etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

So Many Ideas is a performance that explores a moral crisis we cannot quite name: a silent, self-destructive malaise, an obscure calamity.

Set in a crumbling portside hotel room at the edge of their civilization, three women—one terminally ill—take refuge in their shared space. One plays the violin almost absentmindedly, another sings, while the other murmurs, dreams, pleads and remembers. Together, their words overlap, complete, and challenge one another like a Baroque cadenza—a reflection of culture, a nervous tic, an urgent search for meaning: how they got there; how we all got here.

Drawing inspiration from Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, and musically from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto, So Many Ideas confronts the present moment: in a world overflowing with brilliance, beauty, and invention—so many choices, so much creativity—why do we keep ending up in the same places, with so little to show for it?

85 minutes, sung and spoken in English, German and Italian, partially subtitled in German and English

With its new performance, Opera Lab Berlin takes inspiration from pioneers of electronic music such as Wendy Carlos, SOPHIE and Pauline Oliveros in their new performance. They celebrate overcoming mechanical-acoustic sound production and going beyond heteronormative boundaries.

Together with trans singer-songwriter Marlene Bellissimo, known from The Voice of Germany, Opera Lab Berlin explores the sonic potential of electronics for defining your own parameters in A Guide To Self-Synthesis. Its transformative, transgressive power and frequencies of (self-)expression become the focus of the performance, for which composer Evan Gardner creates a pluralistic combination of notated but non-restrictive sound fields. The US-American university professor and and activist Susan Stryker, one of the foremost scholars in the field of (trans)gender studies, will take the stage as a special guest with her own contribution to the production.

What possibilities does synthetic sound production offer? How do queer harmonies and trans oscillators sound? Following the principle of Mauricio Kagel’s instrumental theater, singing and dancing, music from synthesizers, motion-tracking technology, composition and choreography come together in A Guide to Self-Synthesis, a new utopian and emancipatory celebration of electronic music.

“[Opera Lab Berlin is] one of the most experimental and refreshing musical theater groups in the Berlin’s independent performing arts community” (Siegessäule),

MARLENE BELLISSIMO is a trans woman and musician. As a trans singer-songwriter often focusing on trans voices in her work, she is interested in how gender fluidity can be expressed through the voice. On TikTok, she celebrates the diversity of trans voices, performing one-woman-duets that showcase her vocal range. In 2023, she released an EP titled christmas with my dead self, and she is known on YouTube for her documentary Finding a Trans Voice, where she discusses the philosophical and practical journey of finding a new voice through her transition. In September 2024, Marlene Bellissimo appeared on The Voice of Germany, astonishing the judges with her vocal artistry.

The Opera Lab Berlin music theater ensemble is a hybrid collective that links all creative elements together. People from all artistic fields come together in Opera Lab: whether music, acting, composition, directing, instruments, choreography, stage and costume design, lighting, stagecraft or dramaturgy – equality is a core principle at Opera Lab Berlin. Since its founding in 2013, the collective has brought over 30 original productions to the stage, featuring compositions by more than 40 contemporary composers and directed by over 18 different directors. The core ensemble has grown to more than 30 members and they collaborate with over 100 artists and production staff.

The idea of absolute silence is both gratifying and threatening.

Silence can be wellness or torture, a coveted resource or an absolute nightmare. But above all, it is an impossibility: “Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot”, John Cage observed after visiting an anechoic chamber and encountering not silence but the buzzing of his nervous system and the throbbing of his blood.

¡SILENCIO, POR FAVOR! initiates a search for perfect silence, knowing full well that it does not exist. Therefore, when the ensemble searches for silence, it is actually searching for sounds: sounds of everyday life, sounds of coincidence, unintended sounds and inaudible sounds that buzz through the space in the form of imperceptible frequencies. Using selected works by John Cage and Cathy van Eck and with the help of the antennae of sound artist Marta Zapparoli, Björnsson | Marx and Opera Lab create a dense mesh of music, sounds and texts, opening up a space for reflection and experience in which the ambivalence of silence is treated just as much as the contingency of our acoustic perceptions.

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