Unlimited
What happens when opera opens its hidden spaces? When the scenery depot becomes the stage, the costume workshop the concert hall, when musical theatre becomes a poetic space and we can encounter each other in a completely different way? When opera knows no boundaries?
With Unlimited, the opera becomes the host. We make surprising connections: between opera and the street, between composition and club culture, between history and radical modernity, between city and opera house. Our program follows curiosity, wherever it leads us: to Berghain for Bára Gísladóttir’s double bass drones, to the cinema with Susanne Kennedy, to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche for immersive sound installations. In the Tischlerei – our headquarters – Afrofuturist music theatre merges with Congolese science fiction and spiritual jazz to create a vision of a new society. John Cage asks: What does democracy sound like when everyone plays at once? Jennifer Walshe and Philip Venables explore solitude as a shared experience. In the Nachtmusiken, Mozart’s original clavichord meets glowing sewing machines and humanity’s final days – the Letzte Tage der Menschheit.
We celebrate musical theatre as a space for transformative, experimental art. For stories that are warm and still push boundaries. We give a visual artist the key to Deutsche Oper Berlin for two days, and bring together women’s voices from different musical traditions, knowledge keepers and storytellers who lead us to a range of places in Berlin for the new concert series Cantadoras. Our Salons bring astrologers and Stockhausen, Congolese countertenors and sommeliers, together. And when night comes, the stage becomes the floor: the opera exhales and dives into the night in our Late Nights.
Unlimited happens everywhere: In various corners of the opera house, in clubs in Berlin, in galleries, in front of the building and in the foyer. We invite you to dance, to flicker, to debate, to dream, without limits.
Premieres
Sunville 25.9.26 – 2.10.26
Survivors of the sea, refugees, exiles come together on an island. They create a new society from scratch without the old rules of origin or power. Is it possible to have a community built on love? The hosts for this evening are two intergalactic collaborators: Sun Ra, pioneer of Afrofuturism in response to omnipresent racism, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who sought to flee the constriction of the art world. Both are fascinated by interplanetary vibrations, read the same spiritual book about love in the 1970s and set the cosmos free. What is true and what is fiction? What is past and what is future? Sunville dives into an uncertain underwater world of the imagination, asking the seemingly simple question: How do we want to live?
Music of Changes 5.3.27 – 13.3.27
Together with the Berlin-based Zafraan Ensemble, the musically playful and versatile theatre artist Thom Luz and Titus Engel, conductor-in-residence at Deutsche Oper Berlin, have created an evening of musical theatre in which John Cage’s work can be experienced in its entirety: from the surprisingly captivating percussion pieces of his early years, through the more contemplative thinning and dissolution harmonies of his middle period, to the sound meditations of his late works, shaped entirely by chance and the initiative of his own interpretation. More than a century after his birth, Cage’s work still contains one of the most radical musical answers to the most pressing question facing our society: How can we create a structure in which the most diverse sounds can coexist without one sound dominating, controlling, suppressing, reinterpreting or even obliterating another?
Hamed & Sherifa 30.4.27 – 13.5.27
What would it be like if there were no more injustice in the world? If we were to overcome the power structures that suppress people? If nobody were to destroy the Earth, and if peace finally prevailed? If everybody could live and love as they wished? Exceptional artist Heinrich Horwitz narrates the family opera Hamed & Sherifa by Lebanese composer Zad Moultaka as a look back from a utopian future – a time when all forms of life and love are possible and accepted. It is also a time when all barriers have been overcome, including those between the audience and the stage: When the performance is over, audience members big and small become part of one vibrant community.
The Alonetimes 14.10.26 – 16.10.26 / Guest Performances
The Alonetimes guides six extraordinary performers through a web of memories, times and parallel worlds: a druid by a fire made of broken iPads, two boys at a piano just before a meteorite impact, the voice of a lost love on a walkie-talkie. Scenes like found objects from personal history. For this project, two fascinating and very different composers come together: Jennifer Walshe and Philip Venables explore loneliness in their new music theatre piece – sharpened by constant digital presence, intensified by pandemic and crisis.
