I is a cup

Nico and the Navigators pose existential questions about the consciousness of things in their new piece The Dessau Bauhaus stands for the magic of objects like hardly any other design school. By stripping things of all disguise in the 1920s and 1930s, they were reduced to their pure form, which gave them an almost mythical significance. It was here that the architect Nicola Hümpel, born in Lübeck in 1967, founded an ensemble five years ago that she called "Nico and the Navigators". A name that also extends associatively in the direction of the disembodied world of the Internet. In recent years, the troupe, which oscillates between dance, movement and image theater, has played its way into the upper league of the independent scene. The new piece was now even announced in the Stern: "Lilli in putgarden". Some critics began to suspect that something might be wrong here. One read "designer theater." And that is a bad word. But it is not that simple. For Nico and the Navigators thematize precisely the existential insecurity of the individual, who loses consciousness of himself at the interface between being and design. Nico's Navigators is clearly affected by the crisis into which our modern times repeatedly plunge the individual: the superiority of objects on the one hand, which in class-struggle times might still have been called "commodities". But the virtual counter-worlds have also led to a clear loss of substance in the bodies and souls of the beautiful young people. Slowly the figures float like fragments of themselves through a styled ambience (stage design Oliver Proske). Always smiling, sometimes with the expression of infinite astonishment on their faces. Every now and then a sentence comes out of their mouths that sounds as if left over from former contexts of meaning: "Are memories unhealthy?", for example, is asked. Or whether things have a soul. The Navigators' last production, "Eggs on Earth," dealt with the absurdities of the working world. Now it was about the objects that have become so important in our lives that they have long since disputed man's first place in the hierarchy of creation. So seven young people come on stage, carefully styled and wrapped in cream-colored dresses. It could also be the presentation of designer wardrobe. But the elegance is severely disturbed: by suddenly protruding hair, a distracted facial expression or strange behavior. Suddenly, everyone tears off their clothes. From the resulting tangle of clothes, the lost chic can no longer be reconstructed. The many collector's cups, which show their silent presence at the edge of the stage throughout the evening, have an easier time of it. "The silent return of domineering souvenirs," is how one navigator sums it up during the evening. Someone else proclaims "World Cup Day." Because of course it is easier to be for something. Being in itself is much more complicated. And so, for almost two hours, Nico and the Navigators fence with things in a strange battle for stage presence. Books that appear on stage as if by magic. Cups that move and suddenly disappear from the face of the earth. In the background, a dress suddenly flutters in the wind on a screen. A woman appears and pulls a vacuum cleaner behind her like a dog. Nicola Hümpel has underlaid the evening with a densely woven tapestry of classical and popular music, which charges the absurd slapstick humor with melancholy sentiment. Man and vacuum cleaner dance a dramatic pas de deux to it. Like dense fog, the music also settles on the viewer's mind. One forgave some of the length, absorbed images and moods, and rejoiced in the bodies that told so wonderfully melancholy of the longing to be able to take oneself as seriously as things, to be as meaningful as a vacuum cleaner for once in one's life.

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