We like to put our fingers in the wounds of time

Something that was heroic just a moment ago tips over into pusillanimity. A moment of happiness arises from defeat. What Nico and the Navigators develop in long improvisation processes seems anecdotal, pictorial, dadaistic, dreamlike. Together with Oliver Proske, Nicola Hümpel founded Nico and the Navigators in 1998. "We like to put our finger in the wounds of time. We are interested in the germ of violence, love, hate. However, it is not their large explanatory component that is of interest, but rather where it begins in the very small. Thus it can become superordinately political or grasp something universally thematic." Navigating through the "general everyday schizophrenia" That's how Nicola Hümpel, artistic director, describes the tools her performers, singers and dancers use to navigate through, she says, "general everyday schizophrenia" - as fragile as they are truthful revenants of their audience. Like the woman with the handbag in the anniversary production "Yesterday's Future": by means of her handbag, she says, the woman becomes aware of her childhood. "We learn a very touching story of how she was in the hospital at a very young age, worried that her mother would leave her. That handbag was always the holding element in her life. Fears, alibis and aberrations take center stage Playing with sense and nonsense is what distinguishes this multi-award winning troupe. Fears, alibis and aberrations run through the more than 20 productions that have been created since 1998. For a long time now, Nico and her changing navigators have also been making great musical theater, for example at the Deutsche Oper and the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt. Now they are returning to their origins. "In this current production, we are dealing both with our own biographies and with the accumulation of biographies that underlie our own - that is, our ancestors and forebears. And how all these experiences, fate, coincidences layer on top of each other and all the baggage we take with us," explains Nicola Hümpel. Biographical breaks They have already condensed feelings of foreignness and homeland in a multi-layered Schubert song recital. Now, on the occasion of the anniversary, their own biographical breaks become material, as in the case of Japanese dancer Yui Kawaguchi in the crisis year of 2011. "There was the Fukushima drama. Her father died, she broke her nose in rehearsals, and in the process she developed one of her most beautiful dances," the artistic director says. "Then I said to her how it could be that this was created in that year. It never really dawned on me. To which she said, 'Because that was the place where I got back all the hope, the strength and the will.' And it was important to me to get back up.'"

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