Berliners can now take a dip outside one of Germany’s best-known theatres after the city’s Volksb\u00fchne opened a temporary swimming pool in the square in front of the venue.<\/p>\n
The theatre’s new artistic director, Matthias Lilienthal, said the pool had become something of a talking point in the German capital.<\/p>\n
“For the past two weeks, the city has talked about nothing else but whether the pool is a brilliant idea or completely stupid,” Lilienthal told dpa, only slightly exaggerating.<\/p>\n
He recalled one local approaching him a few days ago and telling him that he must be “completely nuts.”<\/p>\n
“I thanked her for the compliment, and then she said she loves the Volksbad,” said Lilienthal, who has already taken a dive himself.<\/p>\n
Lilienthal sees the project, in part, as a political protest against deteriorating public infrastructure – a frequent source of frustration in Berlin lately.<\/p>\n
The Volksb\u00fchne is a Berlin cultural institution renowned for provocative and experimental theatre. It has long been associated with politically engaged productions.<\/p>\n
The pool opened on Friday and will cost the theatre around \u20ac300,000 ($346,000) to install and operate. Admission is free, with timed tickets available online three days in advance. Lifeguards are on duty and swimmers can come until October.<\/p>\n
His first season as artistic director of the Volksb\u00fchne officially begins in October. He succeeds Ren\u00e9 Pollesch, who died unexpectedly two years ago.<\/p>\n
With renovation work still under way on the theatre’s overhead stage machinery, Lilienthal organized the pool project ahead of the new season.<\/p>\n
The idea was inspired by performance artist Florentina Holzinger, who is currently representing Austria at the Venice Biennale and has previously staged “Ophelia’s Got Talent” at the Volksb\u00fchne using a large pool of water.<\/p>\n
Lilienthal said the project was also partly a tribute to late German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief, who used to criticize the imagery in filmmaker Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire,” whose original German title translates as “The Sky over Berlin.”<\/p>\n
“When I was doing the backstroke and looking up, I thought: The sky over Berlin isn’t so bad after all,” Lilienthal said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berliners can now take a dip outside one of Germany’s best-known theatres after the city’s Volksb\u00fchne opened a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[51369,18,51367,51368,51370,28543,28542,28545],"class_list":["post-68959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-artistic-director","tag-berlin","tag-experimental-theatre","tag-german-theatre","tag-lilienthal","tag-matthias-lilienthal","tag-public-pool","tag-volksbuhne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}