Celebrated in Berlin as stars of the independent scene: "Nico and the Navigators" make a guest appearance at home Every era weaves its own network of coordinates: Where stars and sextants were enough to set off for new shores in the unmeasured world, people now turn to GPS guides and search engines on their journey into real or virtual expanses. In the new confusion, there is apparently no room for human signposts and pathfinders. Unless, that is, they would call themselves "Nico and the Navigators" and purposefully act out the problem of general disorientation as self-confident representatives. Since its founding at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1998, the group around Nicola Hümpel has become the audience and critics' favorite of Berlin's off-stages with only three productions. In the process, the increasing foreignness has apparently served her well: after bringing back only the idiomatic greeting "Lucky days, stranger!" from her first excursion "Ich war auch schon einmal in Amerika" ("I've been to America once, too"), she now stoops to the cryptic neologism "Eggs on Earth" in her current work. But it is with this cheerfully cheeky language and image puzzle, of all things, that the final breakthrough has been achieved. The Navigators now fill their new home in Berlin's Sophiensaele effortlessly, and a few weeks ago they were invited to the renowned "Impulse" festival of the independent theater scene in North Rhine-Westphalia. What can also be seen today and tomorrow at its place of origin in the Bauhaus presents itself as an educational program in the age of zapping: short, sharply cut slapstick scenes tell of the lives of those young up-and-comers who have to distance themselves from themselves with every step up the hierarchy. In the weird chic of trendy magazines, they costume themselves to the point of uniformity, from which even their language is not unaffected. And when they're not anxiously wondering about the moment they've missed or struggling for an appointment with a higher being called "Mr. Fogg," they're writhing on designer furniture to more or less discreet background music like they're on a Procrustean bed or fighting with a fax paper snake like the legendary Laocoon once did. The 33-year-old Nicola Hümpel, who after studying fine arts gained her formative theater experience with Achim Freyer in 1991 during the notorious stage class at the Dessau Bauhaus, is now a master at developing concentrated images from joint improvisation. She is supported above all by her partner Oliver Proske, who has developed from an industrial designer into an imaginative scenographer and has designed a multifunctional box full of surprising play levels for "Eggs on Earth". This is the ring for the seven sad clowns, whose loss of reality leads to the pas de deux with simple household appliances or to the cruel disinterested groping of other people's bodies. The fact that this melancholic-grotesque portrait of a generation is drawn on the fringes of the subsidized German theater landscape is, of course, one of the paradoxes of cultural policy. For although Nico still describes the handmade makeup of her actors as a "tender gesture," the ensemble, which is fed by embattled funding pots, still functions according to the principle of self-exploitation. The aphorism that a smile at the foot of the career ladder is inevitably paid for by foregoing one's own advancement seems merely cynical. For between the interim venues in the Sophiensaele and the Bauhaus, the navigators would have long since deserved a permanent domicile. Especially since, as is well known, there are all too many stage ships in this country that cruise aimlessly on the open sea.

