The lilac fear

A good start of the Donaufestival with the beautiful tableau-vivant-picture theater "HELden & kleinMUT The German performance team Nico and the Navigators opened the Danube Festival with their beautiful tableau-vivant picture theater "HELden & kleinMUT". A good start! Krems - With their gentle form of subversion, the members of the German performance collective Nico and the Navigators have earned themselves the touching title of "honorary Swiss of art" (Renate Klett). Their large-scale tableau-vivant-theater is kept in good shape by a deliberateness, precision and slowness that is considered to be Swiss. And they do their own thing, which is also the same attitude, away from the fashionable contortions of contemporary performance theater. This time it is called HELden & kleinMUT and opened the new Lower Austrian Danube Festival on Thursday. It is the seventh work of the group, which has existed since 1998, and it is visiting Austria for the first time (!). An omission that neo-director Thomas Zierhofer-Kien is now making up for. Visual independence and accuracy are the foundation of the ensemble. Director Nicola Hümpel (alias Nico) is not the only member of her off-group to come from the visual arts; she attended the stage class at the Bauhaus Dessau, worked with Achim Freyer and, with her navigators, sailed far around the "Sprechtheater" right from the start. All the more conclusive, clear, assertive, she succeeds here in re-enchanting the world in a way that has not been allowed to be so beautiful for a long time. The narrow evening (one hour, ten minutes) is dominated by the almost laughably broad theme of "fear". It is of course about less and more, also about the fear at the sight of a child without a helmet on a bicycle. Figures, states, images find only momentary validity here in a loose, scenically puristic connection. People (types) push themselves with or without suitcases into the nested gray cube mountains of stage designer Oliver Proske, let their long hair hang over the edge of a mezzanine or lift the skirt for the pregnant belly. Noble off troupe Nico and the Navigators allow - Achim Freyer plus silent film mimicry - the re-enchantment of the world, quite precisely. In shades of lilac and olive green (phenomenal lighting by Peter Meier), with silky guitar and drum sounds by Steffen Martin and Joao Orechhia. Off-theatre? Nico and the Navigators are the noble troupe among the free. The (striking) hairstyles are at least as expensive as the dreamlike couture, and because they have successful designers in the crew, the beauty of everything that occurs is spacey. Likewise the six actors, three women, three men, their names (for example Annedore Kleist) as extravagant as the corresponding faces. And when a plastic bag is left pecking at their clean bare feet, the ensuing act of liberation is always at least a ballet. Humor counts here, even in singing chansons. "Do you want to buy my paradise?" the perky Frenchwoman in the red puff-sleeved dress calls out enticingly. And you don't want to. A wonderful work.

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