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).