At night

• A film by: Claudia Lehmann

  Claudia Lehmann

  Claudia Lehmann (b 1975 in Langenhangen near Hanover), who holds a doctorate in elementary particle physics, is a film-maker and video artist. In her cinematic work, which ranges from short, documentary and feature films to music and art videos, installations and performances, she uses simple stories to explore perception, reality and time. Her film Memory effect won the 2006 Shocking Short Award. Her first independently produced documentary Hans im Glück was invited to the 2009 Berlinale, and in 2012, with X-Filme Creative Pool, she created the Juli Zeh adaptation Schilf. She also frequently works in theatre; in the course of her long-standing collaboration with stage director Nicolas Stemann, she developed Visual Concepts and unconventional live video performances, and worked in various productions such as Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns by Elfriede Jelinek (Thalia Theater Hamburg/Schauspiel Cologne, 2009), Faust I+II by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Salzburg Festival/Thalia Theater 2011) and Die Schutzbefohlenen by Elfriede Jelinek (Theater der Welt/Thalia Theater Hamburg, 2014). In 2014, together with artist and composer Konrad Hempel, she founded the Institute for Experimental Affairs (IXA), which collaborated with Tamtam Film to produce the documentary The Symphony of Uncertainty. 2018-2020 she was guest professor for Digital Media at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. In 2019 she was appointed professor of Film and Visual Communication at the Mozarteum University.

  Konrad Hempel

  Konrad Hempel

  Konrad Hempel (b 1973), writer, producer, artist, composer and musician, lives and works in Berlin. After studying History, Musicology and Philosophy, he went on to study Visual Communication at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin, graduating under Prof. Alexander Jordan. His work deals primarily with space, the overlapping of real and virtual world, and text, sound and information. He creates installations, soundscapes, video works and paintings, acoustic, visual and spatial compositions, which have been exhibited in venues including the Academy of Arts and House of the Cultures of the World in Berlin, and Museo Monjo in Barcelona. Coming from the squatter and underground scene, from 1998 until 2003 he was founder and member of the Hearing and Seeing department of the Open Stage in Berlin, an experimental space somewhere between art and satire. He is engaged in experimental, classical and popular music, and composes for film, silent film and the theatre. He has toured with his band Yellowback in countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Czech Republic, and has released more than six albums. With ALP music, he has provided new compositions for classic silent films, with live performances in Europe and the USA, including in the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. The ensemble Elementarstrategien  was created for The Symphony of Uncertainty. His work as musician, composer and video artist takes him to venues including the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Residenztheater in Munich, National Theatres in Luxembourg and Zagreb and Den Norske Opera in Oslo, as well as to clubs and galleries as a member of the performance and multi-media collective Schwindel, and with performances such as Irrlichter and Improvisation 0108. In 2014, together with Claudia Lehmann, he founded the Institute for Experimental Affairs (IXA), linking philosophy, art and research in order to generate innovation beyond goal-oriented knowledge- and art-production. He has taught at the Berlin Academy of the Arts and the Weissensee Academy of Art since 2016.

• Musical interpretation: Daniel Regenberg

  Daniel Regenberg

  Daniel Regenberg (b 1976) began his musical education at the age of four. At six, he started piano lessons, which he stopped at fourteen, preferring to experiment and improvise, concentrating on jazz and popular music. Initially, he studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and went on to study Jazz Piano/Popular Music, auditing Composition at the Hanns Eisler School of Music (with Jens Thomas, Georg Graewe and others), and post-graduate studies in Film Composition at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. He was a private pupil of jazz-piano legend Richie Beirach and a student in tabla and Indian music with Pandit Sankha Chatterjee.

  Besides performing in various ensembles in many places including New York, Tokyo and Beijing, and composing music for film and theatre, he has produced various albums ranging from electronic music to jazz, and participated in many contemporary dance productions, frequently with Juschka Weigel, also as concept developer and co-choreographer. He has written two books, as well as diverse articles,  screenplays and pamphlets, initiating and realising, as director and screenwriter, a feature film and a 12-part internet series entitled Torstrasse intim.

  In the theatre, Daniel Regenberg has worked as musical director and stage pianist with Sebastian Baumgarten, Nicolas Stemann, Karin Henkel, Karin Beier, Oliver Frljic, Ivan Panteleev and others, and frequently with Milan Peschel, including in Berlin at the Volksbühne, Komische Oper, Deutsches Theater, Maxim Gorki Theatre, in Hamburg at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and Thalia Theater, at the Schauspiel Köln (Cologne) and Schauspiel Zürich, in Vienna, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Leipzig, Amsterdam, etc.

  Together with his partner Maria Kwiatkowsky, he developed the character Paff Meisi and released the CD Intimtattoo on the Volksbühne label. They also presented the King of Cock’s monthly Laid Night Show in the Red Salon of the Volksbühne. For the past five years, in thrall to the late recordings by Wladimir Horowitz, Daniel Regenberg has spent much time and energy on developing a cantabile sound on the piano. His focus is now increasingly on performing exorbitant solo improvisations.

• Production

  Concept & implementation: Institut for Experimental Affairs

  Institut for Experimental Affairs

  The Institute for Experimental Affairs (IXA), seeks to mediate between science and art. It was founded in Berlin by Konrad Hermann Hempel and Dr. Claudia Lehmann in 2014. With a growing network, the IXA launches and realises multi-media projects which – based on scientific and philosophical approaches – become artistic experiments. The film project The Symphony of Uncertainty, released last year,  was realised and co-produced with the Hamburg production company Tamtam Film. Research institutes act as partners, as do organisations, production companies, theatre and independent scene institutions. Claudia Lehmann and Konrad Hempel,  as IXA, teach at institutes including the University of the Arts and the  Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin.

• In collaboration with: Thomas Ballhausen

  Thomas Ballhausen

  Thomas Ballhausen (b 1975 in Vienna) is writer, university lecturer, and literature and culture researcher, currently focusing on media history, text theory and literature as artistic research. In the Spot On MozART project he is part of the office team and supports the development of individual project planning.

   

  Copyright: Chris Saupper 2022

• Direction and production assistant: Henrike Wiemann
• Image design: Eike Zuleeg
• Sound design: Andreas Mohnke
• Production design: Stephanie Därr
• Costumes: Anna Lechner
• Make-up: Dorothea Eisel
• Set / props: Tobias Esche
• Lighting: Rasmus Bjerregaard

• Actors

  Jenny Schily
  Daniel Regenberg
  Oskar Lehmann
  Josefine Hempel
  Carl Hegemann
  Alexander Lode
  Christian Rau
  and
  Thelma Buabeng

Night makes us see our very existence differently. At night, we approach the dark side of our existence, delicately and secretly; at the same time, night frees us from all constraints, admitting imagination into our life. The starting-point for the film Nachts is Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor – possibly his most frequently played piano work, at least amongst young students. The piece lends inspiration for this narrative film in which clues of the composer’s biography and musical elements of the composition are weaved into a woman’s (played by Jenny Schily) nocturnal journey through a city. She has to go somewhere, wants to go somewhere. But where does she arrive? Torn between her longings and encounters, between genius and fear of failure, between  freedom and constraints, she finally finds herself. In reality, everything is different – or exactly the same.