Love services for lifetime administrators

With her group "Nico and the Navigators", Nicola Hümpel has invented a new form of improvisational theater. The name makes you think of a pop band: Nico and the Navigators. But Nico is not a singing siren, it is the nickname of theater director Nicola Hümpel, who quickly put her Navigators on the road to success. With only two productions, the ensemble, founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, has gained a growing fan base. The troupe, which plays to sold-out crowds at the Sophiensaele, is committed to its own way of working. "We work exclusively through improvisation. So each member of the ensemble navigates the play along with it," Hümpel says. With the Navigators, a type of performer entered the off-stage that captivates with its graceful insouciance. Nico gave them a fashionable look. But she knows how to effectively showcase the idiosyncrasies of her actors. "I study my Navigators to the core," she confesses. With her images of space, sound, movement and language, Hümpel wants to evoke associations and thus "generate thoughtfulness," says the graduate of the Hamburg Art Academy. A decisive factor was her encounter with Achim Freyer at the Bauhaus Dessau, where the student took part in an international stage design class. Freyer's working method has developed her further. Nico's pieces always revolve around the exploration of human behavior. Everyday rituals are alienated, processes driven into the artificial and absurd. The graphic clarity of the stage design contrasts with the floating mental states. Nico celebrates a theater of slowness that thrives on the art of reduction. She has developed an editing technique for her scene collages. "In visual art, I was interested in the cut. In a sculpture, I look for the moment of greatest tension and make a razor-sharp cut. In doing so, I give the viewer the opportunity to continue the line in their own imagination." Nico and the Navigators' theater relies on the co-producing imagination of the viewer. It always lays out new tracks. And refrains from any rash explanations. The actors navigate with pleasure into the unknown. Sometimes the director slips an actor a note with a brief instruction before the performance begins. Martin Clausen is an expert in this form of free play. The young actor moves through the performance with droll wonder. And thus provides a guide for viewing this theater that shuns all determinations. "I realized that I will never fully understand the world," Nico says. Her navigators give the appearance of entering an unknown continent each time. The last production, "Lucky Days, Stranger," was about the ceremonies of saying goodbye. May green was the color of loneliness. In the new production "Eggs on Earth", blue is the dominant color when it comes to dress for success. That's because this time everything revolves around the theme of work - a topic that is being taken up remarkably often by artists at the moment. "My observation is that my fellow human beings are increasingly turning from life adventurers into life administrators. They increasingly have to organize themselves and in the process don't get to live at all." Hümpel is not worried that the topic won't stir much emotion. "During our research, it turned out that the topic is on everyone's mind. We are, after all, the generation of insecure existences." A gallery of types from the workaholic to the slacker is presented. She herself is obsessed with her work, says Nico. Before each performance, she puts makeup on her actors. "It's a tender gesture," Nico points out. "And then we go into a love process together."

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