Opera Lab Berlin presents the Kreidler Conspiracy - the world’s first live music theatre advent calendar! At long last The Lab at Monumentenstraße 5 is letting the public have a sneak peak and unveils its Popup Store for Truth. From December 1st right through 24th the collective for contemporary music theatre will perform a shrewd and musically virtuoso showdown of conspiracy theories using compositions by the concept music artist Johannes Kreidler.

Every day a new formation of performers from the ensemble will expose a new conspiracy with and around Kreidler’s music. How does rope jumping explain the secret intrigues behind 9/11? What’s the connection between shoes falling on guitars and the Illuminati? And did you know, that Prince Charles is a vampire - and that opera lab holds him prison? Come to the fireplace, where Opera Lab Berlin will retell the 21st century’s most popular tales. Untruths, which manipulate our Zeitgeist’s narratives from the depth of the web of social media, proclaiming the new salvation or catastrophe. Or becoming reality.

Witness how festively the velvet curtain will swing open daily at 5 pm and open a new door to an alternative truth. Walkers-by can then partake in the inner workings of the laboratory by gazing through the shop window wearing disinfected bluetooth headphones. Short performances as well as social distancing and obligatory medical masks will ensure a safe art degustation in fresh air. Come and enjoy links and connections, where there are none; tasty concept music Christmas recipes; Elvis and Big Foot; glitter and chocolate. 

Forget love, Christmas 2021 will become a feast of truth! 

HUM-AN Orchestra : repetition repetition repetition BANG BANG
Kagel’s Zwei Mann Orchestra visualises the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, which has left us in a world designed by and for the white male. The complex process of machines is externalised into a giant multi-layered sculpture made of ropes, wires and pulleys. Opera Lab Berlin brings this piece into the 21st century and beyond, to a future where the Digital Revolution is completed, and humanity has to seek to overcome bias and prejudices that echo from the past. Wires become wireless connections, ropes become digital networks, the transfer of energy becomes transfer of information and - and this is truly revolutionary - humans are no longer in a mere external controlling function, but are integrated seamlessly into the digital machine. The process of machines is internalised. Human interactions become data transfer. Bodies are extended into the digital. Clouds of soot become an omnipotent digital cloud. 

The members of the ensemble for contemporary music theatre themselves become a collective machine and explore their new digitalised inter-human dynamics, that must rebel against the status-quo. They leave processes and structures of the Old World behind and organise themselves in a decentralised network, they counter quantum artificial intelligence with non binary human swarm intelligence. The genesis of this project is intersectional, multimedial and collaborative. What does the body mean in the world wide web, where does it end, where does it begin? What does a bluetooth connection resonate? What is above the omnipresent Cloud? Where is this all encompassing machine heading? And who controls the System? Join us on our journey up and beyond, into the uncertain. 

Originally composed for an a-capella-choir by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stimmung is reinterpreted as a musical dance theatre by Opera Lab Berlin under artistic direction of Margaux Marielle-Tréhoüart. The vocal occurrence is translated into a spatial-corporal event which allows an examination with Stockhausen's societal utopia. The occupation with the transcendental as an artistic antithesis to capitalistic rationalism, to western lifestyle and to the bourgeois concert ritual is more topical than ever. The ensemble – a community of dancing singers - and the audience will undertake a quest for meaning within the contrast of separation and collectivity. The former church room of Ballhaus Ost invites to invoke artistic and real paradises within transcendental homelessness. Stimmung equally becomes God's requiem mass and a spiritual resuscitation attempt. This dance and music theatric liturgy of tragicomical encounters with the last things opens the question, if not the transcendental itself is standing in earthly felicity's way.

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The documentary "Ostravaganza – Discovery of East German Avant-Garde" is currently in production. Director Martin Miotk accompanies culture journalist Marion Christen at her search for traces of the true origin of avant-garde music.

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The story: Six East German artists didn’t only give rise to the most important innovations of New Music, they also still indulge experimental music in a subversive cultural underground in senior residencies and cultural centers. The sprightly pensioners officially personate as schlager- and entertainment stars and disguise their performances as nostalgic shows and tea dances, where they already had to hide their avant-gardist artistic work under dictation of the GDR regime. These pioneers of the radical modernism now push into the public to present their “Ostravaganza” to a broad audience. The musical avant-garde was originated in the East, was betrayed, dispossessed, forgotten and finally shall be rehabilitated. Including coming-outs, nervous break-downs, confession orgys and emotional minefields…

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