Sophiensæle: Nico and the Navigators go in search of happiness with “Wo Du nicht bist" (Where You Are Not) At one point in "Wo Du nicht bist” someone says: “You only live once. But when you do it right, isn’t one time enough?” But how does one live “right”? Does to live mean to suffer? To learn? To be happy? Can it be that the only one who is happy is he who is not living? Questions with which people have busied themselves for all time. Nico and the Navigators too offer no answers – and when, to be taken with scepticism. But the posing of questions is an art in itself and in this the stars of the Off-Theatre scene prove to be absolutely virtuosic: and once again with their piece regarding happiness, which involves seventeen performers and is their largest production thus far. For years Nicola (Nico) Hümpel and her multi-national ensemble have been passed from region to region and this time the première of "Wo du nicht bist" was at the Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival). Now the piece is playing at the Sophiensæle in Berlin, the real home of this cult group, grounded in 1998 at Bauhaus Dessau, which, due to the great demand elsewhere, happens here only sporadically. The quest for happiness takes place in Oliver Proske’s grey hill country. A part of the stage set consists of a kind of music box that is wound by an actor. The lid opens and offers up a small orchestra. Franui, the East Tirolean group with which the Navigators are working for the first time, plays Schubert utilising the instrumentation of a village band. "There where you are not, that’s where happiness is", a line from Schubert’s song "Der Wanderer" describes the constant longing for another place and is the source of the title for the piece. Andreas Schett and his band of dulcimer, tuba, violin and saxophone make over, shorten, and extend motifs from Schubert’s Lieder, while Nico and the Navigators work a variety of interpretations of happiness in a similar way - from Aristotle through Camus to Thomas Bernhard. Director Nicola Hümpel and her group make associative theatre, and that goes for the production too, developed as it was from improvisations involving performers, light, sound and space. And for the audience response as well: the various scenarios are designed to create room for thought. Many paths lead to happiness. Props such as a ball, a bucket, a sled may represent a happy childhood; the apple, which at one point is threatened with a golf club, rolling across the stage stands for the expulsion from Paradise. A large book, which Anne Paulicevich almost manages to crawl inside of, denotes knowledge. An actor with a protective helmet prowls the stage – life as a construction site. Miyoko Urayama throws soybeans about in an Asian springtime ritual. One consults cards or looks to the stars, bursts balloons or washes bliss away with water. And one sees happiness in despair - a desperate at his own burial – for then the others are unhappy. It all unfolds in the rapid interplay between slapstick and pose, wild frolic and sad pauses - surprising changes of mood create the comic effect. The spectator does not come away scot-free: lines like "You work and work only because you lack the talent for happiness” certainly can be painful. Happiness is thus not liveable. Because we strive for the big happiness we often disregard the little ones. Sometimes an evening in the theatre counts among the latter. This one should not be passed over.

