NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS: „WASTED LAND“
Link to the article: https://www.rbb-online.de/rbbkultur/radio/programm/schema/sendungen/der_tag/archiv/20230330_1600/kultur_aktuell_1745.html
Intro: The Berlin company NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS has perfected its performance art over the last 20 years - its mixture of music, music theatre, dance and performance and text and acting and video art. And all of this is probably also needed for the new piece that will premiere tonight. The source of inspiration for it is "The Waste Land", the poem by T. S. Eliot, the Nobel Prize winner for literature. He published it in 1922, just over 100 years ago. How do NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS now attempt to take up this poem atmospherically and find references to our present day? Frauke Thiele gained some impressions during the final rehearsals for the production.
[Ted Schmitz]: "April is the cruellest month..."
"The Waste Land", spoken in the original English. The poem begins with a lament, a lament about April - the cruellest month of all.
[Ted Schmitz interlude]: "Stirring dull roots with spring rain..."
There is talk of dull roots and shrivelled tubers, nothing of fresh new beginnings. T. S. Eliot himself called his poem "a rhythmic quivering", like an endless depression, a personal despair that expands into a general state.
Hümpel: "How many recurring themes emerge, from the pandemic, the Spanish flu, the depression of a society that is looking for a way out but can't find it, the traumatised returnees from the war, inflation, the economic crisis."
Nicola Hümpel, director of NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS, has staged T. S. Eliot's dramatically desperate poem in "Wasted Land" like an atmospheric outcry in which you don't need to know every English word to grasp the basic mood.
[Ted Schmitz]: "Lilacs, out of the dead land..."
Hümpel: "It's not so easy to understand the poem, you can perhaps grasp it, you can sense it, you can sense the mood. You can grasp this beautiful language and these terrible images for moments and take them into your own world."
[Ted Schmitz]: "Coming over the Starnberger See..."
She creates an atmospheric tapestry in which language, music, video images and dance are interwoven.
[Interlude by Wolke Misewitch]: „Starnberger See, da ist es so schee..."
There are three performers on stage. The singer and actor Ted Schmitz, who speaks, plays and sings the original text. Then there is the actor Patric Schott, who categorises the text in German in the period in which it was written and explains references in the text.
[Patric Schott]: "In 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo is signed between Germany and Russia, which regulates the mutual waiver of compensation for the costs and damages of the First World War."
And the dancer Lujain Mustafa, who deals with the words in her movement, finds her own language and also repeatedly intervenes with commentary.
Hümpel: "The dance is a way of sensing the texts and words, as well as the music. It is also the female perspective on this material, which makes it very exciting. What's more, Lujain, who comes from Damascus, reads the whole text in a completely different way and you can see that in her physical interpretation."
The dancers, actors and musicians are all dressed in muted shades of brown to match the mood. They all look into the cameras on stage and are mixed live on the video screen in relation to each other. Abstract video images in which the performers appear and disappear are also shown repeatedly.
[Ted Schmitz]: "A brain allows one half formed thought to pass. Well, that's gone and I'm glad it's over."
[Wolke Misewitch]: "Bored and tired, food and tins..."
And the music, of course, which accompanies the scenic realisation of the poem, drives it forward and leads it down its own path.
[Interlude Wolke Misewitch]: "glad it's over...bored and tired"
Time and again, the musicians also provide humorous breaks by singing lines of text all at once, turning them into their own song. It's varied and develops a life of its own.
[Interlude Wolke Misewitch]: "glad it's over..."
Hümpel: "There are soundscapes, collages, everyday noises, so it's also become a kind of radio play, with a strong alternation of dominant musical passages and then very subliminal atmospheres."
[Recording Ted Schmitz]: "The river sweats. Oil and tar..."
Wherever your own perception then takes you in terms of atmosphere, whether to the end-time mood after the First World War, to current catastrophic moods or to personal emotional states - everyone can let themselves drift freely.
[Ted Schmitz]: "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih, shantih, shantih."
Outro: Wasted Land is the name of the new piece by the Berlin company NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS. Tonight is the premiere at the Radialsystem, where it can be seen until Sunday. Incidentally, Norbert Hummelt, poet and translator of T. S. Eliot, will introduce this poem and its layers of meaning and will read from his translation of "The Waste Land". In each case before the performances in the Radialsystem.