Ten Transcendental Etudes
In a decathlon arena, six performers belt, twirl, seesaw, and croon through a mashed lexicon of love songs. Over ten etudes, they learn to speak in tongues, in a meditation on language and learning to fall.
Nick Brooke’s Ten Transcendental Etudes melds sampling, sound design, and physical theater and looks at how songs dominate how we talk about each other. The 10-movement theater piece begins with a phonemic breakdown of a single Elvis phrase (“I can’t help falling”), then blooms into dense fugues of text, song fragments, and visceral movement, using familiar pop and recorded sources while recursively sampling itself, creating a work that is “operatic in scope, unfolding in layers that constantly reveal new meanings.” (Culturebot).
Like Brooke’s previous work, the Etudes weave sampled collages with physical theater: productions start as a collage of many recordings, which the ensemble learns to imitate, creating a gestural vocabulary in lock-step with the samples. The work complicates musical culture, using a style developed in shows at Lincoln Center Festival, HERE, Mass MoCA, in what has been called “the most exciting and innovative music theater I’ve seen in years” (Meredith Monk).
The performance is in the round. Circular projection hoops above and behind the audience translate and phonemically parse each etude. A seesaw, chairs, prop mikes, and elaborate sound design and lighting fill out the minimal stage. The ultimate effect is something between arena rock, a decathlon, and a 19th-c. amateur circus.
Over the course of the evening, and the 10 progressive etudes, the performers learn new languages—through phonemes, songs, mash-ups, or simply speaking in tongues–and a fractured snapshot emerges of how we create new ways of communicating, made up of songs.
PROJECT ARTISTS:
Yasmin Pascall
Ariadne Greif
Synead Nichols
Dax Valdes
Michael Chinworth
Paul Pinto
Music Director: Kerry Ryer-Parke
Lighting Designer: Michael Giannitti
Set & Projection Designer: Sue Rees
Sound Designer: Devin Greenwood
Costume Designer: Richard MacPike
Updated: March 8, 2023
HERE is now a mask-optional space. All patrons attending HERE performances and events will no longer be required to wear masks.
We ask all audience members to please stay home if they have a sore throat, are feeling sick in any other way, or have been recently exposed to COVID-19, and to please contact the box office for refunds or exchanges.
All of our performers, technicians, and staff members are required to be fully vaccinated. Additionally, they are participating in an active testing regimen to keep everyone as safe as possible.
HERE reserves the right to revise protocols as the rate of transmission changes and in light of new scientific data that may present itself.
Apr 4-7, 2024
Thu-Sat at 8:30 pm
Fri, April 5, at 10 pm
Sat and Sun, Apr 6-7 at 4 pm
We understand the extreme challenges that our current financial climate presents. No matter your socioeconomic status, we want everyone to have access to groundbreaking art. There are ten tickets priced at $10 available for each performance on a first-come, first-served basis, for those in need of financial assistance. These tickets are available with the code ACCESS. Limit two tickets per patron. Subject to availability.
Running time: 60 minutes, no intermission
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Michael Chinworth is an actor, composer and multi-disciplinary artist based in New York. As a music artist he has created and produced numerous albums/sound art/recorded work, and has toured nationally and internationally as a solo performer and bandmate. Stage credits include Constellations (Roland) at the Gene Frankel Theater, Teatro Belli, Teatro Garage, and Teatro Erba; BOTCH and oyster (by Joe Diebes) at HERE Arts and Roulette; Time and Motion Study, Border Towns, Psychic Driving, The Breaks, 10 Transcendental Etudes (by Nick Brooke) at HERE Arts, Mass MoCA, Arete, and Coffey Street Studios; Serenade for tenor, horn and strings by Benjamin Britten (tenor) at Chapin Hall, Williams College.
