YOU\ME/ALIEN - A Space Opera

YOU\ME/ALIEN is an experiment in radical empathy, a meditation on the unknown – not as a figure of fear or exclusion, but as a presence to be reimagined. Through this lens, Opera Lab Berlin reinterprets the genre of “space opera”, usually evoking large-scale science fiction epics, as a poetic and sonic journey into the fragile and deeply political spaces between people and the way they encounter each other. On this journey, an international group of 12 performers interlaces experimental vocal techniques and choreography with instrumental timbres from strings, winds, percussion, and electronics. Sound becomes the terrain of encounter: unstable, searching, shifting between signal and language. The crew aboard a deep-space vessel works to interpret these signals as identities loosen and re-form, and certainty slips away.

This otherworldly sound theatre invites you to immerse yourself in a world beyond familiar boundaries and raises urgent questions: How do we hear each other across divides? How does language both connect and separate us? And how might art create the conditions for empathy to replace division?

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Opera Lab Berlin has staged over 30 independent productions since its founding in 2013, working with more than 40 contemporary composers and 18 directors. With YOU\ME/ALIEN, the collective continues its mission to expand the possibilities of contemporary music theatre to open space for exchange of diverse lived experiences.