Manual for the awkward daily intercourse with oneself Nico and the Navigators are exploring a new ease in the off-theatre-community The Free Troupes are having their centre in Berlin. The worse the situation for the traditional theatres, the more the off-theatres are growing and flourishing. Recently the most unique style has been developed by the ensemble of Nicola Hümpel, which is concentrating on absurd performances. It is touring through the whole of Europe. Forbach/Berlin „Le Carreau“, red cinema seats in an anonymusly looking, ugly space, is the sociocultural habitat at the most uninviting place: Forbach, the first village of Lorraine at the western periphery of Saarbrücken. Germans are remembered of the GDR by witnessing this distinctive urbanistic dreariness. And just here the most original, innovative and melancholic but still funny troupe of the German off-theatre-community is playing on two evenings, each time in front of about 500 spellbound, almost enthusiastically reacting people in the audience. This theatre, being a charmingly absurd project in opposition to a world without meaning and soul, unfolds pure enchantment at such a location, thereby letting everyone forget time and space. Originating from the Dessauer Bauhaus six years ago, they are now stars among the off-theatres in Berlin. And the amount of off-theatres in Berlin is higher and their connections and networks are denser than anywhere else. There are evenings in Berlin when the productions of the off-theatres are not only higher in number than the ones by the well-known traditional theatres but also more interesting. But also this has to be recognized: Without the gurus of the established art – in our case mainly Pina Bausch, Achim Freyer, but also the absurd comedian and director Jacques Tati – as a recognizable model they would not exist in this form. But “Nico and the Navigators” are having so much specific within their language, thereby enlarging the language of theatre, and so much elaborate ambivalent sense of style, that they should have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen a long time ago. The titles of the diverting sequences of scenes, which during their field study survey called “Menschenbilder” for the mysteries of a deranged everyday-life are following a surreal logic, are already the first promise preparing for the following tender, but lasting nonsense absurdities. „Ich war auch einmal in Amerika“ (I have also been in America), „Lucky days, Fremder!” (Lucky Days, stranger), „Eggs on Earth“, „Lilli in Putgarden“, „Der Familienrat“ (The family council) and now, totally unfounded, „Kain, Wenn und Aber“. Nicola Hümpel, the director of seven impromptu players with amazing acrobatic abilities, both physical and vocal, has her origins in the fine arts. The characters are chiselled accordingly, like sculptures, before they are setting themselves in awkward motion, either solitarily or in a chaos of communication, playing a trick on the rules of game and the rules of behaviour in this paralysed postmodern world. The aimless Navigators start to take course somewhere in the nowhere, out of the moment and for the moment. But they are doing this with a stubborn and playful-vague cussedness-of-the-matter-insistence which is systematically shaking the perception of the amazed audience. They are quite literally making the circumstances dance using the Free Will of Kant, right in accordance with Ernst Bloch. Just without any missionary impetus or any intense and forced philosophical superstructure. A self-sufficient, self-reliant, seductively flickering ease of being-that-way. The soundtrack being tender, the light being mild, the designed and styled tousle-hairstyles fixed aslant, the clothes not every time only on the body – and already the bell tolls adamantly, for we were meeting ourselves and, even more fateful, the matter. „Nico and the Navigators“ are now harboured in the Sophiensaele in Berlin. Nevertheless they are rarely in their harbour, but are happily cruising the courses of the international festival. The complex plays of words in „Kain, Wenn und Aber“ are always faithfully transposed according to the country, with perfect subtitles. In the off-theatre-community the absolute and precise perfection of the Hümpel troupe, concerning both their art and their craft, is quite unusual. On tour internationally After France there are already tours scheduled in the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, and probably in the inevitable USA. The off-theatre-community in the Sophiensaele, in the Podewil and now in the thrice distributed Hebbel theatre – those are advantages of location in Berlin, which are smartly kept alive by the senate of Berlin and the endowment fund of the capital. The rest of the theatres in Germany could learn a lesson of how to support great contemporary art by experimenting with small means…

