Above water: Oceanic feelings in the Berlin Liquidrom

Blue legs, blue arms, red hands. I float in body-warm salt water under the eye of a dome. The dark sky above makes the disk reflect everything that swims below. A flat concrete ceiling stretches over the circular pool, four semi-arches open onto a square circulation. The entire room is smaller than the diving pool in the Humboldthainbad. On the fourth Saturday of December, a handful of people lie in the dim heart of the Liquidroms, gradually there are more. They let themselves be carried by pool noodles, hang on the edge, some kiss each other. Most people listen to the music with their eyes closed. The DJ This afternoon I stand behind a glass window and coordinate the flowing house sound with the moving heads; geometric figures and swaths of light in neon red or blue flicker above me.

These days are enchanted. While the sky over Berlin tries out shades of gray and variations of rain, people play with light in the houses. On Thursday at the Volksbühne, mermaids with meter-long dark tails swim in glowing red tanks. Florentina Holzinger’s piece Ophelia‘s Got Talent works with opulent means, a gang of female sailors down below drunkenly marauds across the stage, acrobats fly around and copulate with a helicopter and all thirteen artists have contact with water. There is a swimming pool with lined lanes on the stage, three connected tanks and a single stand: these are thousands of liters of water in which people swim, frolic, celebrate and give birth. Among other things, the actors reflect on the oceanic feeling, the oneness with the ocean – flanked by a naked female Neptune in her own tank, who, with her eyes wide open, thunders her trident onto the pool floor. That is fantastic and magnificent.

Above water

Photo: private

Anne Hahn is the author of novels and non-fiction books and swims the waters of the world for “nd”.

The large water tank is a challenge for the stage technicians, a friend with whom I took the landscape pictures on Friday tells me Edward Munchs in Potsdam. At one point the large pool leaked under the stage floor of the Volksbühne, but a replacement tank that was there caught most of the water. I look at a neon blue line of Munch’s paint that meanders along the shore stones on the Norwegian Baltic Sea beach under a dark blue sea, the water pierced like a phallus by a reflection of the orange full moon. Pink veils float over the sea and unite it with the sky.

My skin no longer feels like skin, I’m starting to break down. Just drift under the dome eye again, I wave my hands until blue legs appear glowing in the reflection. Splash on to the cave exit, where a sign prohibits the exchange of caresses. The long hallway from the grotto to the sauna opens up a view of the garden, into which a Japanese hot water pool is sunk, surrounded by neon-lit grasses. The other side is the overlong bar with bathrobes and exhausted contents on several stools, in between people relax on loungers, talk little and sip extensively. The minimalist sauna area offers a plunge pool, shower, steam, Himalayan salt, herbal and Finnish sauna. The changing room is a bit tight, only in the hairdryer area is there room again, my hair is flying like it’s under a theater wind machine and I happily run out into the drizzle that is lighting up the fairy lights Roncalli Circus blurred at the Tempodrom.

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