Characters go in search of their creator, a certain Mr. Fock - a sonic interplay of fuck and God , who, at least it seems, runs the show, the president of the company on which everything depends. From then on, no other narrative thread intertwines the one and a quarter hour long piece Eggs on Earth that Nico and the Navigators performed in the small and experimental Hall B of the Teatro Central in Seville on Friday and Saturday. It didn't need more narration, because Nico and the Navigators put more emphasis on reproducing an experience, on exploring the surreal and the hidden, than on creating a meaning. Eggs on Earth, already performed at the Alhambra Hall in Granada, is a series of particularly kinetic and extraordinarily poetic prints and paintings that thrive on grand gestures, on being a new hybrid between theatrical and dance performance, on just the right amount of acrobatics, of plastic architecture and an extremely refined, exquisite and eclectic sound background - with music from Janis Joplin to Rachmaninoff - from which impressions gradually grow and anxiety and laughter are evoked in the context of what forms the Gordian knot of the performance: Insanity, impersonal conditions that reify the worker, and lack of communication within a worker's existence, which the actors express in no uncertain terms. They confront the spectator with impressive gestures and isolation. Such alibis can also be superfluous, as we fortunately experienced at Central in Seville. Eggs on Earth, with its great ups and downs between wonderfulness and failure, can be easily consumed like much of modern theater. Like taking a shot at a wonderful, plastic world exercise model, or like a cultural device on which to experience influences from Breton or Artaud - with doctrinally surrealist texts - to the immeasurable Jacques Tati or Pina Bausch. Everything is very postmodern, aimed at the visualization of a vile and unhinged world. Poetic power Eggs on Earth, a pictorial work, layered one on top of the other like a series of short, spartan and extravagant dialogues, very close to human puppetry, of deep poetic power and absolutely free of apparent narrative and meanings. It is an hour and a half of vivid paintings, built in front of a wall of sound, which lifts the spectator to the level of enjoyable and pleasurable, plastic climaxes. Only the ominous ambush of a Mr. Fock, similarly annoying as God, interrupts this without ever being present, and whom to look for proves absolutely futile, which turns out to be Mc Guffin of the piece. With performances like this, Teatro Central once again dedicates itself to successful and brilliant actuality of the best, intuitive and cosmopolitan European theater of the present.

Berlin-based theater company Nico and the Navigators performed "Eggs on Earth" at the Muffathalle. Is it too late to start early?" Perplexed, one young man wonders. Another keeps trying to get through on the phone to a Dr. Fock who is in denial. Seven people, visible only from the waist down, parade past a shoe shine machine - one has to look proper when looking for a job. Behavioral rituals and phenomena of the working world are shown in the performance "Eggs on Earth," with which Nico and the Navigators from Berlin made a guest appearance at the Muffathalle. The theater troupe around director Nicola Hümpel, founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, already has an international reputation and could be seen at the last Spiel-Art-Festival in Munich with "Lucky Days, fremder" and "Lilli in putgarden". Both performances form with "Eggs on Earth" the trilogy "Menschenbilder", a bizarre society panorama. The performers move as if on raw eggs, on and in front of a sky-blue multifunctional box (stage design: Oliver Proske). Business suits, uptight grins, correct behavior - the slow egg dance to soft music slips again and again into the grotesque and into the (body) oblique. When Julius Weiland - a younger brother of Buster Keaton - takes a run-up on the roof, you don't know whether he wants to fly or jump. Eventually, he makes himself comfortable on a chair in the air. "I want to go up. Do you want to go up, too?" Despite this credo, heads jam between chairs as if on a guillotine. Surreal slapsticks, dreamy pictorial puzzles, crazy perspectives, objects and bodies that take on a life of their own: Nico and the Navigators invent a wondrous, melancholic-comic world.

...It was the details that helped this contribution make the densest statement on an outrageously minimalist level. Details from the excellent soundtrack to the props, whose mutability took the reduction principle of the performance to the extreme. A reduction, which just by the merciless evaporation of its figures to the essentials triggered a grandiose flood of associations - a truly worthy conclusion for a theater festival like the "Impulse"...

Nico and the Navigators fascinate with "Eggs on Earth" in Dessau Dessau/MZ. Show me how you clean your shoes and I'll tell you if you're made for the working world. According to this credo, Nicola Hümpel first introduces the young men and ladies from the waist down, lets them walk through a half-opened container and pass the first testing station on their career: A shoe shine machine. Then they swarm out of a container into the blue in their entirety, young people, more or less conforming to the wardrobe regulations of the business class, staring intently ahead: "Nico and the Navigators" choreograph life paths around a large office cube in "Eggs on Earth": it is equipped with hatches, sliding doors, entrances and exits, rises and falls, which suddenly open or close, providing imponderables, by overcoming which winning types are easily recognizable. All this is mechanically commented on with a few repetitive snatches of phrases from job interviews, self-instructions and telephone calls. Who gets past the anteroom of the ominous, unreachable Mr. Fog? Patience, your case is being processed, they say. Winning poses are already practiced or posture is maintained during initial aptitude tests. Who will immediately cry at sexual harassment? For one, the whole thing is too much, he dreamily cranks a pepper mill and himself back into embryo position. Or he fastens the tie tightly around his neck like a rope. Anyone who shows a little nerve - playfully twists his belly hair into curls - is immediately whistled back by the company commander. The company as superego. The movements of the characters, whether they sit down or twist the corners of their mouths, are all precisely timed. Personnage becomes part of the stage set, which slowly and enigmatically transforms until it freezes into a meaningful composition for a snapshot. The characters are unique, swaying incessantly toward Mr. Fog with music ranging from waltz to rock, melancholy and somehow serene. A dreamlike production, which the spectator cannot forget so fast. Nor do they want to: many people from Dessau set out on Friday to experience it a second time.

