SUNVILLE

A musical theater production by Sofia Jernberg (music), Fiston Mwanza Mujila (text), and Stephanie Thiersch (director)
World premiere at the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 25 September 2026

Survivors of the sea, refugees, exiles come together on an island. They create a new society from scratch without the old rules of origin or power. Is it possible to have a community built on love? The hosts for this evening are two intergalactic collaborators: Sun Ra, pioneer of Afrofuturism in response to omnipresent racism, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who sought to flee the constriction of the art world. Both are fascinated by interplanetary vibrations, read the same spiritual book about love in the 1970s and set the cosmos free.

«The truth about the planet Earth is a bad truth,» sings Sun RA in 1972. He selects music and, with a dose of irony, space as a place of refuge. Afrofuturism is about «resistance through imagination» (Adyam Tesfamariam). This performance follows this trail and seeks out new answers. Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila takes us into the «Second World,» a place where African cosmologies, Black science-fiction and biting satire collide. Sometimes the only solution is to break out into laughter before we can continue dreaming.

Sofia Jernberg’s music is a place of resonance and contradiction: Contemporary composition meets spiritual jazz, improvisation is juxtaposed with griot tradition. Both – Jernberg and Mujila – are on the stage as singer and storyteller. Stephanie Thiersch’s choreography turns the space into a fluid body where language, sound and movement vibrate in permanent tension.

What is true and what is fiction? What is past and what is future? Sunville dives into an uncertain underwater world of the imagination, asking the seemingly simple question: How do we want to live?

In co-production with Wiener Festwochen and VOICES BERLIN FESTIVAL. With generous support from Deutsche Bank Foundation and the Förderkreis der Deutschen Oper Berlin.