Opening: 2nd of March 2023, Berliner Ringtheater

The year is 1919, only a few months after the Russian Revolution and the failed German Communist Revolution of 1918/19, when the body of the executed Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was unceremoniously thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. A year later, a woman jumped from the Bendlerstraße bridge into the same canal to end her life. She was rescued and committed to a psychiatric institution, where she refused to reveal her identity. For a short time, therefore, she went by the name Fräulein Unbekannt – until she launched an unexpected new career claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, who had somehow managed to survive the assassinations of the Russian Revolution. In Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal, the ghosts of these two enigmatic historical figures are joined by a worker ant who has been separated from her colony.

This multidisciplinary work combines the anarchic linguistic inventiveness of Travis Jeppesen with the elements of dance, sound, and video art. Under the direction of Taiwanese theatre-maker Wang Ping-Hsiang, the audience is allowed to wander through a Berlin suspended in time between two centuries, with the Landwehr Canal symbolising the separation between the world of the living and the dead, and at the same time acting as an excavation site for Berlin’s psychogeography.

With: Moritz Sauer, Wu Po-Fu and Tien Yi-Wei

Director: Wang Ping-Hsiang
Sound Designer: Shen Sum-Sum
Stage & Costume Design: Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo
Lighting Design & Technical Direction: Raquel Roslidete
Video & Graphic Design: Lin Yu-En
Sound Engineering: Ilya Selikhov
Assistant Stage & Costume: Idil Morsallioglu
Vocal Coach: Keith Wong
Production Manager: Michael Rade
Press: Anita Goß