Berlin Ditches German Opera for Afrofuturism

With the new season beginning in September, the renowned venue is setting new standards. For example, the “Afro-futuristic” music theater piece “Sunville.” The story centers on a group of “survivors of the sea, refugees, exiles” who are shipwrecked on an island and, according to the opera house, build a new society there “out of nothing.”

Two figures stand out: the American jazz musician Sun Ra, the “leading thinker of Afrofuturism as a response to omnipresent racism,” as stated on the Deutsche Oper website; and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both share a fascination with “interplanetary vibrations,” from which they conceive a new order.

For those who want a more detailed explanation, the Berlin State Opera (BSO) offers further insights: “Afrofuturism” combines elements of science fiction with African cultural traditions. The work understands this art movement as a form of “resistance through imagination” and, based on this, seeks new perspectives. The Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila also plays a central role. He leads the audience into a “zone where African cosmologies, Black science fiction, and biting satire collide.”

But the problem is that there is no single number for the cultures or racial groups in Africa. The continent has more than 3,000 distinct ethnic groups and over 2,000 spoken languages, many of them hostile to other groups. Each group has unique traditions and distinct social rules. The notion that the BSO’s project would create a harmonious new order, is naive in the extreme.

In 2023 already, an estimated 40 million Africans were forcibly displaced (internally displaced persons, refugees, and migrants), more than double the figure in 2016. For perspective, 40 million forcibly displaced people is more than the populations of Angola, Ghana, or Morocco.

The emphasis is therefore presumably on cultural “collision.” Beauty has not been a requirement at German theaters for a long time. Musically, the Berlin production promises a mix of different styles, from jazz to contemporary compositions to the so-called “Griyo tradition,” which has its roots either in Haiti or, alternatively, in West Africa. The question remains whether or why Berlin needs this. But that’s completely irrelevant—after all, the taxpayer foots the bill for Germany’s highly subsidized theaters.