"Nico and the Navigators": One of the most original German troupes gets famous. Some noticed them just late, others knew it immediately, but everybody agrees: A spectre is haunting Europe, needing no manifesto to earn adoration, and it answers to the name of Nico and the Navigators. While sounding like a pop group, they are a troupe, most likely the best in the off-scene of Berlin and beyond. Their career developed rapidly, and this story of success culminates in the fact of being so untypical and contrary to the Zeitgeist, being without any calculation. Everything you do on stage nowadays, the video-grumbling and the blood-sperm-adulteration, they refuse it right from the beginning. Instead just old fashion: Humour and poetry, stubbornness, melancholy and misfortune. Again this Swiss way of soft subversion, one tends to believe, Häusermann, Kienberger, Marthaler – and now this: They are from Lübeck, from Hamburg, Dessau and Berlin. But nevertheless: Nico and the Navigators are Swiss by honour of their art. “Why deny your descent at the slope” – thus, they say it themselves! That sentence originates from their scenic setting „Lucky days, Fremder!” (Lucky Days, stranger). Red carpet, a green wall, and in between six solitary islands in man-shape. The wall consists of several drawers, which are sometimes bright yellow and moreover not really reliable: When needed most, they stay shut or, one needs to see it by himself, they swallow the staircase. “Never again forever proud” says a beautiful sentence in this play, in which the distance already starts with the next human being. “Vote for the horizon” is only another way of saying “I love you”, it just sounds cooler. „Lucky days, Fremder!” dealt with parting, came out at the Sophiensæle in Berlin in 1999 and succeeded, soon becoming a sleeper. Previously there had already been two productions at the Bauhaus Dessau, “DenkVorGang” in 1996 and “Ich war auch schon mal in Amerika” (I have also been in America) in 1998. Like everything that followed they were directed by Nicola Hümpel, with stage design by Oliver Proske, and illumination by Peter Meier. In 1997 the name of the group emerges, and from then on they gain momentum : Every year a new production, all of them modules for a monument of Sisyphus-like size called “Menschenbilder” (Images of man). “Edith, the pharmacy is arriving!” The director, born 1967 in Lübeck, took courses at Achim Freyer and at the Bauhaus in Dessau. But you cannot learn how fantasy makes fools of everybody and doubles. You cannot learn it anyway, at best the method you need. The performances are coolly composed, they are alert, clever and sly, their Dada-like logic makes the universe and the perception at one, and the perspective resembles one of a somnambulist shortly before the fall. Wonderful sentences like Morse messages out of the gutter or from outer space are announcing what nobody understands but what is evident to everybody: “comparatively temporary accomplished” matters to be a legitimate statement, and a threat (or maybe promise?) is “Edith, the pharmacists are arriving!” At the same time there are games almost without words, through which each nested sentence doubles its significance. Tamer of speech and miming are at work here, poets of the absurd working with their whole body, who are taking each sense as literal as possible until it evaporates. It is shown how one walks, lies, dreams, and why one aspires upward but never succeeds, but also why just this quickens one. Contradiction as aim in life, the brightest smile as the most toxic arrow, and a consequence is anyway just shown in a mess - many silent, evil picture puzzles about failing and its glory. In the first scene of Eggs on Earth (2000) the actors are approaching a shoeshine machine like one finds in hotel corridors. They use it and disappear. Only the legs are still visible, and they are delivering chased character sketches by striding to the machine or by philandering, by maltreating the on/off switch or by caressing it and then starting the day shining freshly. When one sees the legs again afterwards, one knows already everything about those they carry. They are creatures who intend to get ahead. One sees them already tumbling upstairs, in free fall. Hümpel does not denounce her characters, she just exposes them, but still loves them. Her mockery is tender, not cynical; the butcher knives nevertheless are sharpened. “We want to show the bare human soul”, she says, “to take away all possibilities of shelter and stabilisation, so that the actor is reduced just to his face, his existence and his two sentences.” The character, settings and situations are created by improvisation. One agrees about a topic, a colour, a taste, and than one starts to spin, each for himself and everybody together. A controlled collective frenzy, not adding but multiplying the creativity of the individual, and catapulting them in not anticipated levels of inspiration and association. Such a method can only work in a group being old enough to be connive together but young enough to surprise each other. In the spirit of Tati, Allen and Keaton Additionally there is the work at the table, an écriture automatique, where countless pieces of phrases are de- and each time newly reconstructed until they finally have attain the obviousness of the abstruse for which N & N are famous. We construct our productions like a painter is constructing his paintings,”, Nico Hümpel says, “which is a complicated process concerning instinct and intellect, where you should never yield to the desire of finishing something.” By composing the performance out of the abundance of the material she pays attention to keep everything in abeyance. She avoids motivations and messages. ”It is important to find the second where a scene has to be stopped in order to stay open.” The method reminds of Pina Bausch, and the results therefore are often labelled as “dance theater”, sometimes also as “image theater”. But this crazy mixture of ordinary life and crash can of course not be pegged as something . Where “the meaning of an item proves itself merely after its use” (Oliver Proske”, there is each attempt to characterize in vain. Logically The Items, following Parting and Work, the topic of the next production Lili in putgarden in 2001. It deals less with the functional, but more with the emotional added value. After all one can fall in love with a vacuum cleaner. It just