Little Man in the Fabric of the Product Standard

"HELD & kleinMUT" by Nico and the Navigators Actually everything as usual: The world of "NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS" is a beautiful, awful construction kit. Very elegant, very sensibly functional, only the people in it never quite work with it, which is why this lilac Bauhaus world is always a bit sad and a bit ridiculous. Carefully dressed in shades of beige to pink, the little people in "HELden&kleinMUT", who are nevertheless always determined to be the boldest and best, push and fold their way out of the scenery in slow motion, but actually the futuristic model city pushes and folds those out of itself. It chirps and chirps cheerfully to the cautious human displacement until someone names the horror: "You see a kid on a bike, and he doesn't have a helmet on!" Renewed back Fear is breathing down the necks of the heroes of "Nico and the Navigators," but like the people in their new production, that fear seems to have long been stuck somewhere in their model world. Almost a year ago, the successful theater troupe embarked on a European tour and announced that they would return creatively renewed. Now, in addition to Lajos Talamonti and Annedore Kleist, four new actors from four different countries grope their way through the large, constructed world of stage designer Oliver Proske, and two musicians play the small, human intervals live. English, French and Flemish are spoken, but only the gestures and things are communicative. And in this, Nicola Hümpel, the head of the ensemble, ties in with her best early days at the Bauhaus Dessau: To a human-bound object theater, which she had lost sight of in her last production "Kain, Wenn & Aber" to the disadvantage of pseudo-philosophical texts. Now the riddles are representational again. Windows slide open, actors fit into the gaps. A fountain deforms into a bench, which turns into a treadmill. Despite their unconditional will to master form, the six Buster Keatons with their modest human functions of course never get behind these multipotent cultural objects. Thus, ridiculous fear peels from grand fantasies of domination, slapstick stumbles from menace, and Punch and Judy shimmers in the Robert Wilson ritual. At the end, an actor slowly pulls out montage parts from his clothes, as if pulling them out of his own body, and builds a meat grinder out of them: subject-object sausage-making à la carte.

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