Love in times of the selfie-stick

In The hour we knew nothing of each other Peter Handke wanted to describe passers-by in search of poetry. Pure kitsch. The Berliner company Nico and the Navigators don’t fall prey to the same temptation and instead presented an original interpretation. Peter Handke’s piece, The hour we knew nothing of each other, is perfect occupational therapy for metropolitan theater ensembles: with over three hundred roles and sixty pages of stage directions, performers scurry across a non-descript European plaza, where everyone gets their turn to play flâneur or harlequin in exclusively silent parts. Handke describes couples and passers-by in search of poetry and the undistinguishable bond that binds us all … in short, the 1992 premiere by Claus Peymann is considerable kitsch. Nico and the Navigators do not stick to the script. In The hour we knew too much of each other, they are more animated by the original and find inspiration to freely go about creating their own take on this merry-go-around of roles. Only eight performers. Not as many roles. Short dialogs and much singing. In no way to be confused as a Handke enactment. In this piece, which was recently staged at the Radialsystem V, The hour we knew too much of each other, truly proves the unbroken phantasmagoric power of the Navigators. After a series of opulent and labor-intensive composer-based productions such as Mahlermania, led by director Nicola Hümpel and set designer Oliver Proske, the group returns to their somewhat minimalistic and improvisational roots. The smartphone is constant companion in scenes of dysfunctional communication On an indistinguishably gray space, centered by a dried-out fountain of sorts and against a backdrop of cement wash, the performers enter and exit like cosmopolitan urbanites scattering out of subway tunnels. The mood: aggressively confrontational made apparent from the first scene where the brilliant tenor, Ted Schmitz, accompanied by Tobias Weber on guitar, are interrupted in their melancholic song by garishly grinning businessmen. Later, the almost incidental yet complete humiliation of a man, stripped naked and photographed, takes place to a piece by Neil Young from the “Dead Man” soundtrack. The smartphone is to be found as a steady companion to all scenes of dysfunctional communication. Love in times of the selfie-stick, a rare find. This may sound superficial. However, the repeated and unabated drive into the absurd, performed so well by Navigators such as Yui Kawaguchi, Anna-Luise Recke or Adrian Gillot, enlighten bright and dense. Conjured on this piazza is the estrangement of a painful absence of sense and sensibility.

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