For a few years now Paris's Opéra Comique has structured its monthly programme of shows around a centrepiece production, meaning it often has wonderful surprises up its sleeve. So it was at April's festival, during which audiences could discover a unique and remarkably intelligent production, albeit one that was potentially confusing for a few spectators. The Berlin-based theatre company and director Nicola Hümpel presented a new take on Rossini that surpassed even the month's centrepiece (“La Muette de Portici”). On tour in Europe following its premiere at the Weimar Arts Festival last September, this Petite Messe was unfortunately only in Paris for two nights. The stage, designed by Oliver Proske, is a triumph, and although at first glance it seemed to be a little squeezed into the venue at Rue Favart, this impression quickly faded in the face of the overall coherence of the production. An extremely curious, Fassbinder-esque figure dressed in a hood and sunglasses and a second figure by the name of Benedikt (yes, Benedikt!) represent the clash of faith and reason in this staged version of the work. Nicola Hümpel permits herself a few dialogues as an addition to the score, which, as harmless as they may seem, are never just idle chitchat (by turns in German and English, with a bit of French thrown in). One couldn't really claim that Hümpel's view of things embraces religious rituals (the mystery of the Eucharist is viewed rather mockingly), but neither could one attribute her vision to the delight she may take in “shocking the bourgeoisie”. The director is intimately acquainted with the New Testament and she returns to it again and again for inspiration in tackling Rossini's oeuvre. This results in a performance which flows with astonishing ease and is singularly hard to put into words. Perhaps it suffices to mention the two semicircular stage elements which whimsically signify first Jesus's walking on water and subsequently – now standing on end and propped up against each other – the passing through of a narrow portal, an image that is cheekily reminiscent of the metal detectors we walk through in security checks. At the end of the evening, as the Agnus Dei is heard, all the singers and performers are once more to be found lying on the stage, eyes directed towards heaven, arms stretched out wide and imploringly, then vengefully clenched into fists: an image that beautifully reflects the spirit of this Petite Messe solennelle, balanced between faith and scepticism, spirituality and materialism. The twelve singers (including soloists Laura Mitchell, Ulrike Mayer, Milos Bulajic and Nikolay Borchev) prove to be the equals of the four performers and dancers. You could nitpick if you wanted to, but it is much more important to emphasise the degree to which all those involved are integrated into Hümpel's scheme – including the great pianists David Zobel, SooJin Anjou (grand piano) und Jan Gerdes (reed organ) and the conductor Nicholas Jenkins, all of whom are protagonists in this subtly drawn production.

Nico and the Navigators interpreted Gioachino Rossini's "Petite messe solennelle" imaginatively and wittily Nico and the Navigators, the successful and original music theater troupe around Nicola Hümpel, gave a guest performance of Rossini's "Petite messe solennelle" at the Bregenz Festival. During the performance, singers, musicians, actors as well as a dancer interpreted the extraordinary mass composition by Gioachino Rossini with an imaginative visual language. Rich in associations and with a playful musical approach, religious-philosophical questions were posed in the space, which allowed a variety of individual interpretations. The twelve choristers performed admirably, demonstrating their great mastery not only in singing but also in acting. Gioachino Rossini set a monument to himself with his late work, the "Petite messe solennelle", which also distinguished him as an artist with a pronounced sense of self-irony and humor. At the same time, this unusual mass composition radiates a serene seriousness that is unparalleled. The Berlin music theater group "Nico and the Navigators" made use of these compositional qualities for their individual interpretation of this "small festive mass". Outstanding singers Above all, the twelve singers under the direction of Nicholas Jenkins impressed with their musical performance. Soloists were Laura Mitchell, soprano; Ulrike Mayer, mezzo-soprano; Milos Bulajic, tenor; and Pauls Putnins, bass. Despite a multi-layered choreography and countless acting cues, they came across as relaxed and confident. The musically demanding mass parts sounded humorous, sometimes with almost too much ambiguity, and the contrapuntal voice-leadings were particularly noteworthy. Unusual instrumentation The "Petite messe solennelle" is set for two pianos and harmonies, and it was in this instrumentation that "Nico and the Navigators" presented the work. Thus, the singers and musicians stayed very close to the original version and achieved a pronounced stringency. Well solved was the positioning of the instruments, which could be variably positioned on the stage on rolling tableaus. SooJin Anjou and David Zobel on the pianos as well as Jan Gerdes on the harmonium made music in the service of the choristers and highly concentrated. Ironic social criticism To translate the mass composition into a music theater performance, director