Kopf unter Wasser

Hold your breath, dive under, swim away! Imagine that in the middle of the city, in an unassuming lake, there was a hidden world where everything was different. And you would be a mermaid, a dolphin or just a little black fish. The sun would be a billowing sphere from here, the wind a bubble machine and the street noise a dull sound wave from a distant galaxy. And somewhere far out under the water there would be something calling you. How far do you dare to dive into the unknown? What stories will you encounter along the way? And what is happening under the surface of the water in exactly the same moment the earth is shaking somewhere else? Or while we sit up here and listen?

The actress Anke Retzlaff and the musicians Peter Florian Berndt (guitar, electronics) and Dominik Tremel (keys, electronics) turn the perspectives around. They have developed a musical reading with ambient and techno sounds specifically for the floating lake stage and a cross-generational audience. Equipped with an underwater microphone, their instruments and a collection of known and unknown stories, they embark on a musical dive deep into the Schwanenspiegel and all the way to the other end of the ocean. Why fly to the moon and reach for the stars when our own planet remains so unexplored?

Anke Retzlaff is an actress, musician and director. She was nominated for the New Faces Award for Best Newcomer Actress in 2013 for her role in the feature film “Puppe” and named Best Newcomer Artist in “Theater heute” in 2021. Her performance “Dream Machine”, in which Berndt and Hoffmann also participated, premiered in 2021 at the “Theater der Welt” festival in Düsseldorf and has since been touring internationally. In 2022, the three developed the musical performance “Wofür es sich zu kämpfen lohnt – Aufzeichnungen eines Hamsters” together with Paul Jumin Hoffmann, which premiered at the asphalt Festival 2022.

Peter Florian Berndt is a musician, songwriter and performer. He has worked as a composer and stage musician at various theatres in Germany. He is an active member of the professional improv theatre ensemble “Ernst von Leben” and plays e-guitar with “Los Pistoleros Güeros”.

Dominik Tremel works as a freelance musician at theatres and in the field of experimental electroacoustic music and, like Berndt, is a member of the ensemble “Ernst von Leben”. He also develops radio plays and films: “TRAUMfactory” screened at the Max Ophüls Preis Film Festival in 2020, and the radio play “Was wirklich geschah” won first prize at the 2021 Berlin Radio Play Festival.