‘The Mutables’ to Premiere at HERE Arts Center
By Afton Markay(Photo credit: Whitney Browne)
“The Mutables,” by Kat Mustatea and Kamala Sankaram will make its premiere at the HERE Arts Center from Oct. 8–12, 2025.
“The Mutables” blends experimental opera, dance, and technology into a meditation on the power and precarity of what it means to have a voice. The story is inspired by mythological forest creatures from Balkan folklore, the ielele, whose voices could both seduce and silence. In Mustatea and Sankaram’s work, technology goes beyond augmentation, turning choreography by Marie Lloyd Paspe, into syntax that raises urgent questions about how language is felt, embodied, and made.
The new work features BodyMouth, a one-of-a-kind, sensor-based instrument for embodied speech invented by Mustatea. Bridging choreography, language, and computation, BodyMouth allows performers to “speak” through sequenced gestures, enacting words phoneme-by-phoneme, turning the body quite literally into a mouth.
Sankaram’s score entwines with the BodyMouth instrument. It features medieval chant and harmonic structures via its computational framework, a collision of past and future that re-writes myths of the feminine and transforms the stage into a living, speaking instrument. The score was written specifically for mezzo-soprano Rocky Duval, who is the soloist.
Mustatea’s BodyMouth is the result of three years of research into real-time speech synthesis. The instrument has garnered major recognition as a finalist for the 2024 Guthman Prize for new musical instruments, the 2024 Lumen Prize, and has been featured by CBS Sunday Morning, Harper’s Magazine, and Gizmodo. “The Mutables” will mark the world premiere of a full length performance featuring the instrument.
The 90-minute performance will take place on the Mainstage Theatre and begin at 8:30 pm.
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