When Schubert ghosts around

"Nico and the Navigators" come to the Muffathalle with "Wo du nicht bistt". When Nicola Hümpel went to buy a sweater in Munich, she heard a Schubert piano sonata in the department store. Since Ms. Hümpel is by no means inclined to see her own ego in relation to the world around her as a yardstick, she was not horrified by the economy-driven treatment of the music she loved. She just wondered, "Nothing is more beautiful than lifting Schubert into the now." Of course, that doesn't have to happen in a department store; by its very nature, that's the completely wrong place for it. But the fact that one of her actresses listens to Schubert in her Walkman and infects her shared apartment in Berlin-Friedrichshain with it makes her happy. For Nicola Hümpel, Schubert is a dear friend. "Schubert's music is the fusion of happiness and unhappiness, the undefined state in the now." At the Bregenz Festival, there is a series called "KAZ - Art from Time." And it deals with the difference between what is real and what is unreal. If one follows Nicola Hümpel, then this distinction is a science for angels. As an artist, Ms. Hümpel's name is Nico and, together with stage designer Oliver Proske, she has been engaged since 1998 in the physical imaging of a psychological search for traces. Her theater is political, poetic, wondrous, her Berlin troupe an assemblage of behaviorally capital physical theater animals with warped hairstyles and pastel bell-bottoms. In summer 2006, "Nico and the Navigators" premiered their eighth production in Vorarlberg. On February 7 and 8, "Wo du nicht bist" can now be seen at the Muffathalle. And whoever from the jury for the Berlin Theatertreffen has time should go there. The Navigators have already been guests in Munich several times. First as part of the Spielart Festival, but then Dietmar Lupfer from the Muffathalle invited them on his own. This was always a good thing, because it is rare to experience such wondrously fragile theatrical moments that are threatened with disappearance at the very moment of their creation. Half a year after the Bregenz premiere, in a Munich café, Ms. Hümpel possibly provides an explanation for this. In all of her works, she says, Schubert is haunted. And the beauty of the moment cannot be captured. It melts away. The wanderer must go on, the journey into his own winter is never over. The fact that Schubert finally became the explicit subject of Navigators is due to the fact that at some point Nico inevitably had to put an end to his ghosting around and explicitly include him in her own discourse of the shredding of the ego, the fragile possibility of longing, and the question of how the outer and inner worlds are connected. She is concerned with Schubert as one who dwells in himself only most insufficiently; accordingly, the evening is called "Wo du nicht bist," in analogy to Schubert's song "Der Wanderer," in which the quoted phrase is: "Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück." Wandering, searching - a futile endeavor. No manifestation. "Where you are not" is a Schubert evening and then again it is not. It is first of all a Nico evening, with a famously unheimelig-sterile stage, which did not even become a self-evident home in the crumbling Berlin Sophiensälen, Nico's home. This is an evening with eight whimsical, crusty actors who come together and drift apart again, who conquer a meaningless balcony, roll down from two small hills, come together for seconds in bent couple behavior. And it is a Schubert evening after all, because Nico got together with the East Tyrolean combo Franui. Thomas Wördehoff, chief dramaturge of the Ruhrtriennale, was to blame. That's where "Wo du nicht bist" was originally supposed to come out, but it didn't happen that quickly. What was important, however, was the initiated meeting of the musicians with the theater people, the triggering of a rubbing debate that has not yet found its end. Franui, this enlightened homeland band, sits in the performance in a kind of music box, with a lot of brass, dulcimer, violin and harp, is wound up at the beginning, as it were, with a crank and underpins the Nico-specific hustle and bustle with a sound carpet, finely woven from many beautiful, primarily tonally cautiously transformed songs of Schubert, in which the farewell to the beloved self (one's own or a foreign one), mourning and decay are inherent. But above all, the search, the wandering. "A piece about the flights of fancy and the abysses of happiness" (Nicola Hümpel). For Hümpel, working on "Wo du nicht bist" was comparable to developing an opera - in fact, the production effort is comparable to that of a piece of musical theater, which is why the Munich guest performance is a small miracle. In her previous works, Nicola Hümpel has had every freedom to distill out of improvisational processes the results that are important to her. With Schubert and Franui, this was no longer possible. For the first time, she was given precise time units to fill. And yet, at that time in Bregenz, an evening of iridescent, organic lightness emerged, which was in no way noticeable because Ms. Hümpel had sent the completely exhausted actors to bed after the dress rehearsal and forbidden them to think. Franui once recorded Schubert's "Deutsche Messe" in a kind of sonic performance of a ballroom on an alpine meadow. The old people in their valley call it the "Compass Mass" because it begins with the words "Wohin soll ich mich wenden". This joke turns serious in "Wo du nicht bist." With Schubert's songs, the compass points inside the eight Schubert-Nico bodies. The chords of "Leiermann," the melodic sweetness of "Ständchen," the hoped-for peace in "Wandrers Nachtlied II" - all these are moments in which the actors might find happiness, in an embrace, in the reading of a tattered book, or simply in the realization that one's name does indeed belong to one. While all of this is near death, the ending is by no means devastating, but wrenchingly beautiful: a violin plays the melody of "Farewell," like a floating, superhuman voice. The lyrics to it would read: "Over the mountains you go. Come to many a green place; must return all alone. Farewell! It must be so."

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