Wasted Land

Music Theatre for the 100th Anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

+++ NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS show “Wasted Land” using T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in English. At the beginning there is an approx. 15-minute introduction by the poet Norbert Hummelt in German. Duration in total approx. 95 min. +++

When the American author Thomas Stearne Eliot (1888-1965) published his long poem “The Waste Land” in 1922, he struck a chord with the times: Four years after the end of the First World War and under the impression of the immediately following pandemic, the “Spanish flu”, which went down in history, the poet, who was himself plagued by severe psychological problems, described in a total of 433 lines and five paragraphs the lonely and meaningless existence of modern man in a dreary, parched and broken environment.

For the 100th anniversary of “The Waste Land”, Nico and the Navigators want to create a scenic-musical revision of the poem that asks about the lasting validity and increased relevance of the text.

Externally, of course, it’s about irony as a mask of despair, which Eliot expert Mary Karr compares to David Letterman’s sarcasm, to Cindy Sherman’s erotic conundrums or to non-linear leaps in Quentin Tarantino’s films – a technique of associativity that has been familiar to the Navigators since their beginnings and which now predestines them for the continuation and rewriting of “The Waste Land”.

In terms of content, however, it is about escalations that the author could not have foreseen and that still affect us today in changing variations – about wars and drought catastrophes, about the artist’s progress “as a process of perpetual self-sacrifice with the aim of the complete annihilation of the personality” (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) and, most recently, about a pandemic that forces every individual behind a mask.

The title “Wasted Land” is meant to allude to Homo sapiens’ wasteful treatment of the earth and the consequences that follow.

At the same time, the production will deal with the biographies of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who became “persona non grata” for a time because of anti-Semitic statements on the one hand and active enthusiasm for the Italian fascists on the other, and who are still critically discussed today. Thus, the play can and should also ask about the role of intellectuals in political debates, about elitist positions as a starting point for right-wing thinking.

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Press reviews

Dr. Ingobert Waltenberger / Online Merker

“Nicola Hümpel and her Navigators have freely adapted T.S. Eliot’s lyrical jubilee text for an evening of theatre that grabs you right by the jugular … Pleasantly, the production refrains from any hammer-and-peen updates; its strength lies in its reliance on the poetic word. At the centre of the evening is Ted Schmitz, a US singer and actor of the highest order … he speaks Eliot’s poem in British English with such tonal beauty and archaic urgency that everything around him sinks in during his recitation on the dark empty stage.”

Dr. Ingobert Waltenberger / Online Merker

"Present and past are perhaps contained in the future, and in what has been the future. But if all time is always present, all time remains unredeemed." from T.S. Eliot "Four Quartets"


"April is he cruellist month" - With the cloud-breaking changes outside, who would not agree with this enigmatic opening sentence from T.S. Eliot's 433-line suada about a desolate land, this monological monster, this liturgical monody? The blind seer Tiresias gets lost in the 1920s. The prophet's journey through time from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' ends in a sober present. Over London, this "unreal city" and its bridges, processions of the dead totter. The war may be over, the Spanish flu has run its course, but an unprecedented drought is ravaging England and the deadly economic depression is forgotten in the metropolises for a few hours in nightly ecstasy.


People lack support, values and a fixed location, order and overview. Ideologies begin to take the place of humanity, the primal need for togetherness and real sense. Three literary monoliths descend into this rough (s)snowy 1922: T.S. Eliot with his "Waste Land" radically abridged by Ezra Pound, James Joyce's "Ulysses" and Rilke with his Sonnets to Orpheus.


Nicola Hümpel and her Navigators have freely adapted T.S. Eliot's lyrical Jubilee for an evening of theatre that grabs you right by the jugular. From the poem's five chapters "The Burial of the Dead", "A Game of Chess", "The Fire Sermon", "Death by Water" and "What the Thunder Spoke", her direction distils the fragmentary, the banal and the philosophical into haunting melodramatic scenes, pantomimic solos and focal point facial landscapes projected onto the screen. Pleasantly, the production refrains from any hammer-and-peen actualisations; its strength lies in its reliance on the poetic word. But: any attempt to counterpoint the linguistic power of Thomas Stearns Eliot's poetry with adequate music (concept Tobias Weber) must remain an attempt. Not even the short and skilfully arranged sound sequences from Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and "Rheingold" can do anything about that.


At the centre of the evening is Ted Schmitz, a US singer and actor of the highest order, who has remained loyal to the theatre group founded in Dessau and performing regularly at the Radialsystem since 2006. This initial second T.S. of the evening speaks Eliot's poem in British English with such tonal beauty and archaic urgency that everything around him sinks in during his recitation on the dark empty stage. The audience's perception is focused on this tall light-haired slender artist who - when he sings - resembles a bard from the Elizabethan age. Here the music also gains concentration, reminiscent of Benjamin Britten in its chamber-music prosody.


