Opera Lab Berlin curates composers who have found a way to be radical and understandable at the same time, writing pieces that present real and unique dramatic challenges to directorial teams and performers. It's about creating comprehensible, real-life events, searching out places that conjure the magic of the moment and to articulate, conceptualize, and anchor the language of contemporary music in vivid terms.
In recent years we have presented projects such as "Ostravaganza," a mockumentary film about subversive new music in the GDR, and "Kreidler Conspiracy," a performative live-streamed Advent calendar to be experienced in the streets of Berlin and at home on YouTube. Furthermore, we are proud of the success of our operatic pop-song covers from the project "Who's Afraid of Pop Culture?" with over half a million views on youtube. As well as our online spectacles we do live productions such as "Stimmung," which most recently performed at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, combined Stockhausen's overtone singing with experimental dance theater, and "HUM-AN Orchestra," which radically reinterprets the composition by Mauricio Kagel's “Zwei Mann Orchestra” portraying a world in which human and machine has become one. Discover all of our projects.
The music theater ensemble Opera Lab Berlin is a hybrid collective that represents all the links in the creative chain, thereby forming the foundation for their work. Our artists come from a variety of branches in the creative industry: musicians, actors, composers, directors, choreographers, set and costume designers, light designers, and dramaturgs - together they are united by the desire to create unique music theatre experiences. All lab members strive to dare challenging boundaries and always explore new perspectives. As such, the virtuoso skills of all expands in each project.
At Opera Lab Berlin, there is an equal principle between music and theater, between sounds and movement that interact and create a whole.
Since its founding in 2013, the collective has staged over 30 independent productions, with compositions by over 40 different contemporary composers and over 18 different directors. The core of the ensemble has now grown to over 30 members, while collaborations with artists and production staff extend to over 100 highly artistic individuals. Opera Lab builds teams where mutual trust and responsibility are the highest assets - and where questions and conflicts are allowed.
