Mauer Broadcast is a 16-minute composition in which the public came together to sing memories of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The premiere, part of the MauerFall30 festival organized by Kulturprojekte Berlin, took place at three historic sites - Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz, Humboldtforum / Marx-Engels-Forum - with hundreds of singers from all over Berlin, several times over the course of the festival week, November 4-10, 2019.
The texts for Mauer Broadcast were selected from Sheryl Oring’s Maueramt project from autumn 2014, produced in conjunction with the 25th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. At this series of public performances, Oring set up typewriter locations along the former Wall and asked questions such as: “What do you think about when you think about the Berlin Wall,” or “What would you like the world to remember about the Berlin Wall?” Answers were typed on a manual typewriter onto small sheets of paper and collected for an exhibition at the Museum THE KENNEDYS in Berlin.
In addition to participants from the public, Mauer Broadcast performances also featured the American Church Berlin Gospelchoir; Lisa Bielawa and Ken Norris, sing leaders; Kati Brien and Bastian Duncker, alto saxophones; Elena Kakaliagou, horn; Damir Bacikin, trumpet; and Vladimir Veres, trombone. The horn played the entire piece from the center of the site, while the other instruments and singers began at opposite peripheries and worked their way towards the center for the celebratory finale, enacting a symbolic “reunification.”
Mauer Broadcast can be presented live as an electroacoustic performance for a flexible number of instruments and voices and pre-recorded digital audio.
The project was an initiative of American composer Lisa Bielawa and American artist Sheryl Oring in cooperation with Kulturprojekte Berlin’s week-long celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution - Fall of the Berlin Wall.