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The clink of the spoon in the porcelain of the cup

First the Japanese in sneakers. Then his silhouette painted on the wall, cut out and removed by the choreographer. A world that blurs in the twilight as the Japanese's body flows across the floor. "Someone drilled a hole in my skull and poked around in it." At this point at the latest, it also drills into the viewer's consciousness.
Water splashes out of the amplifiers, and deep, echoing metal threatens. Morgan Nardi landed in Murakami Haruki's "Hard-boiled Wonderland" without saying anything about it beforehand: "1," (one point) is the succinct name of the new piece by the Düsseldorf choreographer and former "Neuer Tanz" ensemble member. Behind it is a showpiece on the subject of identity, reality and appearance, closely based on Haruki's cult novel - a quiet fantasy about the coexistence of real and imagined worlds in a single human being.
Morgan Nardi choreographs in front of everyone. A figure in the background, always unobtrusively present, he quietly directs and oversees every action of his main character, Hironori Sugata. He holds the spotlight for a long time, in the light of which Sugata moves: as if absent, yet extremely concentrated. With a quiet, laconic devotion to everything that is happening: he walks across the stage as if wound up, rhythmically in a given beat - his feet continue to walk while he is still on his head. A character whose identity seems to have sunk beneath the surface.

The senses become public

But somewhere something changes, an inner world that is becoming more and more restless lights up. In silent video images of subway shafts, the shadow cut out of black cardboard at the beginning scurries across the walls as a white shape. Sounds and music keep breaking down into slower speeds.
Filmed and photographed images on the background screen are transformed as if by magic into constantly newly colored drawings. At one point it even seems as if the protagonist's senses had become public: every sound he made was given a deep, glassy resonance amplified by loudspeakers - the clink of the spoon in the porcelain of the cup; the bright bubbling of the tea. A perception like on drugs.
For more than an hour, Sugata lives in front of and behind the pictures, sometimes disappearing to the other side of the screen: Alice's walk through the mirror into the fantastic being of herself. Anyone who doesn't know Murakami's book will find Nardi's floating, obviously absurd pictures even more mysterious . Like a ghost train, he travels through the levels of reality with the help of visual artifices by video artist Naoko Tanaka and suspense sounds by Andrei Loginov.
But Nardi doesn't just stay in "Hard-boiled Wonderland". He combines the mood of the book with reflections on the relationship between choreographer and performer, imagination and realization. There are many allusions to mirroring outer and inner, real and imagined worlds in one another. Very clear worked and narrated, yet more poetry than prose, "1" leaves everyone their own way into the piece. Philosophical questions as a sensual puzzle: with Nardi, Tanaka, Loginov and Sugata everything is wonderfully in the balance.

Gesa Pölert, Rheinische Post Düsseldorf, May 17, 2003