Seduction & Demise
Seduction and Demise in East Berlin
Beggars Opera Co-Operative
Through a successful three way funding arrangement between Deakin University, Beggars Opera Cooperative and The Future Designers Fund – State Government of Victoria, Seduction and Demise in East Berlin – is a digitally mediated partnership, collaboration and performance between Deakin University communication design students and the Beggars Opera Cooperative.
The Melbourne-based Beggars Opera Cooperative is dedicated to the interdisciplinary development of dynamic new operatic works. Since its inception in 2010, BegOpCoOp have collaborated with a growing collective of freelance writers, musicians, performers and designers to develop material for their flagship opera ‘Seduction and Demise in East Berlin’. This is a 3 Act opera featuring an ensemble cast of principal performers, a choir and an orchestra of musicians on percussion, horns, strings and piano. Through the intertwining stories and fates of its five principal characters the opera uses the theme of surveillance and mutual spectatorship as experienced in communist East Berlin as an allegory for the manner in which contemporary communication technologies mediate and control our lives in the present day.
This collaboration with the BegOpCoOp is part of an ongoing dialogue between the artist and the organisation which engages the visual, the designerly and operatic arts. This resulted in the development of visualisation, knowledge, infrastructural and digital communication design strategies that open up the organisation to the theoretical and practical implications of contemporary performance in Australia. The technical innovation involved in the production of this work draws on both formal and structural elements of critical design practice that can be traced through the theoretical concerns shared by Bonsiepe and Krippendorf.
