I want to go to the top – do you?

Reflection on the work: "Eggs on Earth" by Nico and the Navigators Everyone knows the phenomenon. Those who have work almost roll over. The rest is bored to death. Nicola Hümpel deals with these contradictions between being busy and having to be busy. "Eggs on Earth" is 90 minutes of brilliant visual theater of the quiet, intensely resonant kind. Just like life, Oliver Proskes' stage, ingenious in every detail, is a practicable modular system. As a blue cuboid with sliding walls, opening flaps and a walkable roof, it is labyrinth and snail shell, devouring working machine and sheltering refuge. Half-concealed, unsecured working people parade through the structure in endless loops at the beginning and finally emerge. In proper blue suits, files or bags in their hands, two as tourists with the world atlas over their heads. Seven young people wander questioningly through everyday life and marvel at its inconsistencies. They whisper only a few sentences into the room, worn-out phrases and platitudes, but also wishes for the future. "I want to go up - do you too?" or "What can you do?" they say several times, and "Patience, your case is being processed." The balance sheet gobbledygook of a team boss is smothered in sneers. No room for failure in a success-oriented world. When abstruse curricula vitae are reflected on, who began halfway around the world after graduating, only to end up as a hairdresser or bistro owner in some small town, this reduces the much-publicized mobility of young cadres and their unlimited opportunities for advancement to absurdity. "Is it too late to start early?" is an anxious question. They and many others in the area of tension between work stress and leisure time constraints, on the edge of the abyss and isolation are pictured in an immensely intelligent, funny, absurd, even melancholic way. In her slow, thorough staging, Nicola Hümpel does not disown her former teacher Achim Freyer. Ravel's "La Valse" and Chopin's funeral march, opera aria and country, Beatles and Janis Joplin underpin a highly sensitive piece of dance theater with excellent performers - actors, dancers, a playing industrial designer. "Onward" optimistically reads one of the last words. Good not only for Nico and the Navigators.

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