Waltzing with the Pepper Mill: Nicola Hümpel lets "Nico and the Navigators" dance the modernization losers Slim guys with wide ties or oversized shirt collars. They make strange contortions, sometimes dance-like movements, and ask questions like, "Is it too late to start early?" The young men, as well as the women who soon join them, are sad figures. Yet they all look very fashionable. Spread a similar hip atmosphere as people in commercials for Internet services and telecommunications. The blue tones of the clothes are carefully coordinated. Even the obliquely composed red tones of a stuffy women's costume obey the fashionable trash aesthetic that famously defines the collections of Gucci and Prada. But that's how people have to look these days in order not to be seen as modernization losers. And that's what "Eggs on Earth," the new play by "Nico and the Navigators," which has been on view at the Sophiensaele since early June, is all about. "What does it mean to get or lose a job in the budding 21st century?" one asks at the very beginning. And then, over the next hour and a half, we see what that can mean: namely, that seven rather attractive young people are slogging away in rather absurd gestures, always on the edge of the abyss. Or at the foot of the career ladder. Sometimes one carries a Z-shaped chair across the stage to plant it somewhere, sit on it and stare into space. Sometimes a red suitcase is carried through the area. A man grabs a woman's breast, who stoically lets this happen. Later, she grabs a man's pants. Pardon is not given. A man dances a waltz with a pepper mill. A couple is holding the "New World Atlas" open on their heads as if it were a traditional costume cap: a pretty picture for globalization. Everything is almost without words, but with a lot of music that ranges from Chopin to the Beatles, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin. Sometimes, however, all you hear are the sounds of hot-running motors of completely antiquated household appliances. Nicola Hümpel founded her troupe four years ago at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Since then, she has played her way into the first league of independent groups with a few very strong visual pieces. At the beginning of the year, her piece "Lucky days, Fremder" was shown in Berlin. There, too, the most diverse forms of expression were sampled into a very concentrated performance: elements from video, dance, performance, music and theater. The new piece is more economical with all the set pieces. Variations on the theme of "Modern Times 2000", which clearly show their body language kinship with the anti-heroes of the modernization push of the 20s and 30s, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Oliver Proske has built a coolly styled cube-shaped container that can be turned and walked on from all sides. At the beginning, it opens and you see legs walking by. Later, one staggers on top of the roof, and you don't know: is he thinking about whether he can fly, or does he just want to throw himself off. "I want to go up!" someone finally said at some point. And once you're up there, you'll fall down again faster than you'd like.