Bregenz is a city of impressive ugliness. How an idyllic spot on the banks of the Lake Constance can be destroyed by bad architecture is to be studied here. The only exception is Peter Zumthor’s simple and elegant art house. The Bregenzer Festspiele present their “Troubador” at Europe’s largest lakeside theatre seating seven thousand people. On stage is a fire-spitting oil-refinery upon the staircase and scaffolding and bridges of which hundreds do their business - Verdi as frivolous Musical. But the Festspiele has its experimental track as well: “Kunst aus der Zeit” (Art of the Times) in short KAZ. They produce and co-produce productions with the Hamburg Thalia Theatre (Schwab’s “Präsidentinnen“) and the Berlin fringe-scene. The new project by Nico & the Navigators, “wo du nicht bist” (where you are not), initially planned for the Ruhr Triennial, has its Première, after a year’s delay, on the Werkstatt stage. This is the biggest project that the Navigators have so far navigated – and it is a triumph! Together with the marvellous Tirolean group Franui they have developed a piece about happiness, and Franz Schubert, the Great Misery himself, is godfather. Andreas Schett and Markus Kraler have worked, skeletonised, celebrated, and developed further eighteen Schubert Lieder, fitted them out with all the trimmings such as dulcimer, accordion and tuba, and have realised an imaginary, folksy, alienated song-cycle for which Nico and the Navigators have then devised scenarios and images. As usual they don’t come to a theme directly, but flirt with it, playfully circling round with anecdotes and associations. Happiness is not so easy to grasp hold of - like a fish it slips the through fingers and is only to be recognised afterwards anyhow. When someone puts a grape in his mouth to represent each New Year resolution something should actually come of it. Or one spits it right in the face of the New Year, embodied here by a compliant and bewildered contemporary. The scene with Verena Schonlau and Patric Schott, accompanied by Franui’s gently pleading songs is as poetic and comic as any melancholy bliss. But happiness can exist as well in the childlike amusement of dressing oneself up, in swimming, in reading books or even in putting on the act of being really miserable in the loneliness of the big emotion. All of this is touched upon, fantasised over and made into riddles, at times fairytale cryptic, at times wide-awake and mean. “You work and work because you lack the talent for happiness” someone says on one occasion, and immediately you feel caught. This is a serious piece, but there are wonderful moments of freedom and yes even joy as when someone springs stark naked in the air, like a postal pigeon or an eagle; and when everyone knows in the end that “most likely each one of us is as happy as he has decided to be”; or, drawing on Thomas Bernhard, the dialectic is everything: “He was afraid to lose his desperation”. Happiness can be its very opposite. “Wo du nicht bist” is a small masterpiece of poetry and defiance. When Anne Paulicevich plays her whole family or Miyoko Urayama performs a springtime ritual throwing soybeans about, when Christoph Glaubacker whines “Honestly, I don’t find this funny any more” and insulted explains why, then the audience is at the peak of its enjoyment. Everything remains in a state of shimmering irresolution, is full with secrets and perspicacity. The dimensions of the evening almost exceed the limits for a free ensemble, but the eleven musicians and eight actors win through via a heightened self-sacrifice. And Oliver Proske’s geometric staging would honour any big stage. He places the musicians in a huge metallic box wound like a music box which can go up and down finally opening up like an oyster to reveal its pearl. Colourfully and magically illuminated by Peter Meier a large walkway and a hill become, with the swing of the hips, the scene of action made of happiness and sulphur. How will all of this be transferred to the technically less equipped Sophiensaele for tonight’s Berlin première? Hümpel, Proske and their helpers have overcome such difficulties in the past.

The Bregenz Festival featured "The Fall of the House of Usher" and a "play about happiness. In Claude Debussy's seldom-performed Gothic opera "The Fall of the House of Usher," opera, dance and image merged into a grandiose unity and a new Bregenz stage aesthetic. What the musicologist Robert Orledge with set designer Richard Hudson, director Phyllida Lloyd, choreographer Kim Brandstrup and lighting designer Adam Silverman created in the Festspielhaus from Debussy's fragment and his ballet compositions "Jeux" and "Après-midi d'un faune" as a feast for the ears and eyes is phenomenal. There, Edgar Allan Poe's famous horror story, from which Debussy took the material for music and libretto, reveals not only incestuous Eros elements and the demoniacity of a doctor figure resembling that of Dr. Mirakel in "Tales of Hoffmann." Huge vitrines, moving around each other, continue to spin the passions and fears of Roderick Usher on the revolving stage (fascinating baritone Scott Hendricks as well as his dance double Steven McRae of the Royal Ballet London). The actual motifs of the ballets gave way to thematic integration into the operatic material. Thus the fragment became a coherent thriller, which the actions and feelings of the singers explain in dance and foresight. And which they help to an exciting conclusion in the final dance and song phase. The respective dance doubles and their singing partners (outstanding soprano Katia Pellegrino as Roderick's sister Madeline with Leanne Benjamin, baritone Cavalier as Roderick's friend with Johannes