Ariadne Greif, praised for her “luminous, expressive voice,” “searing top notes,” and “dusky depths,” (NYTimes), enjoyed a casual child career as a “boy” soprano at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in operas ranging from Donizetti’s Elixir of Love with The Orlando Philharmonic, to Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias at the Aldeburgh Festival, and Atthis, by G.F. Haas, which the NY Times called “one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times. Recent projects included performances with William Kentridge in the Oslo Opera House, The Luxembourg Philharmonic, Berkeley Cal Performances, and Performa in New York of the Dada masterpiece Ursonate, collaborations with The Knights, two projects of her own called Bird Party and Eleven Wild Geese commissioned by The Ultima Festival in Norway, a film of Table Manners, by Sheree Clement, and a film of We Need To Talk, a new monodrama by Caroline Shaw and Anne Carson for Opera Philadelphia. Highlights this season include Alyssa Weinberg’s Isola with Long Beach Opera, as well as the forthcoming album of Kate Soper’s opera The Romance of the Rose. Ariadne has premiered upwards of twenty new operas and more than a hundred new chamber works.
Synead Cidney Nichols is a poly-disciplinary performance artist based in New York City. Her inspiration is deeply rooted in her quest for collective healing, self-awareness, and the freedom and advancement of queer, black, and indigenous people of color. She utilizes various movement-based practices & healing modalities to dismantle fear-based thinking around our identities in order to self-actualize our deepest creative desires. Her practice consists of exploring, sustaining, and reinventing the provisional nature of humanity as it relates to the environment in its macro and micro moments through movement, music, & performance. In the last years, she has performed in a series of works including BLANKS (Getsethamane Herron-Coward/Signature Theater), The Hang (Taylor Mac/ HERE Arts), Dark Girl Chronicles (Nia O. Witherspoon/The Shed), Second Skin: MONSTER (Magnus Works/Judson Memorial Church), and so much more. Synead was most recently awarded the New York City Trust Van Lier Fellowship and is an apprentice with Urban Bush Women. She is currently in pre-production for Priestess of Twerk, created by Nia O. Witherspoon set to premiere this spring at The Space at Irondale Brooklyn. She is continuously inspired to create boundary-breaking art that challenges societal norms and inspires others to cultivate change in their inner worlds in hopes that it will create change in the world around us all.
Yasmin Pascall (she/they) is an NYC-based actor and creative from Chennai, India. They are honored to be a part of this project. She is currently a resident actor at the Mercury Store. Recent credits: Ellis Stump’s White Bitches in Delhi at the Lenfest Center, Kit Marlowe at Redbull Theater, and Kate Pressman’s Pair at the Lenfest Center. UNCSA Drama ’21. @yasminpascall
Paul Pinto is a composer, performer, opera-sermonizer, and multi-disciplinary dabbler who makes music, new media, micro-theatres, and durational performance by himself and with his friends. Some of those friends include the collectives thingNY, Varispeed, and LOVELOVELOVE. A few favorite projects include Patriots with Jeffrey Young, Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives with Varispeed, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, and the cyclorama video installation Whiteness with Kameron Neal. He sang and danced on Broadway in Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, and wrote and performed in the electronic opera Thomas Paine in Violence, starring Joan LaBarbara. Recent commissions and partnerships include HERE Arts, Prototype Festival, Big Ears Festival, Colgate University, The Fisher Center, the Look + Listen Festival, American Opera Projects, Opera America, Culturehub, LaMaMa, Quince Ensemble, WNET All Arts, Media Art Xchange, The Exponential Festival, The Rhythm Method, Yarn/Wire, Gelsey Bell, Nick Brooke and Kristin Marting. He’s a proud artist on the omnivorous Brooklyn label, Gold Bolus Recordings.
Dax Valdes is an actor, movement director, and teaching artist. With Nick Brooke: Decameron, Border Towns. Selected performance credits include The King and I (2nd National), The Addams Family, Matilda, Shrek, Seussical, (CFRT), The Tempest (Free Black Millenials), Spamalot, Rumors, Triumph of Love (Millbrook Playhouse), Beardo (Pipeline Theater), Trade Practices, Lush Valley, (RUS)H, Orpheus (HERE), A Dream Play (NAATCO), 3 Sisters (Old Vic New Voices). Work as movement and/or director has been seen at Prospect Theater Company, Ma-Yi, NAATCO, Leviathan Lab, Walnut Street Theater, and Millbrook Playhouse. Associate member – SDC. Graduate of Point Park University and PCPA.