Alongside this, the performances by Lujain Mustafa, a Syrian-born dancer, performer and choreographer, leave the strongest impression. In her expressive pantomimic songs without words, she tells of the naïve hyacinth girl who ends up in a brothel and has to have an abortion, of the loneliness of the creature, the sobriety of the encounter with the opposite sex: "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over". The temporal planes seem to be dissolved, memories, fear and desire in the heads and minds of fragile and torn souls wander in a world that is just as fragile. The meaning of our actions is difficult to discern. Is effort enough, as Albert Camus will later so vividly describe in "The Myth of Sisyphus"?


We recognise in T.S. Eliot's finding "I will show you fear in a hand full of dust" a mirror of our time full of eloquently staged surreal orgies of images in social media style, full of natural catastrophes, rattling with the use of nuclear weapons of destruction and the many familiar feeling of nothingness with which nothingness is associated.


Only at the end does the author bless his own radical literary apocalyptic experiment, so much like a Hölderlin of early Romanticism to the 20th century, and probably his readership with the Hindu shanti, shanit, shanti, shanti. It is a (very) quiet wish for peace of mind and inner peace among the dry rocks of existence and a humanity metaphorically thirsting for rain.


The audience also included Patrick Schott as chronicler and the musicians Daniel Seminara (guitar), Paul Hübner (trumpet), Philipp Kullen (drums, sythesizer), and Wolke Misewitch (violin, vocals) in the extremely rapturous applause during the thoughtful one and three-quarter hours, which were carried by fine poetry.


Note: On 16 December 2023, the 25th anniversary of the Berlin company will be celebrated with a chamber version of the production "Lost in Loops".


https://onlinemerker.com/berlin-raialsystem-wasted-land-nico-and-the-navigators-in-einer-melodramatischen-musiktheatralischen-aktion/



Barbara Wiegand / RBB - Inforadio

“Haunting: Nico and the Navigators take up the gloom… a sound space with enough room for your own associations to let yourself drift in lines that don’t always make sense, that you don’t always have to understand for them to touch you… the vocals sensitively empathise with it… the dance seeks to express the fears and aggressions that open up here…”

Barbara Wiegand / RBB - Inforadio

T.S. Eliot wrote his poem "The Waste Land" in 1922 under the impression of numerous crises - as gloomy as it is timeless. A good hundred years later, the theatre collective Nico and the Navigators take on the text and turn it into "Wasted Land" at the Radialsystem.


The performance can be listened to here: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/kultur/eindringlich-wasted-land-von-nico-and-the-navigators/rbb24-inforadio/12549199/


(Recording / Ted Schmitz) "...what branches grow | Out of this stony rubbish?"


What are these roots that are taking hold, what branches are growing | Out of this stony rubbish?

1922, the First World War is over. So is the Spanish flu. There has just been an extraordinary period of drought in Europe. Crises that demoralised people and left the country desolate. Emptiness, including personal emptiness. In his poem "The Waste Land", T.S. Eliot delves deep into the mood of the end of time, in fragmented, associative 433 lines, peppered with quotations from past myths and legends and full of glimpses into human abysses and personal states of mind. There is no plot, rather individual events. It is about the office of the dead, drought and flood, strife and the course of events - yesterday and tomorrow.

(Recording / Ted Schmitz) "April is the cruelest month"


April is the cruelest month of all, even spring in T.S. Eliot's work is a hopeless reminder of a deprived winter. NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS take up the gloom over this 'Waste Land' in their "Wasted Land" and rise at the beginning from the fog billowing across the empty stage to play with and around T.S. Eliot's words. Sometimes this resonates with a certain melodrama, sometimes it breaks with it, in which the group ironically exaggerates many a quotation.


(Interlude / Patric Schott) "Tristan and Isolde, first act, verses 1 to 8..."


The music with electric guitar, violin, trumpet, drums and synthesiser is sometimes an atmospheric tapestry of sound, sometimes a propulsive disharmony, then suddenly a cheerful folk song, a blues ballad - a sound space with enough room for your own associations to let yourself drift through lines that don't always make sense, that you don't have to understand to be moved by them.


(Interlude / Wolke Mišewitch, Ted Schmitz) "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over. | This music crept by me upon the waters"


The vocals of NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS sensitively empathise with this. The dance seeks to express the fears and aggression that arise here - forceful, a little formulaic at times. The scenic interpretation also sometimes seems rather performed, only enhanced by the very strained effect of the livecam. Here, one would have wished for more individual accents. Time and again, however, NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS manage to get close to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". A poem that, in its fragmentary nature, was intended to offer support to its author. In times of crisis that seem so timeless to us today.


(Interlude / Wolke Mišewitch) "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

A production by Nico and the Navigators, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and by funding from the "dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions" from the Federal Cultural Foundation. In cooperation with Radialsystem.

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