Pigsty of Gropius – “Nico and the Navigators” deal with the credibility of the eye on the occasion of the 100th Bauhaus anniversary – and with the betrayal of images

Bauhaus - "Nico and the Navigators" deal with the credibility of appearances and with the betrayal of images on the occasion of the 100th Bauhaus anniversary. Dessau / MZ - Somehow everything was Bauhaus, back then, in the 1920s. At least if one is to believe the city marketing and the media up and down the country. Whatever was painted, built, carpentered or pottered somewhere: It was Bauhaus, if only it had no flourishes. Nonsense and yet correct On the one hand, this is utter nonsense. On the other hand, the statement that somehow everything was Bauhaus is completely true. If you hit it like the theater troupe "Nico and the Navigators" did in their latest play "Betrayal of Images." It should be noted in advance: if you want tickets, you have to hurry, there are only 23 (in words twenty-three) per performance. Which is due to the narrowness of the venues - the Dessau master houses Muche and Schlemmer, which not even augmented reality helps to escape. More about that later. For Nicola Hümpel, "Verrat der Bilder" is a return to the Bauhaus. Her official vita conceals it, but before studying at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Hamburg, she attended the stage class at the Dessau Bauhaus in the early 1990s and staged her first play in Dessau. Now, almost 30 years later, she and her fellow actors Oliver Proske and Andreas Hillger are making the Bauhaus their subject. "Betrayal of Images" is not a tribute to the Bauhaus, not a bow to Gropius and the other teachers who call themselves "masters," who are often quoted in passing in the play. Johannes Itten (Michael Shapira) makes an appearance, after all, the color magician and follower of the esoteric Mazdaznan doctrine. Ernst Neufert (Patric Schott), briefly a Bauhaus student and later office manager for Gropius for a few years, is offered up as his counterpart. An architect whose standard work is now simply called "Der Neufert" and which, among other things, meticulously stipulates how much space there must be under a piece of furniture so that a woman can wipe there: Neufert unrolls a short measuring tape - ten centimeters. But it also says that pigs need something to play with in stables, which makes Neufert the right man to present Gropius' last German design: a pigsty - no joke - for Philip Rosenthal, the boss of the porcelain manufacturer of the same name. Bauhaus - and it's still okay to laugh? In "Betrayal of Images," that's allowed. If Itten and Neufert were Bauhaus, then so were Gertrud Grunow (Annedore Kleist) and Karla Grosch (Pauline Werner). Grunow introduces visitors to the dress rehearsal to the color harmony and teaches them how to see with augmented reality glasses that make virtual things appear in the middle of the room. "Do you see the bullet?" Reckoning with the macho Grosch, on the other hand, celebrates "health gymnastics working through the body." And both of them together are settling accounts with the machos in the House of Muche, who acted so progressive, but then preferred to stick to the role models that were so familiar to them.

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