Musical theater: Data eats up the soul? “Beta” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Deutsche Oper Berlin is now showing what an “investigative musical theater” is in its small hall, the “Tischlerei”: “Beta” is a collaboration between the 35-year-old Russian composer and singer Dariya Maminova and the 45-year-old German director, journalist and Actress Christiane Mudra. The piece lasts 100 minutes, in one act without a break, and is dedicated to the topic of “Big Data and AI”. It’s about the contemporary “Silicon Boys”, a term based on the non-fiction book by journalist David A. Kaplan: These are Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s about the super-rich owners of US technology companies, their omnipotence and arrogance. It’s about data protection and data misuse. It’s about human self-optimization and eugenics. It’s about capitalism and democracy. It’s about news and fake news. It’s about science and fiction. These are all highly topical questions that are grateful for the general public and which in the opera business – at least superficially – often have to give way to mermaids, elves and knights.

So hard facts? Copywriter Mudra has adopted the brand name “investigative theater” herself. She regularly works in long-term research projects and then develops multimedia performances using the information she collects. Most recently, in “Hotel Utopia,” performed in Munich and Berlin, she focused on the value of passports. Composer Maminova works with computers and synthesizers as well as classic analog instruments consistently across genres and on the boundaries of serious and popular music – insofar as these even exist.

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Upon entry, spectators are given a wireless, white voting cube with a display. With this, the course of the action can now (ostensibly) be influenced by simple majorities. In the hall, the audience can expect a stage set whose futuristic minimalism is strongly reminiscent of the aesthetics of the feature films “Tron” (1982) and “The Matrix” (1999). In the center, illuminated plastic arches form a kind of central aisle, to the left and right of it are the stands, on three sides there are video projections, and at the front, so to speak, is the five-member musical ensemble. Conducted by Elda Laro, the piano and harpsichord (Jessica Rucinski), violin (Yukari Aotani-Riehl), viola (Juan Lucas Aisemberg), double bass (Martin Schaal) and percussion (Thomas Döringer) play in triggered sequences from the digital archive.

Soloist Hye-Young Moon appears in an illuminated body suit. She plays the cyborg Lou, plagued by excess data and a faulty operating system in pre-production status. Like a siren, she sings pseudo-metaphysical tech babble over anemic sound decor. Maminova’s string pads can hardly be distinguished from emotive film music, reminiscent of the neo-romanticism of Wendy Carlos (who composed the soundtrack to “Tron”), technoid club music and the West Coast synthesizer arpeggios of Suzanne Ciani.

The voting dice are about to be used for questions about data security and online behavior: “Do you primarily use WhatsApp for communication?” Results are projected live on the screen, the audience may only suffer such sleight of hand in the production once or twice, it seems in the course of the but rather poor plot rather unimpressed by the technical navel-gazing.

Although Mudra’s content is by no means unclear, it is neither particularly “investigative” nor does she put a lot of effort into artistic communication. In quantitative terms, simple facts from our world, the world of the data ogliopole, stream into your ears. The tenor here is always the same: perverse, inhumane, apocalyptic. So if you haven’t recognized the seriousness of the situation, you’ll have it carved into your brain here. Zuckerberg is a slave driver, Musk is a libertarian amoralist, Gates is a greedy hypocrite. Quotes from Ayn Rand and Nick Land are served – two programmatically anti-social bogeymen of liberal Democrats. The latter should also get rid of their fat, Mudra doesn’t want to appear so blind in the middle-left eye and therefore introduces the character of Clara Sanders, a well-intentioned but consistently elusive politician for digital matters. Because the free market also regulates social democracy, it cuts into its own flesh with its binary optimism: Purchasable AIs manipulate public opinion, including in the interests of right-wing radicals. And they benefit because in surveillance capitalism, everything in private is always available for money, while everything in public falls into disrepair. Zuckerberg parody Julian Zapp (Simon Mantei), on the other hand, moves beyond any conservative morality towards genetic selection on the way to becoming a new human being.

It may also be due to Carolin Müller-Dohle’s rather shattered dramaturgy that the approaches of a game show, mixed with a political crime thriller and the personal tragedy of a cyborg, all come to nothing. Apart from redundant accusations in the jargon of a K-group reader in black and white, there is hardly anything offered in terms of language and narrative. It was precisely our own milieu – a cultural industry that, with and without AI babble, that only generates a crisis-like emptiness – that would have offered urgent reflection. “Beta” remains in its own clichés and has become a rather boring, half-baked lesson, but one that constantly sticks the moral index finger all the way up into the rectum. The deadly sin of hard-working Democrats is also arrogance.

Next performances: 1st and 2nd 3rd, https://deutscheoperberlin.de/de_DE/production/beta.1341640

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