Stepanek, and tenor John Graham-Hall as the devilish doctor with Cary Avis) were provided by U.S. conductor Lawrence Foster and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra with that fine musical tapestry that inspires peak performance. No wonder that theater managers from all over the world did not miss this world premiere in French with German subtitles and its audience acceptance! Three evenings earlier, a "play about happiness" had its world premiere on the workshop stage - with the Nicola Huempe Group. Their success had begun in 1998 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. From Berlin, "Nico and the Navigators" started their triumphal processions worldwide in 1999 with new, spectacular experiments. Now Hümpel, assisted by the instrumentalists of the East Tyrolean Franui-Musicbanda and sponsored by the Berlin Senate and the Austrian Cultural Foundation, has developed the piece "Wo Du nicht bist". From August 10, it can be experienced in the Sophiensälen in Berlin. Eight actors, convincing in their acting, dancing, pantomiming and singing, accompanied by Schubert songs, some of which are original in sound and some of which have been alienated, create the "question of the where, how and essence of happiness": as a feeling of being alone, being with someone or being together. On, in, in front of and above a bright supermarket facade with an underground parking garage mouth and integrated orchestra tower, Hümpel lets her young crowd of mimes (pastel dressed by Frauke Ritter) philosophize, meditate and communicate in German, French, English, Flemish and Japanese. Lyrically and acrobatically, there are no short excursions into the Grand Guignol, the Kabuki theater or the circus ring, happiness can develop in munching apples as well as in browsing, and the audience's eyes and ears are constantly on the move.

"Nico and the Navigators" and the home band "Franui" in Bregenz. The gilding of the past is hard to escape. In Austria, a cultural nation, everything this year is Mozart, which is as beautiful as it is easy, because even the most unconventional attempt to interpret the composer knows that he is on the safe ground of cultural heritage status. That certainly creates identity. But this is born of a distant past. While Mozart's works are juxtaposed with grim, well-honed comedies in Salzburg, in Bregenz they seek happiness in the present. For the sixth time, the Bregenz Festival is presenting the series "KAZ - Art from Time. And it deals with the difference between what is real and what is unreal. If one follows Nicola Hümpel, then this distinction is a science for angels. As an artist, Ms. Hümpel's name is Nico and, together with stage designer Oliver Proske, she has been engaged since 1998 in the physical imaging of a psychological search for traces. Her theater is political, poetic, wondrous, her Berlin troupe an assemblage of behaviorally capital physical theater animals with warped hairstyles and pastel bell-bottoms. Now "Nico and the Navigators" have landed in Vorarlberg on the Werkstatt stage. With Schubert. Where is the difference between Mozart and Schubert? After all, both are Austrian high culture, so again cultural nation identity. Well, the difference is that Nico inevitably had to deal with Schubert at some point, in her own discourse of the shredding of the ego, the fragile possibility of longing, and the question of how the outer and inner worlds are connected. She is concerned with Schubert as only highly insufficiently dwelt in himself; accordingly, the evening is called "Wo du nicht bist," in analogy to Schubert's song "Der Wanderer," in which the quoted phrase is: "Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück." Wandering, searching - a futile endeavor. No manifestation. "Where you are not" is a Schubert evening and then again it is not. It is first of all a Nico evening, with a famously unheimelig-sterile stage, whose full charm will unfold only from August 10 in the crumbling Berlin Sophiensälen, Nico's home. An evening with eight whimsical, crusty actors who come together and drift apart again, who conquer a meaningless balcony, roll down from two small hills, find themselves together for seconds in bent couple behavior. And it is a Schubert evening after all, because Nico has met up with the East Tyrolean combo Franui. This enlightened homeland band sits in a kind of music box, with lots of brass, dulcimer, violin and harp, is virtually wound up with a crank at the beginning and underpins the Nico-specific goings-on with a carpet of sound, finely woven from many of Schubert's beautiful songs, in which the farewell to the beloved self (one's own or someone else's), mourning and decay are inherent. But above all the search, the wandering. Franui once recorded Schubert's "German Mass" in a kind of sonic image of a ballroom on an alpine meadow. The old people in their valley call it the "Compass Mass" because it begins with the words "Where shall I turn". This joke now turns into urgent seriousness. With Schubert's songs, the compass points inside the eight Schubert-Nico bodies. The chords of "Leiermann," the melodic sweetness of "Ständchen," the hoped-for calm in "Wandrers Nachtlied II" - all these are moments in which the actors might find happiness, in an embrace, in the reading of a tattered book, or simply in the realization that one's name actually belongs to one. While all of this is near-death, the ending is by no means depressing, but wrenchingly beautiful: a violin plays the melody of "Farewell," like a floating, superhuman voice. The text, not sung here, reads: "Over the mountains you go. Come to many a green place; must return all alone. Farewell! It must be so."

