Nest of strangers

Ambiguous emotional and weather situations hold opportunities. Nico and the Navigators show this in their play "Wo du nicht bist" in the Sophiensælen. A man lets a woman pull on his cigarette with tender slowness, as if it were the longed-for kiss. There is a sled on which two sit as close as only fat friends do. Then the sled is shouldered as a satchel. The friendship is over or the winter. So it is in the play "Where you are not" by Nico and the Navigators. In the moment of farewell, despite all the misfortune, there remains a small piece of happiness with which to remember, to hide, to put off. More metamorphosis than in this piece is impossible. Since their first work in the Sophiensælen in 1999, Nico and the Navigators have toured abroad a lot, and because they now have financial as well as personnel support there, the productions are getting bigger, lusher, more international. "Where you are not" was created in cooperation between the Bregenz Festival and the Sophiensæle. Soon it will go to Spain and Hungary. A guest performance tour of the USA is planned. Because they are under heightened cult suspicion. Because everyone can understand the nonverbal body language of the performers, who are investigating how it works: to be happy, when the most beautiful moment in life passes by again and the broadest smile becomes a poisonous arrow. The grapes that a performer has just put in her mouth for every good New Year's resolution, she spits in her lover's face at the first argument. "Where you are not" is a typical Nico-and-the-Navigators evening: a bit artificial, a bit cranky and melancholic. A slipping of scenarios into each other. Things cut up moods and create new ones. A red ball rolls lonely across the stage, which in the soft light one just thought was a dune landscape by the sea. In it the eight Nicos, with hats, windswept hairstyles, dresses and suits like on a trip in the 20s, but still in soft-edge optics of today. But "Wo du nicht bist" is also an evening of Schubert songs, the leitmotif of which comes from the "Wanderer" song. A man from the mountains comes to the sea, where he confesses, "I am a stranger everywhere." This story runs as a common narrative thread through the evening, which begins like a shared excursion to the sea. Groups form and break away. Miyoko Urayama, the Japanese among the performers, eats alone with a rice bowl and chopsticks. Everyone is an outsider whom the collective repels - and always takes in again, because the group around Nicola Hümpel makes theater that, for all its quiet pain, is also born of nest warmth. The homeland combo "Franui" accompanies the evening with various Schubert songs orchestrated for violin, guitar, zither, brass and dulcimer. "The equipment of a dance band is suitable for the reproduction of funeral marches," describe "Franui" insights of their work, and just as the Nicos seek the moment between pain and happiness, the music sounds unobtrusively from the in-between. The musicians sit in Oliver Proskes stage in a closed box, which is initially cranked up like a music box. In front of them, on the corrugated plastic stage, the landscapes change depending on the light, like in a weather house: summer dunes, snow hills, all-year-round muddy weather. But the rain-soaked as well as cheerful departure of all participants conveys the realization that ambiguous weather as well as emotional situations need not end in self-pity or callousness. Once again, Nico and the Navigators defy it all with vivacious liberation. At the Sophiensælen, on 12, 13, 15 and 16. 8. at 8 p.m. each night.

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