depends on the story by which one is tied, and on the degree of sentimentality one permits to oneself. “Tyrannical souvenirs” and unfamiliar teacups are able to complicate life quite a lot, and the foldable stage design, partly tent, partly bed for lolling and lounging, is swallowing people and spitting out coat-hangers. In 2002 originated “Familienrat” (Family council). Proskes stage is now a particularly cunning all-purpose trap, where shoeshelves are mutating to staircases, tables to shower booths and swords not to plowshares for a long time. Here the items are changing and not the people. Only the fortress family is eternal and invincible. Christmas, the festival of fear, makes flakes of bread snow and unites the cripples of the family in an affectionate mendacious round. Evil to him who evil does, nonsense to him who doesn’t. But they are not opposed to families, they are one for themselves, merely without any tenure. This includes surrendering of internal copyright; each scene invented by an actor may be used by each other, may be changed, and plagiarized. This works for the trust they have for each other, on stage and in real life. While talking to them they revel about their honesty and their liberty in their relations, about love and security which does not cramp, and loyalty which does not lead to indifference. A group of commons, each one a poet and athlete, in the spirit of Chaplin, Allen, Keaton and Tati. All are about 30 years old, and only few of them are actors by education – maybe therefore they appear to be so authentic and clear: each face a landscape, each body the tempest raging over it. Their names are: Martin Clausen, Annedore Kleist, Lyon Roque, Verena Schonlau, Patric Schott, Peter Stock, Isabelle Stoffel, Lajos Talamonti, Sinta Tamsjadi, Julius Weiland. One should remember these names, for it is possible to encounter them elsewhere soon. Their newest production, having its first night on December 6th at the Sophiensæle in Berlin, will be the last one in this combination. With growing success, already across Europe, the horizon widens and the desire for discoveries increases. Therefore Nico Hümpel will participate in an international coproduction next. The old productions are being played – there is no lack of invitations. But now there will be the Navigators once more, pure. “Kain, Wenn und Aber” (Kain, If and But) is the name of the new play, being about decisions and their impossibility. To be or not to be has never really been answered – maybe it is easier by slapstick than by Shakespeare. All great questions have a slightly nagging core. So then: “The first decision means: to myself – brave – alone”, thus the play begins, and one anticipates already how the tiny eyes are sparkling, while fidgety fingers are disproving it at the same time.

"Kain, Wenn & Aber" - Farewell to Nico and the Navigators You turn the semicircularly bent wooden box around for the last time: Just a gray-blue wooden box? Depends on what you make of it. And so the box is suddenly a seesaw, the seesaw becomes a bar, behind which someone is shaking invisible cocktails, while in front someone leans up as only drunks do, and a woman asks for a light with a lascivious gesture, as if it could be all night. This scene is the encore of Nico and the Navigators' new evening, and it sums up with timeless beauty the group's six years of work: figuring out what things tell us about and how they reflect back on people, whose sentences in turn become objects. Director and artist Nicola Hümpel, set designer Oliver Proske, and their seven performers unleash worlds with this style of play. Whereas other independent groups in recent years have resisted psychologizing narrative on stage through experimental deconstruction, Nico and the Navigators have been concerned with unobtrusiveness, designing more than playing, and creating pieces in which people are kneadable primordial matter. On stage, one transforms into a barber, parting his client's hair right, parting it left again, until the decision-making problem dissolves in the dishevelment of the hairstyle. The title "Cain, If & But" suggests that it is about a modern catechism of individual self-assertion in awareness of Old Testament forces. "Do I actually determine what happens, or does my destiny determine?" is the title at the beginning of the evening, which is announced as the last in this ensemble constellation. Nicola Hümpel, head of the group, wants to work internationally in the future, after having won hearts at numerous festivals at home and abroad. So the decision-making process could be tried out right away. Which strategy does one choose? One creeps concentratedly with a pendulum over the stage, another trains box punches, tarot cards are laid. The multi-functional wooden elements on the gray-blue painted stage rise to platforms on which incendiary speeches are held - appeals that are unobtrusively addressed more to the speaker himself than to the audience. A paper that is studied closely turns out to be a horoscope. But things have their cracks, any hope is chilled with gentle irony. "Fucking astrology," the woman later curses, ushering in the second part of the evening: There were once decisions that were made and bring back memories of them being made. The stories that took place in between float silently like balloons above the figures, who move like lemurs in time loops. An oppressively beautiful evening, as true to form as it is gentle, that wrings a few happy moments from human states of exhaustion. Nico and the Navigators are now touring Europe with "Kain, Wenn & Aber" after their farewell piece was first shown at Berlin's Sophiensaele.

