“Yesterday’s Future” at the Sophiensälen in Berlin

With the loosely melancholic anniversary show "Yesterday's Future," the Nico-and-the-Navigators ensemble celebrates itself. For 20 years, the troupe has belonged to the post-dramatic off-theater scene that is shaping the current political changes at city theaters. Performer Ted Schmitz stands in front of a wide screen with a black-and-white video sky screen: loud people gathered on a lawn, a bit of coming and going. Meanwhile, the U.S.-born singer talks about his family history. How does that go together, the private and the mass? Suddenly the other six performers come on stage to musically reconcile the contrast between the individual with his individual memory and the formless mass of the video image in the background: With an anthem, a certain idea of Americanness. Eels in their own performance history In turn, each and every one of the Nico-and-the-Navigators ensemble is allowed to tell a story from childhood, or the story of joining the ensemble. Patric Schott, for example, says that although he has been in almost all of the troupe's more than twenty productions, he has been allowed to say no more than eight sentences all this time, but has often had to perform naked. One of the many laughs of the birthday performance, which loosely and melancholically basks in its own history while demonstrating one or another of the self-imposed performance rules: "With a razor-sharp editing technique, we will now draw into this body a completely contradictory level of expression: Facial expressions of an offended, reproachful mole, and then, quite contradictory to that, a gesture of the upper extremities." In the hodgepodge of scenic ideas, however, there are also dance solos by Yui Kawaguchi and Anna-Luise Recke, to a life-band musical accompaniment. The spectrum ranges from baroque to pop mainstream, all the way to Cyndi Lauper's "Time after Time." The video screen now also shows more abstract images, a close-up of a polished metal surface, or the ever-bubbling screw water at the stern of a ship. Ah yes, one drives and time passes. Curious fringes in melancholic imagery In the twenty years of their existence, the group around director Nicola Hümpel and stage designer Oliver Proske has given everyday objects a bizarre life of their own and maneuvered people into curious peripheral situations in mildly melancholic imagery. Quite quickly they have sought the shoulder to the musical theater. This is the only thing that distinguishes them from all the other troupes of the post-dramatic off-theatre scene, all of which have been founded since the second half of the 1990s. She She Pop is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary and with it 25 years of research into forms of female self-dramatization, Shohcase beat le Mot was founded in 1997, Rimini Protokoll was formed in 2000. Turbo Pascal is somewhat younger. The vast majority of them are children of the Giessen Applied Theater Studies program, where the traditional methods of mimetic art for the presentation of found drama are not taught. Instead, they develop their own material, work on biographical material, performative formats, documentary theater. All of this was made possible by a network of venues such as Hamburg's Kampnagel, Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer, and the Sophiensälen, where Nico and the Navigators began as artists in residence. And it was made possible by continuous funding, albeit too meager, for the independent scene. Fueled by some of the successes of independent groups, which were also evident, for example, in invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen, classical theater houses sought out collaborations with the independent scene. Turbo Pascal docked temporarily at the Deutsches Theater, Rimini-Protokoll at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus, and these are just two examples. More lasting than the sporadic cooperation of a free scene that has long since come of age with the highly subsidized municipal theater, however, is the political and aesthetic influence of their post-dramatic work. Their rehearsal spaces have become fields of experimentation for a performer who no longer remains hidden behind the mask of his theatrical character in the service of the performance, but instead places himself in the foreground. In the works of recent years, the early deceased Jürgen Gosch and Dimiter Gotscheff, among others, have always turned their actors into performers on the large city theater stages, illuminating the field of tension between sign and meaning, player and figure. Experiments of the independent scene and the political transformation of theater. The popular, great actors of today's theater are all equally great actors and exciting performers. Theater has acquired greater complexity, looking has changed. Crisis of empathy, crisis of representation, the credibility gap of classical theater, all these phenomena of a creeping cultural change were not invented by the independent scene; it just reacted to them faster than classical theater. That's why documentary filmmaker Andres Veiel experiments with forms of documentary drama at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and why Yael Ronen, among others, uses biographical material in her work at the Gorki Theater. That's why a free-producing documentary theater person like Milo Rau can take over an entire city theater in Belgium. How stories are authenticated, and how they are told in a way that is binding for the audience in the performance, and how the audience is involved in this process, all this is currently undergoing political change. And the independent scene has been experimenting with all of that in recent years.

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