. Their performers, above all Ted Schmitz, company veteran and astounding acting and singing double talent, sing Henry Purcell just as beautifully and hauntingly as Kurt Cobain. "In the end, both tell of loneliness and longing, of love and fear," says Hümpel. Music is the means to speak of things that one should actually remain silent about; questions of genre are of secondary importance. This creates a synergy that not only liberates the mind, but also the body.
"We also do all our work in musical theatre to bring the sometimes still antiquated body language of classical theatre into the present," explains Nicola Hümpel. In Nico and the Navigator, people wind and let go freely improvising, moving with and through music. An organic, deeply human whole is created from bodies, sounds, words, gestures and dance. Performers do not disappear behind the figurativeness of a role, but come to the fore as wide-awake, vulnerable performers. Their facial expressions are often magnified on a screen as an additional layer of meaning. The press review judges: Nico and the Navigators are full-body poets. The ensemble was honoured with the George Tabori Prize in 2011 and the Konrad Wolf Prize from the Akademie der Künste in 2016.
The ensemble will continue to explore human abysses in the future: The anniversary production "sweet surrogates" takes a sceptical look at the subject of intoxication and anaesthesia - an undertaking that comes dangerously close to the artery of reality. "Is it possible," asks Nicola Hümpel, "to expand or anaesthetise consciousness without risks and side effects? Is it possible to escape gravity without risking a fall? And isn't ephemeral art also a sweet surrogate for guaranteed mortal life? The euphoria we longed for after the pandemic has failed to materialise, new crises are shaking the world - and redemption in ecstasy seems more desirable than ever."
Sharp-witted social analysis on the one hand and soul-searching poetry on the other: for Nico and the Navigators, this is no contradiction.
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