and ensemble leader Nicola Hümpel introduced three protagonists and a dancer. In whimsical, witty and sarcastic dialogues, Peter Fasching, Adrian Gillot and Patric Schott addressed a search for meaning. Among other things, religious representatives were experienced as seducers and people who talk about wanting to listen, but are most concerned with themselves. All protagonists were corrupt in their own way and in different contexts. An abstruse esotericism and the wellness boom as well as the longing for the idyll in the countryside were presented as a substitute for religion. A simple but extremely refined stage design and a grandstand construction, which contained numerous surprising elements of use, enriched the performance. Dancer in a class of her own The dancer Yui Kawaguchi was in a class of her own. Her dance contributions seemed entirely inspired by the music, infused with an infectious humorous streak and an acrobatic lightness that significantly enriched the performance. Thoughts on the direction of KAZ "Nico and the Navigators" made a guest appearance as part of the Bregenz Festival's "Art from Time" track. They offered profound entertainment at the highest level and received much acclaim on the workshop stage. However, this performance does not seem to me to be appropriately placed within the framework of "Kunst aus der Zeit" (KAZ). As is well known, this "third mainstay" of the festival has been massively cut this year, with only three events taking place as part of the KAZ. It is symptomatic that precisely the advanced art forms have fallen victim to the austerity programs. Immediately after the 2011 festival season, Laura Berman, the artistic director of Art from Time, was - to put it casually - "immobilized." From the "Art out of Time" program track, I expect music and music theater forms that are truly at the cutting edge of our time, that do not point backward into the future, but are actually forward-looking.

We are used to singers being able to sing, play and dance in all situations. But that a pianist continues to play even when an actor is ruffling her hair, and that a conductor also turns out to be a passionate actor, is unusual. This is the third time that the Berlin troupe Nico and the Navigators have been guests at the Bregenz Festival as part of Kunst aus der Zeit (KAZ). Their multi-layered approach to Gioachino Rossini and his "Petite Messe Solennelle" captivated the audience on two evenings on the Werkstattbühne. There's a softly purring man in a brown hooded cloak with Buddhist-inspired recommendations and a mocking doubter named Benedict - they talk past each other in a whimsical English-German dialogue. There are many allusions, image quotations and cross-references, for example when the dancer Yui Kawaguchi with her gifted body language makes two carved "praying hands" bob like angels' wings. A variably used stage set, sometimes a choir podium, sometimes an altar, a prison or a confessional, can be disassembled into a psycho couch or a balancing seesaw. Twelve joyful singers unite to a homogonous choir, from which the solo voices (Laura Mitchell, Ulrike Mayer, Milos Bulajic and Pauls Putnins) emerge.

Nico and the Navigators use the openness inherent in Rossini's mass for a general meditation on faith and doubt that is light-footed, imaginative and amusing – all of which is perfectly in keeping with Rossini. What is shown is a kind of total work of art made up of dance, pantomime, acting and musical performance, but oddly enough it never seems overloaded, even though quite a lot is happening on stage (directed by Nicola Hümpel). Dressed in colourful sixties clothes, the twelve singers spread out on the stage and create alternative teeming pictures: here is someone chewing on a rose petal, there one of them is stroking the man in front's head, here someone is dancing to music, there one of them is standing stiff as a poker at the edge of the stage and silently moving his mouth. You don't have to understand everything and indeed you can't, and yet it comes across as strangely meaningful and enigmatic. Only exceptionally does the Navigators' imagery fall back on clearly decipherable and then quickly flat symbolism, as when at the beginning of the “Credo” material wealth and greed is referenced, with banknotes perpetually being waved or with one of the performers flagellating himself with his suit jacket. The dance of images is held together by an unobtrusively added background story. Two seekers after God keep on appearing amid the various sections of the mass to contest the clash between cool reason and spirituality. The latter, represented in the person of a solemnly purring monk (A. Gillot), ultimately collapses into compulsive self-mortification (“I ate chocolate last night. Oh God, I am a bad person). On the other hand, the pedantically hesitant and matter-of-fact Benedikt (P. Fasching) hasn't got much further by the end of the evening either. There is no one on stage who is not acting: even the conductor (N. Jenkins) is transformed into an actor and conducts the music with pantomime-style dramatisation. Despite all the activity on the stage, it goes astonishingly well, with the twelve excellent and alert singers also on hand to help the conductor. The result is an exuberant work of art straddling the “holy” and the “damned” and a piece of world theatre of the most entertaining and exciting kind.

