VOX HUMANA

In the summer of 2026, Opera Aperta—a group of Ukrainian female artists living under the daily threat of Russia’s war of annihilation—will gather in Berlin-Neukölln to open the new season at the Neuköllner Oper.

As a thank-you to Germany for its political support and air defense systems, the Ukrainian women decide to give this country the best they have—their voices—and promise to prepare Germany for victory at the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest by developing a radical political hyperpop project.

On the bus ride from Kyiv to Berlin, the artists immerse themselves in a surreal soundscape where the voice of Theodor Adorno, Ukrainian folk songs, and music from the interwar period blend together.

The bus trip becomes a journey through time, at the end of which the group finds itself in 1933 at a Yiddish cabaret in Berlin, witnessing the final meeting between the painter Charlotte Salomon and the singing teacher and psychotherapist Alfred Wolfsohn, who returned from World War I with acoustic trauma caused by the screams of war and cured himself through vocal exercises.

“War is outside, or inside, or over.”

Signa Köstler

How do you imagine war? Does war sometimes haunt you in your dreams? What does war sound like? Perhaps like a scream, like silence, hoarseness, like a chorus of auditory hallucinations?

VOX HUMANA. A SINGSPIEL seeks answers—answers in the form of “rhizomatic theater” that constantly shifts between a workshop on expanded sound techniques, a techno ritual, a lecture on performance theory, and post-documentary theater.