Throw of a fruitful collaboration

The Bregenz Festival successfully ignores the usual pigeonholes with "Art from Time". [...] A typically innovative production of the "KAZ" series could be experienced on August 12 and 13. Because when the Berlin music theater and dance theater ensemble "Nico and the Navigators" meets the Austrian music banda "Franui", something fascinatingly extraordinary always emerges, oscillating somewhere in the orbital space between music theater, dance theater and concert and thus really not fitting into any pigeonhole. This already became impressively clear in the production "Wo du nicht bist", with which the two ensembles made a guest appearance at the Bregenz Festival in 2006 as part of the "KAZ" program. "Anaesthesia" is now the name of the latest throw of this fruitful collaboration. The production had its world premiere in June 2009 at the Handel Festival in Halle and could now be experienced on the workshop stage of the Bregenz Festival Theater. From the very beginning, it was clear that the collaboration between conceptionist, director and choreographer Nicola Hümpel and musical directors and arrangers Markus Kraler and Andreas Schett had once again produced a work of the highest artistic caliber, inspired by creativity and artistic innovation, but never in danger of falling into clumsy avant-garde clichés. In the Handel Year, Hümpel, Kraler and Schett created with this production a pastiche opera that features 32 excerpts from 24 different stage works by George Frideric Handel and thus presents itself as a chain of musical highlights by the famous baroque master who died in 1759. Incidentally, Handel himself was fond of using this admittedly somewhat populist technique as an opera entrepreneur in London. But of course the Musicbanda "Franui" puts its own stamp on the arias, duets, tercets, recitatives, choral numbers and instrumental pieces, and so many a baroque basso continuo mutates through a groovy pizzicato of the double bass into a swinging-jazzy walking line, or so many an aria advances through elements of salon music, jazz, folk music or klezmer into a world-musical gem. One also experiences tonal extensions with unusual instrumentations such as dulcimer in the basso continuo or the inclusion of guitar, accordion or alto saxophone. Nicola Hümpel created a movement concept for the stage actors that has a fascinating basic structure and is not stingy with refined and deliciously satirical-humorous details. A presenter from the baroque era moderates in dandy style the interpersonal scenes, which are sometimes overdrawn to the point of grotesqueness. The choreography is perfected down to the fingertips, and in their suite-like composition they create comprehensible arcs of tension despite the lack of a linear plot. In the process, details such as the naked torso of the singing baritone Clemens Koelbl hanging upside down from the ceiling or the acting and dancing skills of countertenor Terry Wey and soprano Theresa Dlouhy never cease to amaze. But great praise is due to all stage actors for the expressive execution - and in part also independent application - of their parts and again to Nicola Hümpel, who also created the costumes oscillating between Greek antiquity, baroque and modernity. The audience experienced a cross-genre, tragicomic, intercultural and unconventional evening of musical theater that will remain very positively in the memory.

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