Technology can be learned, you have to bring the talent!

How business rituals deform the individual: "Nico and the Navigators" show "Eggs on Earth" at the Sophiensaele in Berlin Man defines himself through work. But it is not so much the workaholic who is the focus of "Eggs on Earth," the new production by "Nico and the Navigators," nor is it the average after-work pub-goer or a member of the "after-work clubbing" movement: For their descent into the shallows of gainful employment, the group led by director Nicola Hümpel has chosen the type who strides onto the stage with a bright red briefcase, after a brief moment of silence the sentence. "At the bottom of my heart I accept my varied everyday life" and then lays down emotionlessly. Everyone - including the briefcase carrier - naturally wants to "get to the top. The only thing is that they would first have to make contact with the ominous "Herr Fock", at least by telephone. What happens, however, is the drama of the eternal failure of the receptionist. Nico and the Navigators", whose powerful conglomeration of speech and movement theater has already generated enthusiasm with their earlier productions in the Sophiensaele - "Ich war auch schon einmal in Amerika" and "Lucky days, Fremder! - aroused enthusiasm, also translated this subject into their very own surreal images. Stubbornly, the actors are overtaken by the collected platitudes of the working world. Sentences like "Your process is being worked on," "You can learn the technique; you have to bring the talent," or "He's got time now!" follow from nothing; and nothing follows them in "Nico and the Navigators." At least nothing that would amount to a stringent storyline. Rather, the elaborations hover over the "upwardly" oriented personnel like malicious visitations. The humiliation that emanates from them is conveyed through a stylized language of movement that is obsessed with detail. Oliver Proske has designed a congenial stage set for this with his multifunctional light blue container, in which the actors either disappear completely or can alternately be viewed only from the waist up or down. The director assembles seven performers gifted with an enviable penchant for the grotesque. Julius Weiland most objectively demonstrates those deformations that business rituals leave on the modern individual: How he attempts a casually sovereign supporting posture at a table that is far too low and, after initial respect, becomes visibly enraged and jams himself in the hostile piece of furniture - this is slapstick at its best. Which is not to say that "Nico and the Navigators" degrades the misery of business to painless amusement. Not only that job interviews or good-humored speeches about groundbreaking company balance sheets perish in a nightmarish sentence repetition compulsion: Even topics such as sexual harassment in the workplace are negotiated with a casualness reduced to a few unerring gestures in such a way that the banality of the proceedings becomes horribly apparent.

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