Schubert as Skeleton

Bregenz is a city of impressive ugliness. How an idyllic spot on the banks of the Lake Constance can be destroyed by bad architecture is to be studied here. The only exception is Peter Zumthor’s simple and elegant art house. The Bregenzer Festspiele present their “Troubador” at Europe’s largest lakeside theatre seating seven thousand people. On stage is a fire-spitting oil-refinery upon the staircase and scaffolding and bridges of which hundreds do their business - Verdi as frivolous Musical. But the Festspiele has its experimental track as well: “Kunst aus der Zeit” (Art of the Times) in short KAZ. They produce and co-produce productions with the Hamburg Thalia Theatre (Schwab’s “Präsidentinnen“) and the Berlin fringe-scene. The new project by Nico & the Navigators, “wo du nicht bist” (where you are not), initially planned for the Ruhr Triennial, has its Première, after a year’s delay, on the Werkstatt stage. This is the biggest project that the Navigators have so far navigated – and it is a triumph! Together with the marvellous Tirolean group Franui they have developed a piece about happiness, and Franz Schubert, the Great Misery himself, is godfather. Andreas Schett and Markus Kraler have worked, skeletonised, celebrated, and developed further eighteen Schubert Lieder, fitted them out with all the trimmings such as dulcimer, accordion and tuba, and have realised an imaginary, folksy, alienated song-cycle for which Nico and the Navigators have then devised scenarios and images. As usual they don’t come to a theme directly, but flirt with it, playfully circling round with anecdotes and associations. Happiness is not so easy to grasp hold of - like a fish it slips the through fingers and is only to be recognised afterwards anyhow. When someone puts a grape in his mouth to represent each New Year resolution something should actually come of it. Or one spits it right in the face of the New Year, embodied here by a compliant and bewildered contemporary. The scene with Verena Schonlau and Patric Schott, accompanied by Franui’s gently pleading songs is as poetic and comic as any melancholy bliss. But happiness can exist as well in the childlike amusement of dressing oneself up, in swimming, in reading books or even in putting on the act of being really miserable in the loneliness of the big emotion. All of this is touched upon, fantasised over and made into riddles, at times fairytale cryptic, at times wide-awake and mean. “You work and work because you lack the talent for happiness” someone says on one occasion, and immediately you feel caught. This is a serious piece, but there are wonderful moments of freedom and yes even joy as when someone springs stark naked in the air, like a postal pigeon or an eagle; and when everyone knows in the end that “most likely each one of us is as happy as he has decided to be”; or, drawing on Thomas Bernhard, the dialectic is everything: “He was afraid to lose his desperation”. Happiness can be its very opposite. “Wo du nicht bist” is a small masterpiece of poetry and defiance. When Anne Paulicevich plays her whole family or Miyoko Urayama performs a springtime ritual throwing soybeans about, when Christoph Glaubacker whines “Honestly, I don’t find this funny any more” and insulted explains why, then the audience is at the peak of its enjoyment. Everything remains in a state of shimmering irresolution, is full with secrets and perspicacity. The dimensions of the evening almost exceed the limits for a free ensemble, but the eleven musicians and eight actors win through via a heightened self-sacrifice. And Oliver Proske’s geometric staging would honour any big stage. He places the musicians in a huge metallic box wound like a music box which can go up and down finally opening up like an oyster to reveal its pearl. Colourfully and magically illuminated by Peter Meier a large walkway and a hill become, with the swing of the hips, the scene of action made of happiness and sulphur. How will all of this be transferred to the technically less equipped Sophiensaele for tonight’s Berlin première? Hümpel, Proske and their helpers have overcome such difficulties in the past.

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