With glasses you see more – “Nico and the Navigators” invite to Bauhaus research

The renowned Berlin theater group Nico and the Navigators invites you to a special Bauhaus research at the Masters' Houses in Dessau. Now the innovative theater group Nico and the Navigators once again lives up to its name: If venturing out into the unknown, navigating new terrain, has always been the aesthetic concept of the collective with changing participants, which was started 21 years ago by Nicola Hümpel and Oliver Proske at the Bauhaus Dessau, the production "Betrayal of Images" is also now about an artistic expedition of a special kind. The approximately 70-minute piece has the matrix of the Bauhaus, which was founded 100 years ago in Weimar, as its theme - and as a double backdrop. The play takes place at and in the master houses in Dessau, but it also plays with an augmented reality that ranges from testimonies of the Bauhäusler and German history to our technology-driven present. Thanks to elaborately programmed AR glasses, the journey through time is not only textually grounded and fabulously acted by Annedore Kleist, Patric Schott, Michael Shapira and Pauline Werner in alternating historical roles, but also amplified in its effect by amazing virtual effects of "augmented reality". Historical vegetable stock Visitors, fortified at the beginning by a delicious vegetable stock personally cooked by director Nicola Hümpel according to a historical recipe, can cover the stairs in the Muche/Schlemmer house with colored cuboids, pyramids and spheres. Later, electronic actor-clones interact with the "real" actors on stage. Unlike the audience, they don't wear glasses, but they have to move in this colorful society on cue and relate to the virtual reality in the fictional game. And, holding a multifunctional stick in their hands, they can also paint their own pictures in the space. What Oliver Proske, who is usually responsible for the stage, space and lighting of Navigators productions, has "tinkered" here together with programmers is challenging for both sides, artists and audience alike. But the playful reach into the possibilities of the future is not only a game, but of course has a direct connection to the history of the Bauhaus, which itself was just as fond of playfulness as it was of experimentation, multifaceted anyway - and also contradictory. All of this comes up directly in the quotations from the Bauhäusler, including pre-gymnastic body cult, esoteric digressions, highly peculiar and dangerously sectarian-seeming rules for the procreation of healthy, "high-quality" offspring. Alongside these are critical words from the Bauhaus about the Bauhaus, for example from Gropius' successor and advocate of Neues Bauen Hannes Meyer, who was dismissed as director in 1930 for political reasons. Multiformity becomes plastic This intelligent, educational journey through time creates a kaleidoscope that gives a coherent impression of the multifaceted nature of the Bauhaus. Gertrud Grunow, for example, who was actually a singer and took care of the "harmonization theory" at the Bauhaus, comes up with murmuring sentences like this: "Clearly the inhibited intellectualist can be distinguished from the flowing naïve person, clearly the nature of the woman from that of the man...". You can think about that for a while. Or not. One word of the painter Lyonel Feininger, on the other hand, can be effortlessly and profitably passed on to the cultural-political debates of the present: "Art is not luxury, but necessity". This also applies in full to the production "Betrayal of Images," a double-meaning title, by the way: The images, real-fictional as well as virtual, reveal something about the Bauhäusler and their cosmos of ideas - and at the same time the betrayal of these ideas and many of their bearers is meant, who were hated, ostracized, persecuted and also killed by the National Socialists. At the end of the impressive, successful play, the Jewish emigrants are remembered - and those Bauhäusler who did not succeed in escaping from Germany. Portraits of women and men are now provided by the AR glasses. And images of concentration camp barracks. Virtual reality is helping to remind us of history.

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