After "Cantatatanz" at the Bachwochen, Nico & the Navigators present their rapidly growing Thuringian fan community with a world premiere for the second time. In an oratorical picture theater, the cult troupe from Berlin now takes on Gioacchino Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle - a late work with a spartan cast and rich potential for ironic refractions. The piece is being created as a co-production of the Kunstfest Weimar, the Bregenz Festival, and the theaters in Erfurt and Luxembourg. We spoke with Nicola Hümpel. Why do you actually call your performers "navigators"? Because they develop their characters through improvisation and thus have a significant influence on the artistic result. The play emerges from joint work; a wealth of ideas and individual scenes slowly develop into a collage-like whole. It takes a long time - twelve weeks. A canonical mass, however, does not provide a dramatic model, it has no plot. It doesn't? All right. Nowadays, few of us still have a true connection to religion. The process that teaches us humility and gratitude to God, and from which we are to emerge purified, would be perfectly understandable as a plot. But you are right, who goes along with that nowadays. Even Rossini, in our impression, struggled with it and ironizes his own undertaking all too often - audibly. You have dealt with this guy intensively. He writes a dedication, "Dear God, I was born to opera buffa, you know that. Be gracious, then, and grant me paradise." So is it mass or buffa? We have taken it as the work of an agnostic that asks the great questions of existence and shows that man, besides his "management of life," is always striving for something higher. How can we bear life if we are not God, not animal? To this question Nietzsche answers, "One must be a philosopher." One senses a constant ambivalence in this music: with great Italian passion and longing for spirituality, Rossini throws himself uncompromisingly into sacred atmospheres on the one hand, and on the other hand, one senses within the composition how he doubts in the next moment, hides behind a pillar like a child, wonders and also makes fun a little. Isn't he a lecher? When he interprets Da Vinci's "Last Supper" as an orgy of gluttony, and even a reference is made between the Mass practice and his famous cooking creation, the Tournedos à la Rossini ... Well, that too. I even once prepared the tournedos myself for colleagues ... So, what do you think of them? A huge perversion! Veal fillets sautéed and deglazed with Madeira wine, the whole thing topped with truffled foie gras, and then flambéed with cognac as well. For me, that's too many taste experiences at once - I think it's rather overdone. What do you transfer from this sensuality to the stage? There is no cooking. At most in a metaphorical sense. We have tried to question creeds of the 21st century within our troupe and to utilize them for our play - at least in small segments. A "landscape of thought" has emerged with four protagonists: the logician who tries to explain his world psychoanalytically or rationally, the priest who in all his humility wants to understand life through the love of God, the hoodlum who wants to profit from religion and cult in the community, and a demonic goddess who oscillates between angel, mother goddess and whore. These four characters, as they clash, guide us through the evening. But now I am already giving away far too much. So the viewer gets involved in an experiment of rhyming ambiguous things together associatively? Under the strongly visual surface of the play, comic, poetic images and thoughts open up, which the spectator - in front of his own horizon of experience - can wander through. All the way to the long and longingly awaited final chord, with which even Rossini himself had his problems. So it doesn't end quite so roundly. We are still working on it. Your piece isn't finished yet? It will be. Usually we finish the structure of the evening too early, so that the actors have the chance to become free again and to improvise on the basis of what they have worked out and to change one or two details. Rossini orchestrated only with two pianos and harmonium, a floating music actually. We have chosen the original version because Rossini himself preferred this version, which connoisseurs liked to call the Living Room Mass. Only later did he rewrite and orchestrate it for a larger choral and orchestral version so that no one else would do so after his death. The intimacy that is created by the cast of musicians is what attracted me to the project. And do the dancers have to do that, too: float? Well, Yui Kawaguchi basically floats, she can't do anything else. But otherwise the term choreography is rather inappropriate for my work, because I don't come from dance. I come from the visual arts. Does the music dictate the movement sequences? It happens that we serve the rhythm, but also that we break away from it. Where do the navigators lead us? To paradise? For God's sake!

