Modern mourning is beautiful

"Nico and the Navigators" convene the "Family Council" at the Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf. The world is beautiful. Pleasant, colorful, bright, clean and of practical emotionality. Here everything is good. Everything is design here. We have benches that can also be tables, tables that were shower stalls, walls where garage doors open up to pointed gables. Have closets in which to hide, to be discovered immediately. Because here is no place for chasms. Here, after all, is us, the family. In our house, by the way, we say sorry. Doesn't it look nice how our sad little one sits there quietly for hours on end? We have a shoe rack that slopes and becomes a staircase. And a raised homeowner's platform in the back, because life can be uphill sometimes. For the fourth time, Nico and the Navigators are guests at Düsseldorf's Forum Freies Theater, now with their latest production, "Der Familienrat." Since its founding in 1998, the Berlin group led by director Nicola Hümpel and set designer Oliver Proske has been searching for the sadness in the happy. Proske finds it in coolly elegant stage cases that are so multifunctional that it is tantamount to a lack of character. Hümpel and her players find it in unhappy-comic postures, a freezing in the face laughter, in the ambitiously failing interaction with the objects of the stage - in the discrepancy between the empty-dreamy looks of the people and their promising accessories. A mixture between dance and spoken theater, music and design: ambient with cracks. Nico is always about things and our attitudes towards them; and how our attitudes dig into things; and how our attitudes become sentences and these sentences in turn become things. Which then look like Proskes' ingeniously serviceable alienation boxes. So when it's about family this time, it's about the same thing again; and the formations and deformations that each of the seven navigators has witnessed in his or her own primary group are again so soothed to form, cooled to laconic, relieved to irony, that the effect is gentle and lasting. Constantly someone comes in with an embarrassed air; at length a little one lies under the bench; piteously a determined one gymnasts; somnambulistically a lanky one bounces. "He was too skinny to take responsibility," he says. - "He knows what he should want. But he doesn't want to." These are such phrases that fall. The word family ties smacks of truth, Karl Kraus once found. We all know them, even "family council" does not go beyond that and thus into the garbage. But rarely has the bitterness of this truth tasted as sweet as it does here.

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