Nico & the Navigators: Scouts to Paradise

After "Cantatatanz" at the Bachwochen, Nico & the Navigators present their rapidly growing Thuringian fan community with a world premiere for the second time. In an oratorical picture theater, the cult troupe from Berlin now takes on Gioacchino Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle - a late work with a spartan cast and rich potential for ironic refractions. The piece is being created as a co-production of the Kunstfest Weimar, the Bregenz Festival, and the theaters in Erfurt and Luxembourg. We spoke with Nicola Hümpel. Why do you actually call your performers "navigators"? Because they develop their characters through improvisation and thus have a significant influence on the artistic result. The play emerges from joint work; a wealth of ideas and individual scenes slowly develop into a collage-like whole. It takes a long time - twelve weeks. A canonical mass, however, does not provide a dramatic model, it has no plot. It doesn't? All right. Nowadays, few of us still have a true connection to religion. The process that teaches us humility and gratitude to God, and from which we are to emerge purified, would be perfectly understandable as a plot. But you are right, who goes along with that nowadays. Even Rossini, in our impression, struggled with it and ironizes his own undertaking all too often - audibly. You have dealt with this guy intensively. He writes a dedication, "Dear God, I was born to opera buffa, you know that. Be gracious, then, and grant me paradise." So is it mass or buffa? We have taken it as the work of an agnostic that asks the great questions of existence and shows that man, besides his "management of life," is always striving for something higher. How can we bear life if we are not God, not animal? To this question Nietzsche answers, "One must be a philosopher." One senses a constant ambivalence in this music: with great Italian passion and longing for spirituality, Rossini throws himself uncompromisingly into sacred atmospheres on the one hand, and on the other hand, one senses within the composition how he doubts in the next moment, hides behind a pillar like a child, wonders and also makes fun a little. Isn't he a lecher? When he interprets Da Vinci's "Last Supper" as an orgy of gluttony, and even a reference is made between the Mass practice and his famous cooking creation, the Tournedos à la Rossini ... Well, that too. I even once prepared the tournedos myself for colleagues ... So, what do you think of them? A huge perversion! Veal fillets sautéed and deglazed with Madeira wine, the whole thing topped with truffled foie gras, and then flambéed with cognac as well. For me, that's too many taste experiences at once - I think it's rather overdone. What do you transfer from this sensuality to the stage? There is no cooking. At most in a metaphorical sense. We have tried to question creeds of the 21st century within our troupe and to utilize them for our play - at least in small segments. A "landscape of thought" has emerged with four protagonists: the logician who tries to explain his world psychoanalytically or rationally, the priest who in all his humility wants to understand life through the love of God, the hoodlum who wants to profit from religion and cult in the community, and a demonic goddess who oscillates between angel, mother goddess and whore. These four characters, as they clash, guide us through the evening. But now I am already giving away far too much. So the viewer gets involved in an experiment of rhyming ambiguous things together associatively? Under the strongly visual surface of the play, comic, poetic images and thoughts open up, which the spectator - in front of his own horizon of experience - can wander through. All the way to the long and longingly awaited final chord, with which even Rossini himself had his problems. So it doesn't end quite so roundly. We are still working on it. Your piece isn't finished yet? It will be. Usually we finish the structure of the evening too early, so that the actors have the chance to become free again and to improvise on the basis of what they have worked out and to change one or two details. Rossini orchestrated only with two pianos and harmonium, a floating music actually. We have chosen the original version because Rossini himself preferred this version, which connoisseurs liked to call the Living Room Mass. Only later did he rewrite and orchestrate it for a larger choral and orchestral version so that no one else would do so after his death. The intimacy that is created by the cast of musicians is what attracted me to the project. And do the dancers have to do that, too: float? Well, Yui Kawaguchi basically floats, she can't do anything else. But otherwise the term choreography is rather inappropriate for my work, because I don't come from dance. I come from the visual arts. Does the music dictate the movement sequences? It happens that we serve the rhythm, but also that we break away from it. Where do the navigators lead us? To paradise? For God's sake!

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