Ariadne jumps in at the last minute for an ailing colleague in Nick Brooke’s stunning Ten Transcendental Etudes.

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).