... The plot is at once abstract and concrete. Rossini provides the framework for the associations which develop onstage and play out alongside the contradiction between sacred formalities and the buffonesque gestures which belong to the opera. Stylistic diversity predominates. Frauke Ritter's gaudy costumes underline both the sense of contemporary relevance and the abstractness of the piece. Furious innuendo meets the disrespectful, slapstick meets Freud, opera parody meets no, not blasphemy, which is always closely circumnavigated, but social satire. We are told not only of the relationship between man and a higher being such as God, but also of those relationships existing between the inhabitants of the earth. Especially moving are the almost classic pas-de-deux or the precisely choreographed ensembles that create moments in which music and action almost completely merge into each other. Sometimes deeply moving, sometimes hysterically funny...

Gioacchino Rossini's "Petite Messe solennelle", theatrically prepared in Erfurt Questions about opening times arise at the beginning of the creation, at which two performers emerge from under a jauntily curved arch. This arch - possibly in memory of the rainbow set by the God of the Old Testament and of the product aesthetics of the 1950s - vaults the stage of the Erfurt theater. Such questions form a probable prelude for a theater project that intended to enrich a mass composition "with intimate testimonies of faith and doubt". The festival pèlerinages, which was actually based in Weimar, presented Gioacchino Rossini's "Petite Messe solennelle" in the state capital, a work premiered in 1864, shortly before the death of the grand master of opera buffa and creator of the Grand Opéra. Nico and the Navigators - the artistic duo Nicola Hümpel (group dynamics and direction) and Oliver Proske (stage), who have been active in the Berlin off-theater scene for years, along with character actors who cross borders as actors and body artists - were appointed as the performing bodies. For many listeners, Rossini's little mass did not and does not seem particularly solemn, but rather all too cheerful, sometimes "quirky" and altogether nourished more by the spirit of musical entertainment than by church music genre traditions: Music with "slipped" dignity and occasional situational comedy that may (nevertheless or even more so) be pleasing to the "dear God." Rossini's late work does not rely on the traditional division of labor of solos, chorus and orchestra, but is performed by a dozen singers, two pianos and harmonium. So now in Erfurt, two grand pianos were pushed to the harmonium, which was already visibly positioned on stage and presented the surrogate of a wind section. The three keyboard instruments underpinned and played around the gymnastic and sporting interludes of the quartet of special performers led by Yui Kawaguchi and the twelve singers, all of whom are also characteristic "types": Milos Bulajic, the tenor tenor, and the supple-profound bass Nikolay Borchev, the sharply pointed soprano Laura Mitchell and the mezzo-soprano Ulrike Mayer, convincing with a calm, warm voice. Conductor Nicholas Jenkins, sometimes flailing around the stage as if in a trance or even casually waving, animated the singing and hammering team in an appropriate manner: the contrasts were sharply profiled. Nicola Hümpel presented, in the run-up to Benedict XVI's tour and with various more or less humorous allusions to the Pope, an excessive and intense theater evening, which moves and remains in the wake of Christoph Marthaler, Alain Platel and other dance concept artists who have become significant in the last decade: a "concert of bodies", which "questions" the mass text and the church concert music associated with it with grace, but precisely in a non-conceptual way. However, this procedure does not touch upon the questions of the tradition of faith, religious and church music rites that have possibly become obsolete, or the questions of the authoritarian and self-righteous papacy. To expect the theatrical images conjured up by Hümpel and her troupe to deal sensibly with the currently surging need for faith again or the waves of superstition that are spreading like a torrent would be to hopelessly overtax them. In the pietistic fringe segment of Protestantism (which, according to its genesis, is strictly word-based), ideas of a "non-verbal proclamation" have long been floating around that are possibly not too far removed from voodoo cult customs. Hümpel's sensitive and esoteric approach to the problems of faith in the early 21st century and the critique of creeds creates some pretty theatrical images, but misses all the centers and even the epicenters of the problems at hand.