The premiere date was exquisitely chosen: St. Nicholas Eve for Nico and the Navigators. And indeed, a sock also appears in the play of the theater group, which has long been cult and now announces, however, that this is for the time being the last in a series of ensemble productions before they will set out "for new artistic shores". A premiere with a tear in the eye. Said sock is not filled with sweets here, of course, but one of the actors stuffs it into his mouth. If the ensemble around Nicola Hümpel, which was founded only five years ago at the Bauhaus Dessau, now sets a caesura, this seems consistent at first glance, because recently one thought to notice signs of fatigue, the productions showed empty spaces. And now comes this new production, and it is the most beautiful, the finest in a long time. Of course, one should not be misled by the title. "Kain, WEnn & Aber" is a funny play on words, but the biblical Cain does not come here with a mutant and a third brother. At the beginning is the sentence "The first decision is: to myself," and a little later the concept of "destiny" is kneaded through in a chain pun: "who actually determines here, who determines?" The age-old question of the extent to which man is free to take his destiny into his own hands, or whether it does not rather hold him tightly in its fist, this question is in the room throughout the evening in the many scenes that emerge from improvisations. But as is the case with this group, it does not make so many words, it never becomes instructive, analyzing, let alone philosophical or religious in principle. Just the way the seven players, three women, four men (all with slightly slanted hairstyles, by the way), - as they individually step in front of the audience and make a silent facial play with them, is exceedingly charming. There are indeed scenes in which trace elements of parental or social upbringing can be discerned, attempts to fix the individual to a certain direction in life. There are self-statements ("Have you ever disappointed anyone?" is the question, and the short answer simply "yes"), or crazy astrological banal promises. And a scene in which the individual is supposed to give up everything, the coat, the credit card, the body jewelry. And there is the perplexity in the face of globalized chickens and before the ups and downs of the Dax on the stock exchange. The determination of this scene collage itself, however, obeys completely the law of a weightless surrealism. This time no vacuum cleaner is taken for a walk, no chicken egg experiences flights of fancy on the air cushion of a household appliance. All sens and nonsense has become looser, lighter this time. Played again with enigmatic deceleration. Apart from moments like the one where one man literally maltreats another man's hair with his hands and feet, as no hairdresser would be able to do in Berlin, Ancona or Moscow, where of course guest performances have long since been booked. There is a sentence to remember in the shapely room, whose box walls are shifting: "The ability to comprehend intellectual connections is now increasing drastically". We already notice, we are to be navigated again and again on the glue. But this as sensitively as crazy, as madly as lovingly. And the actors thereby figure as in a constantly changing absurd tableau. That is the most beautiful destiny of theater, to be allowed to ask for the meaning, but to be cheated of the answer as amusingly, as cryptically, as playfully, as delightfully silly as here.

They can't decide, not for each other and not for what they want to do with the rest of their lives. The lonely city dwellers who populate the stage in "Kain, Wenn & Aber," the new production by Nico & the Navigators in Berlin's Sophiensaele, seem like chance visitors in their own lives, late, somewhat ironic relatives of the hurried and melancholy ones from Handke's "Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten. They seem very lost on the stage, which is bordered by walls in a semicircle: indecisive and uninhibited, who, even if they sometimes roll over each other for moments or circle each other coquettishly, pining for each other or kicking each other's butts energetically ("Have a vision!"), seem slightly autistic. One gentleman in a suit pushes himself along a wall with his head down, another utters curses ("Fuck psychology! Fuck philosophy!") as he tumbles off a bench again and again: a human perpetual motion machine of hopeless excitement. The Navigators, the most charming group of Berlin's independent scene, perform about a hundred such mini-dramas in just under two hours, mostly wordless and as laconic as they are funny. The ego and the world - both seem to be lost to these existential clowns. "That's me, that's all just there, I can't do anything about it and I can't do anything against it." Nicola Hümpel, director of the Navigators, has staged an evening that prances beautifully and somewhat aimlessly through the perplexities.