Die Tischlerei geht baden - Deutsche Oper Berlin
The Tischlerei goes bathing
Swimming costumes required. Charlottenburg’s Stadtbad hosts an evening of electronic music, circus artistry, live visuals and opera singing. And the name of the event says it all: IMMERSION
The last of the bathers left the pool half an hour ago and the baths are now shrouded in darkness. It’s long past 10pm and not even the pitched glass roof above the steel girders of the ceiling let in a shimmer of light. Yet strange illuminations are playing on the tiled wall separating the swimming area from the ladies’ changing rooms. The grid pattern of tiles is highlighted by the glow before losing its form and giving way to organic shapes creeping and curling across the walls, mixed with jagged forms reflected from the surface of the pool. A scene both spooky and transfixing.
»Right, we’ve got to adjust the tilt of the projector,« says Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger, halting the run-through. Jungschlaeger is a creative coder, a producer of live video art from a laptop. This evening he’s testing some pre-produced visuals on the interior walls of Charlottenburg’s municipal swimming baths – arguably the quirkiest venue that the Deutsche Oper Berlin has come up with to date. Built in 1898, the Jugendstil edifice – Berlin’s oldest indoor swimming baths – is set to host the premiere of IMMERSION, a collaborative experiment by the Tischlerei that brings together artists, musicians, singers with DJ, choreographer and creative coder. A new and daring project – including for the Tischlerei, which is providing the equipment.
With the Tischlerei currently being fitted with a new ventilation system, Artistic Director Carolin Müller-Dohle and Director of IMMERSION Ariane Kareev had to come up with a replacement venue. And with the swimming baths just up the road, they didn’t have to look far. Not only that: the water element perfectly suited a production that explores rituals and the search for community. IMMERSION is the latest event in the »Ambushed« series, a format in which the Tischlerei takes themes and motives from operas being performed on the main stage and renders them in new musical and aesthetic form.
»Our springboard into the subject is the witches and ghosts that feature prominently in MACBETH, THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW and LA FIAMMA,« says director Kareev. »I’m interested in the characteristics that people ascribe to these female protagonists – and the way we can shift these associations at the drop of a hat.« IMMERSION seeks to counter the standard witch-bashing convention, which is reflected even today in terms such as »witch hunt«. Kareev explains that there will be a »senior witch« character, who »takes the audience on a journey, a quest for self-determination, empowerment, autonomous identity and free choice in matters of the heart«.
In the process audience and artists will be in close proximity to one another as never before. Performances are designed to accommodate 70 participating male and female spectators – 50 in the water with the performers, 20 arranged around the narrow margin of the 25-meter pool. Bathing costumes can be assumed to be de rigueur for all – in the interests of equality.
And what do witches wear nowadays? Figure-hugging pieces like any swimmer wears, says costume designer Petra Schnakenberg. »That’s a given in a pool anyway.« And her costumes have a vampish, nefarious touch. »I’m aiming for strong images and statements.« She rejected one turn-of-the-century dress as too goody-goody, for instance. »I’m looking more for a mix of Jean Paul Gaultier, Madonna and Vivienne Westwood,« a Gothicky outfit with uber-ornamented breast section. She is also big on fringes, which can be used to represent body hair or lactation »as a way of highlighting and stylising things that we normally conceal.«
This can all be seen in the light of a feminist conceptualisation of witches as wild, nonconformist women living close to nature, healers and midwives who are keepers of secret knowledge relating to birth, contraception and abortion – a motif embraced by creative coder Phil Jungschlaeger. The shimmering reflections of the pool is done in such a way »that it can be read as amniotic fluid«. The organic shapes being projected onto the tiles in the rehearsal take their inspiration from the inside of a womb. Interior and exterior worlds meld into a single cosmos, ready for the audience to immerse themselves.
A swimming baths does not lend itself well as a stage in the traditional sense, however. As performance spaces, the event will be using only a 2m x 2m platform in the pool and the original gantry of the baths, accessible only from the stairwell through a narrow aperture, which all the equipment (lights, tripods, projector) has to be carried through. The entire venture had been questionable from the outset due to the feared effect of humidity on the equipment. IMMERSION remains a string of challenges to be overcome, starting with the scheduling of rehearsals: »A municipal baths is a public utility and can’t just shut down for us. It has to be open to the public pretty much constantly,« explains Carolin Müller-Dohle, Artistic Director of the Tischlerei. Which is why rehearsals had to take place early in the morning or late at night.
Lasse Winkler, DJ from the Berlin club and theatre scene, is occupied with a quite different aspect of the venue: the sound. »The audio just ebbs away and vanishes,« he says with a laugh. For that reason he’ll be working with areal, all-round »ambient-y« sound. »And when beats come in, then correspondingly clear and distinct, sometimes really loud, too.« Winkler will be fusing his music with sections from operatic works - MACBETH, LA FIAMMA, THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW – from which IMMERSION is drawing its inspiration.
He will be presenting all these elements in such a way that the musicians of the Deutsche Oper Berlin can latch on with their own material. The huge enthusiasm for this extraordinary project is palpable amongst all participants. Carolin Müller-Dohle is quite clear that »this whole fusion of classical music, electronic music, artistry, video installation and opera singing is set to be an astonishing event at this venue«. Director Ariane Kareev (who is planning a follow-up event with the same creative team – EMERSION – albeit in the Tischlerei this time) remains very taken with the »Ambushed« format, »because it encourages uninhibited exploration and original thinking«.
Kareev has her next generation appearing, for example, in the form of a young girl, who could be a younger version of Lady Macbeth, or the childless Empress in THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW. »She embodies a society looking to the future. And with it the question ‘How do we want to live together in the future?’«
Patrick Wildermann works as freelance journalist on cultural affairs for the Tagesspiegel, GALORE Magazin and the Goethe Institute
