It's a sunny Sunday in Pankow, Berlin's dreariest suburb. I fix a salad, fill a bottle with water, and go down to my bike. I stop by a Schrebergarten - one of Germany's famous allotment gardens, which I am lucky enough to share with collagues at the end of my street - and pick up a towel, a lying-cushion, and a panama hat I find lying around. Time to get healthy by the lake!
Coming in to Berlin's Weißer See lake - the largest in Berlin-Weißensee and approximately in the centre of that district - many Berliners seem to have had the same idea. The lake reeks with population, people half naked or more lounging around, the beach cafe (entry 4 EUR) with its Hollywood-parody sign and giant letters looming over the water, giving everything a feeling like it's the 1970s. Not to mention the golden September light, which makes everything look sepia-toned, like it's from an old family polaroid.
I find the area between the Milchhäuschen cafe and the Boat rental, find my place, and sit down on the cushion, waiting for the show to begin.
WaterWaltz is a performative cycle that began in 2022 in Krumme Lanke, a lake in south-west Berlin, and has since moved around many of Berlin's favourite water-holes, including Tegeler See and Müggelsee. These are all popular places for Berlin-style summer recreation, where a motley crew of last night's revellers, families, and weirdos gather to soak up the sun and the sand, in a sort of mildly disappointing version of a beach. Waterwaltz re-appropriates these places as site-specific locations for dance via an innovative invisible floating mat, which makes the dancers look like they are dancing literally on top of the water, carefully steered by invisible ropes as the crowd watches on - or simply integrates the magical dancing figure into their everyday recreational activities.
Photo: Dusan Sekulovic
The spectacle of seeing a dancer-on-water against a backdrop of passers by does not lose it's magic over the 3-hour duration of WaterWaltz, which repeats it's cycle every hour. It's worth the free entry price just for this: during the performance I saw, a visitor and her dog amusingly entered the stage while talking loudly in Italian on a wireless headset, apparently oblivious to the audience before them.
