At the Radialsystem V in Berlin, the theater ensemble, Nico and the Navigators, staged a furious urban collage: The hour we knew too much of each other. It’s a continuous, circulating coming-and-going, dancing, running and colliding. There is beautiful song and plenty of silence. Long-lasting dialogs were never an attribute of Nico and the Navigators. In its time, when in 1998 Nicola Hümpel and Oliver Proske founded the ensemble (or better yet, the idea of an ensemble with a varying cast) at the Bauhaus Dessau, it amazed audiences and many were instantly mesmerized. With its mix of acting, pantomime and dance, Nico and the Navigators offered the sort of theater rarely seen, bringing its microscopic examination of everyday occurrences to the stage, creating art from the ordinary the moment it is observed. Under the continued direction of Nicola Hümpel and Oliver Proske, the former student troupe from Dessau has since established itself internationally. Now at the Radialsystem V on Berlin’s Holzmarktstrasse opposite the Ostbahnhof and directly on the waterfront of the Spree, they present The hour we knew too much of each other, a charmingly obvious inference to Peter Handke’s piece from 1992, The hour we knew nothing of each other. Nico and the Navigators had previously presented their latest piece in Hamburg. While Handke calls for a huge ensemble, here only eight performers command the stage – an achievement in itself. And despite the consistently fast tempo of the ninety-minute piece, the performers undergo continual costume changes with characters reappearing soon after disappearance. The enactment is self-reflectively built around a thoughtfully placed center which could be understood as an ironic illustration of an exponentially frequented secret space – peoples paths always cross twice in life. What happens when women and men, mostly strangers, meet each other, collide, or race past one another? Everything is fleeting, it must go faster and yet somethings don’t work at all. A man doesn’t recognize his partners yearning for affection anymore. Or maybe he doesn’t want to after their relationship has long frosted over. Another man seems to have found joy in the form of a humanoid robot but that is soon over after it develops a life of its own. In another instance, a woman takes her time to think about whether she should give her sandwich away to a lady laying exhausted at her feet. She puts the sandwich down and hurries off as if her act was one of crime and not compassion. It’s a sparkling, often funny and sometimes deeply tragic collage of life in our self-inflicted lack of understanding.

When Claus Peymann premiered Peter Handke's "Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten" in 1992, the ambition was to bring a timeless play to the stage. Short, almost lightning-like scenes were to illustrate what life is all about. However, this enormously ambitious claim was inherent neither in the text nor in Peymann's staging, so that directors such as Jürgen Gosch or Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo always made changes. The Berlin music theater formation Nico and the Navigators did not want to get involved in this at all, as director and ensemble leader Nicola Hümpel emphasizes: "Only the basic idea of letting people pass through a square comes from Peter Handke. For 'Die Stunde da wir zu viel voneinander wussten' we did our own research, observed bizarre micro-moments and lightning encounters, developed them further and enlarged them. There characteristic to abstract types of our time meet - with and without language, singing or mute." Psychologists emphasize the enormous potential that lies in the moment of an unbiased encounter, because people decide after just a few seconds whether their counterpart seems likeable to them. During the research on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, however, Hümpel was stunned to discover that these brief encounters hardly ever happen anymore: "Very few people meet each other because they don't pay attention to each other, but mostly communicate with their digital devices." The consequences of digitization affect perception and behavior: "I consider myself to have good intuition," Hümpel emphasizes. "Nevertheless, I have often had to revise my first impression. We live in an age in which people have learned very well how to pretend. The media have taught people to permanently work on their performance." Digital media, however, is just one of the various motifs and accessories that come into focus during stage encounters. "The diversity of the types portrayed is also reflected in the facets of the music," the director explains. "The compositions range from Franz Schubert to Benjamin Britten to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy." Whimsical observations of everyday life characterize this entertaining yet profound musical theater piece, which functions like a magnifying glass. If you see someone crying at the airport, you don't need to know if they've just said goodbye to their girlfriend or received a depressing phone call shortly before. Sometimes a gesture expressing compassion is enough to make the person crying not feel alone in the pain. "Empathy works even without prior contextual knowledge," Hümpel is certain.