Reflection on the work: "Eggs on Earth" by Nico and the Navigators Everyone knows the phenomenon. Those who have work almost roll over. The rest is bored to death. Nicola Hümpel deals with these contradictions between being busy and having to be busy. "Eggs on Earth" is 90 minutes of brilliant visual theater of the quiet, intensely resonant kind. Just like life, Oliver Proskes' stage, ingenious in every detail, is a practicable modular system. As a blue cuboid with sliding walls, opening flaps and a walkable roof, it is labyrinth and snail shell, devouring working machine and sheltering refuge. Half-concealed, unsecured working people parade through the structure in endless loops at the beginning and finally emerge. In proper blue suits, files or bags in their hands, two as tourists with the world atlas over their heads. Seven young people wander questioningly through everyday life and marvel at its inconsistencies. They whisper only a few sentences into the room, worn-out phrases and platitudes, but also wishes for the future. "I want to go up - do you too?" or "What can you do?" they say several times, and "Patience, your case is being processed." The balance sheet gobbledygook of a team boss is smothered in sneers. No room for failure in a success-oriented world. When abstruse curricula vitae are reflected on, who began halfway around the world after graduating, only to end up as a hairdresser or bistro owner in some small town, this reduces the much-publicized mobility of young cadres and their unlimited opportunities for advancement to absurdity. "Is it too late to start early?" is an anxious question. They and many others in the area of tension between work stress and leisure time constraints, on the edge of the abyss and isolation are pictured in an immensely intelligent, funny, absurd, even melancholic way. In her slow, thorough staging, Nicola Hümpel does not disown her former teacher Achim Freyer. Ravel's "La Valse" and Chopin's funeral march, opera aria and country, Beatles and Janis Joplin underpin a highly sensitive piece of dance theater with excellent performers - actors, dancers, a playing industrial designer. "Onward" optimistically reads one of the last words. Good not only for Nico and the Navigators.

With her group "Nico and the Navigators", Nicola Hümpel has invented a new form of improvisational theater. The name makes you think of a pop band: Nico and the Navigators. But Nico is not a singing siren, it is the nickname of theater director Nicola Hümpel, who quickly put her Navigators on the road to success. With only two productions, the ensemble, founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, has gained a growing fan base. The troupe, which plays to sold-out crowds at the Sophiensaele, is committed to its own way of working. "We work exclusively through improvisation. So each member of the ensemble navigates the play along with it," Hümpel says. With the Navigators, a type of performer entered the off-stage that captivates with its graceful insouciance. Nico gave them a fashionable look. But she knows how to effectively showcase the idiosyncrasies of her actors. "I study my Navigators to the core," she confesses. With her images of space, sound, movement and language, Hümpel wants to evoke associations and thus "generate thoughtfulness," says the graduate of the Hamburg Art Academy. A decisive factor was her encounter with Achim Freyer at the Bauhaus Dessau, where the student took part in an international stage design class. Freyer's working method has developed her further. Nico's pieces always revolve around the exploration of human behavior. Everyday rituals are alienated, processes driven into the artificial and absurd. The graphic clarity of the stage design contrasts with the floating mental states. Nico celebrates a theater of slowness that thrives on the art of reduction. She has developed an editing technique for her scene collages. "In visual art, I was interested in the cut. In a sculpture, I look for the moment of greatest tension and make a razor-sharp cut. In doing so, I give the viewer the opportunity to continue the line in their own imagination." Nico and the Navigators' theater relies on the co-producing imagination of the viewer. It always lays out new tracks. And refrains from any rash explanations. The actors navigate with pleasure into the unknown. Sometimes the director slips an actor a note with a brief instruction before the performance begins. Martin Clausen is an expert in this form of free play. The young actor moves through the performance with droll wonder. And thus provides a guide for viewing this theater that shuns all determinations. "I realized that I will never fully understand the world," Nico says. Her navigators give the appearance of entering an unknown continent each time. The last production, "Lucky Days, Stranger," was about the ceremonies of saying goodbye. May green was the color of loneliness. In the new production "Eggs on Earth", blue is the dominant color when it comes to dress for success. That's because this time everything revolves around the theme of work - a topic that is being taken up remarkably often by artists at the moment. "My observation is that my fellow human beings are increasingly turning from life adventurers into life administrators. They increasingly have to organize themselves and in the process don't get to live at all." Hümpel is not worried that the topic won't stir much emotion. "During our research, it turned out that the topic is on everyone's mind. We are, after all, the generation of insecure existences." A gallery of types from the workaholic to the slacker is presented. She herself is obsessed with her work, says Nico. Before each performance, she puts makeup on her actors. "It's a tender gesture," Nico points out. "And then we go into a love process together."