Bennington College Professor Nicholas Brooke brings his creative collaborators to MASS MoCA for a week-long residency to work on his latest piece, Ten Transcendental Etudes. Culminating in a work-in-progress sharing, Ten Transcendental Etudes is an evening-length piece for 6 performers that 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).

Ten Transcendental Etudes has two performance dates: Friday, March 1 and Saturday, March 2.

Photo: Sue Rees