Standstill and gallop – “Nico and the Navigators” make Gustav and Alma Mahler dance

Can Alma dance? The capacious Madam', known as Alma Mahler-Werfel, would hardly be believed to be able to. "Not that I know of!", even Nico has to admit. Nevertheless, there are two dancing Almas in "Mahlermania": an older one and a young one. Mahler also appears twice. The evening for singers and dancers is a departure for the Berlin performance troupe "Nico and the Navigators," even a first-time break from the off-scene. "It is the first time that an opera company has provided us with permanent singers for a 'free' project." Who on earth are "Nico and the Navigators"? Originally a visual artist, Nicola Hümpel has been gathering different collaborators, dancers and singers around her for 14 years, depending on the project. In Berlin this happened mostly in the "Sophiensaele" or in the "Radialsystem". Productions such as "Wo du nicht bist", "Anaesthesia" or Rossini's "Petite messe solennelle" have brought Nico and her friend, the stage and costume designer Oliver Proske, concept funding from the Berlin Senate since 2007. Last year, the George Tabori Prize followed. "Nico and the Navigators," in other words, is a Berlin growth. The person behind it, Nicola Hümpel, is of course from Lübeck. Like many from there, she carries around a little "Thomas Mann trauma." "You don't always want to be nailed down to it," she laughs brightly. "Pruschten" is what Thomas Mann would call that laugh. And "Hümpel" means dung heap to boot, she laughs on. She doesn't regard her "navigators" as guests, but as co-authors. As a ship's crew similar to the big barges that docked in Travemünde, where Nico learned to swim. "Don't drift off with the air mattress," the children were always told. Border territory still loomed to the east. Nico actually got into the Mahler material with the help of Adorno. Before that, Mahler was not necessarily among her favorite composers. "In Mahler's music, the security of Romanticism was lost," she says appreciatively. "You lost the innocence, and today we all just have a big question mark inside." The agglomeration of contemporary history, life and music is amazingly dense in Mahler, she says. So that she has since become a "Mahlermaniac" after all. In her Mahler pastiche of songs and symphonic passages, the Adagietto from the 5th Symphony is also quoted. Through its use in Visconti's "Death in Venice" Mahlermania gained momentum. One should not overdo it with Mahler, however. "I found the 'Mahler' film by Ken Russell, for example, atrocious," Nico says honestly. Mahler, she said, is "standstill and gallop, late Romanticism and modernism, Nietzsche, André Breton and Freud." She wants to bring that to a young audience, she said. And to break up the music so that it doesn't necessarily go down like butter. In fact, Mahler is one of the very few composers whose complete works are almost entirely familiar to audiences. Unfamiliarity is what's needed. In the new carpenter's workshop, Nico can play in the middle of the audience, taking up a lot of space. A peephole is not planned. One of her great role models was Pina Bausch. "Through her radical poetry, which is one of the hardest things to achieve in theater." Also Marthaler's body slapstick and everyday accuracy. "Nico and the Navigators" is a captained Berlin barge slowly approaching the open sea. "Mahlermania" already means: big trip. There is no 'Navi' to help.

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