Ambiguous emotional and weather situations hold opportunities. Nico and the Navigators show this in their play "Wo du nicht bist" in the Sophiensælen. A man lets a woman pull on his cigarette with tender slowness, as if it were the longed-for kiss. There is a sled on which two sit as close as only fat friends do. Then the sled is shouldered as a satchel. The friendship is over or the winter. So it is in the play "Where you are not" by Nico and the Navigators. In the moment of farewell, despite all the misfortune, there remains a small piece of happiness with which to remember, to hide, to put off. More metamorphosis than in this piece is impossible. Since their first work in the Sophiensælen in 1999, Nico and the Navigators have toured abroad a lot, and because they now have financial as well as personnel support there, the productions are getting bigger, lusher, more international. "Where you are not" was created in cooperation between the Bregenz Festival and the Sophiensæle. Soon it will go to Spain and Hungary. A guest performance tour of the USA is planned. Because they are under heightened cult suspicion. Because everyone can understand the nonverbal body language of the performers, who are investigating how it works: to be happy, when the most beautiful moment in life passes by again and the broadest smile becomes a poisonous arrow. The grapes that a performer has just put in her mouth for every good New Year's resolution, she spits in her lover's face at the first argument. "Where you are not" is a typical Nico-and-the-Navigators evening: a bit artificial, a bit cranky and melancholic. A slipping of scenarios into each other. Things cut up moods and create new ones. A red ball rolls lonely across the stage, which in the soft light one just thought was a dune landscape by the sea. In it the eight Nicos, with hats, windswept hairstyles, dresses and suits like on a trip in the 20s, but still in soft-edge optics of today. But "Wo du nicht bist" is also an evening of Schubert songs, the leitmotif of which comes from the "Wanderer" song. A man from the mountains comes to the sea, where he confesses, "I am a stranger everywhere." This story runs as a common narrative thread through the evening, which begins like a shared excursion to the sea. Groups form and break away. Miyoko Urayama, the Japanese among the performers, eats alone with a rice bowl and chopsticks. Everyone is an outsider whom the collective repels - and always takes in again, because the group around Nicola Hümpel makes theater that, for all its quiet pain, is also born of nest warmth. The homeland combo "Franui" accompanies the evening with various Schubert songs orchestrated for violin, guitar, zither, brass and dulcimer. "The equipment of a dance band is suitable for the reproduction of funeral marches," describe "Franui" insights of their work, and just as the Nicos seek the moment between pain and happiness, the music sounds unobtrusively from the in-between. The musicians sit in Oliver Proskes stage in a closed box, which is initially cranked up like a music box. In front of them, on the corrugated plastic stage, the landscapes change depending on the light, like in a weather house: summer dunes, snow hills, all-year-round muddy weather. But the rain-soaked as well as cheerful departure of all participants conveys the realization that ambiguous weather as well as emotional situations need not end in self-pity or callousness. Once again, Nico and the Navigators defy it all with vivacious liberation. At the Sophiensælen, on 12, 13, 15 and 16. 8. at 8 p.m. each night.