Mixed poke in herb garden

Nico and the Navigators show "The Family Council" at the Sophiensaele The father cuts the roast on Sunday. The mother cleans the windows in spring. The little sister whines in the cellar. The big brother fetches the once again missed ball from the neighbors. The grandmother wears an apron. The grandfather can fold paper airplanes. Ah, happy family! But even Heimito von Doderer, the Austrian writer who looked skeptically at the blank bourgeois facades, remarked: "Whoever enters into family, perishes in it." Family, a concept as complex as a therapy session, a subject as multi-layered as a golden wedding - and in this respect an ideal challenge for Nico and the Navigators. This remarkable independent group around founder and director Nicola Hümpel now presents its fifth work with the premiere of "The Family Council". Since their founding in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, the Navigators have earned an international and festival-tested reputation as form-conscious, style-conscious, absurdly witty everyday kibitzers. In a mixture of dance theater, slapstick, and pantomime, supplemented with crude verbiage and artful wit, things get out of proportion for them. The meanings tumble until nothing can be relied on anymore. Madness has a charmingly choreographed method here, the chaos radiates in disciplined grotesque gymnastics, the nonsensical tirades tickle unexpected associative fields: "The peace in the herb garden was better than any old-age provision," they say, or: "He was too thin to take responsibility." In this way, the ensemble approaches the rules of the game and bizarre rituals in the dear kin, which are usually alienating for outsiders. From the sacred customs and ingrained patterns, they try to decipher the matrix of what holds the world together at its core. Without fear of clichés, hot irons and the familiar traumas. Family celebrations included.

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