World Premiere Of Kat Mustatea's THE MUTABLES to be Presented at HERE Arts Center

HERE Arts Center will host the World Premiere of The Mutables, a new genre-defying work created by transmedia playwright and multidisciplinary artist Kat Mustatea. The production will run October 8-12 in the Mainstage Theater at HERE Arts Center as part of HERE's inaugural HERE Hosts series, an annual performance series of new work from extraordinary artists, ensembles, and independent companies working in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary form in which HERE engages artists who share values alignment and demonstrate high creative kinship.

The Mutables blends experimental opera, movement, dance, and cutting-edge technology into an unforgettable meditation on the power and precarity of what it means to have a voice. Creator Kat Mustatea reconfigures body and voice with her groundbreaking new invention BodyMouth, a one-of-a-kind, sensor-based instrument which synthesizes speech in real time from the movements of performers, turning the body quite literally into a mouth that speaks. In this genre-defying work, dancers sound out words phoneme-by-phoneme with precise sequences of gestures. The Mutables is not only a performance where technology becomes both medium and metaphor, but a radical rethinking of how language lives in the body.

Inspired by mythological forest creatures from Balkan folklore-the ielele, whose voices could both seduce and silence-The Mutables weaves together gesture, sound, and narrative to probe how speech operates under systems of power and resistance. From East European totalitarian histories that demanded subversive modes of expression, to mythographies of the feminine monstrous, this performance unearths what is hidden beneath language and what cannot be unsaid. A collision of past and future that re-writes our received myths of the feminine and transforms the stage into a living, speaking instrument.

"Kat Mustatea's The Mutables represents exactly the kind of visionary work at the intersection of artistic expression and technological innovation that our leadership team is excited to support," said HERE Co-Directors Annalisa Dias and Lauren Miller. "As we launch our HERE Hosts series, we couldn't be more thrilled to provide a platform for this project which so beautifully challenges our assumptions about performance, voice, and power."