The Mutables: Bodies That Speak & Minds That Listen
On a crisp Manhattan evening, the black box of the HERE Arts Center glowed like a living pulse. Inside, a hush spread through the audience—the anticipatory silence before revelation. Then came motion. Five figures emerged, their faces calm as stone, their limbs taut with potential energy. What followed in Kat Mustatea's The Mutables was not a performance so much as an awakening—an encounter between human language and the body’s forgotten grammar.
Written and directed by Mustatea, The Mutables fuses choreography, music, and technology into a luminous exploration of how speech and gesture shape consciousness. At its core lies BodyMouth, her invention that transforms movement into phoneme—an instrument through which dancers “speak” by moving, their gestures converted into sound. As each motion flickered into tone and syllable, the boundary between mind and body dissolved. The audience did not merely watch; it listened with its eyes.
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ielele — The Feminine Monstrous and the Music of Hurt
The first part, ielele, opened with Marie Lloyd Paspe as NORMAL, a woman negotiating her humanity in the wake of invisible harm. “Am I hurt?” she asked, her voice breaking on its own echo. The question trembled in the air like an unanswered prayer. Her spine coiled and uncoiled with the inward struggle of self-definition. This gesture could have sprung from Martha Graham’s lexicon of contraction and release, where emotion is truth’s first language and movement its confession.
Marie Lloyd Paspe in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranova
As the other dancers entered—Rocky Duval, Felix Bryan, Lo Poppy, and Jonathan Colafrancesco—they became the mythical ielele, forest spirits whose voices both enchant and annihilate. Their refrain, “Here I am, hear me,” rippled through Kamala Sankaram's electronic score like wind threading through an ancient wood. It was as though the stage had become a neural network of sound and body, each dancer a firing synapse of memory and myth.
L-R: Felix Bryan, Lo Poppy, Jonathan Colafrancesco, and Rocky Duval in A scene from The Mutables at the HERE Arts Center. Photo by Maria Baranova
Lighting designer Christina F. Tang bathed them in reds, beiges, and blacks—colors that flickered like embers of the unsaid. The hues bled into the floor, a chromatic meditation on voice and absence. There were moments when silence carried more meaning than words, echoing Noam Chomsky’s belief that the structures of language—the unseen scaffolds beneath speech—reveal the architecture of thought. Here was the embodiment of syntax: the arc of an arm became a question; a fall became a clause; stillness, the unspoken period at the end of a human sentence.
Rocky Duval in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranova
“To Be Heard” — Rage as Resurrection
In To Be Heard, Paspe’s NORMAL struggled to articulate the simplest word: “v-v-voices.” Duval’s ECHO answered, “What if it’s not your voice that’s broken but your will to speak?” The exchange detonated into fury. Percussion thundered; vowels collided. The dancers erupted in a physical protest of the unsayable. Their nearly blank expressions—recalling the icy detachment of Robert Palmer’s famed muses—amplified the subtext: that defiance sometimes hides behind composure, that silence can be louder than screams.
L-R: Lo Poppy, Marie Lloyd Paspe, and Felix Bryan in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranov
This was Daniel Nagrin’s philosophy made flesh: that dance is not an adornment but “the body thinking aloud.” Each gesture was cognition in motion, a philosophy translated into breath. The choreography demanded courage; it asked its performers to confront vulnerability not as weakness but as agency. Their discipline was as rigorous as their empathy was raw.
Helicopter — Becoming Furiously New
The second half, Helicopter, burst forth in fog and metallic sound, the dancers transformed into a living engine—breathing, whirring, trembling. Mustatea’s text tells of a woman sprouting blades from her scapulae, as her mother asks, “Who would marry you now?” It’s a myth of metamorphosis, womanhood transfigured through propulsion and pain.
Johathan Colafrancesco in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranova
Lo Poppy’s solo embodied the metamorphosis with exquisite tension, each movement slicing the air like a rotor, each breath propelling her closer to transcendence. Across the stage, Felix Bryan answered in rippling counterpoint, his lines both mechanical and human. Jonathan Colafrancesco anchored the motion with quiet gravity, his stillness cutting deeper than frenzy.
Sound designer Jimmy Kavetas layered Sankaram’s score with thrum and pulse—sonic strata that seemed to vibrate within the body itself. Paulina Olivares's costumes and Camelia Skikos's featured designs merged flesh with fabric, turning skin into syntax. Under Tang’s light, the dancers became living hieroglyphs, spelling out what language cannot.
L-R: Lo Poppy and Marie Lloyd Paspe in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranov
In these moments, The Mutables carried the spirit of Leonard Bernstein—not in melody, but in inquiry. Like Bernstein dissecting Mahler or explaining rhythm as the pulse of understanding, Mustatea uses sound not to accompany emotion but to question it. Her performers don’t simply dance to music—they argue with it, philosophize through it. Bernstein once said, “The best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline.” Here, movement becomes grammar, and sound becomes the logic of feeling.
Language and Liberation
What lingers is The Mutables’ profound empathy. Beneath its sleek technological sheen beats a humanist heart. Mustatea’s choreography turns the politics of voice—its suppression, distortion, reclamation—into poetry. Each gesture becomes a syllable in a collective plea for articulation. When Paspe collapsed into stillness, the room inhaled; when she rose again, we exhaled.
Felix Bryan in a scene from The Mutables at the HERE arts center. Photo by Maria Baranova
Producer Alex Darby and The Hybrid Studio managed the miracle of coherence amid innovation, ensuring the technology served emotion rather than eclipsing it. HERE’s intimacy amplified every tremor; the proximity made each whisper seismic. The work’s philosophical lineage—Graham’s emotional truth, Nagrin’s embodied intellect, Bernstein’s rhythmic reasoning, Chomsky’s structural depth—converged into a singular vision of movement as communication and communication as survival.
The Alchemy of HERE
Since 1993, the HERE Arts Center has championed artists who fuse disciplines into new languages of performance. Its West Village home remains a refuge for those who believe theater can still be radical, intimate, and transformative. In Mustatea’s hands, it became a temple for empathy—an environment where silence resounded, where intellect met instinct in equal measure.
The Mutables is precisely the kind of risk that is audacious, cerebral, and deeply human. It reminds us that innovation isn’t an aesthetic choice but a moral one—the courage to imagine speech where none existed before.
To Be Heard
When the final silence descended, the audience remained motionless, breathing the residue of what had just transpired. To witness The Mutables is to stand where language, sound, and soul intersect—to watch meaning incarnate itself in flesh. It’s a rare evening when art doesn’t just entertain or provoke but teaches us how to listen again.
As the HERE Arts Center ushers in its 2025–26 season, Mustatea’s creation affirms why downtown performance endures: because in the dark, we find the light of shared understanding. In a world of relentless noise, The Mutables whispers the essential truth— That to move, to breathe, and to be heard is the oldest, and bravest, human art of all. The Mutables transforms movement, sound, and technology into a breathtaking meditation on voice and identity. Through Kat Mustatea's visionary choreography and BodyMouth invention, the dancers speak with their bodies, uniting myth and modernity in a luminous call to listen, feel, and reclaim the power of being heard.
THE MUTABLES
Written by Kat Mustatea
ROLES & CASTPART 1: ielele
NORMAL - Marie Lloyd Paspe ECHO - Rocky Duval WIND - Felix Bryan SUBTEXT - Lo Poppy FOG - Jonathan Colafrancesco
PART 2: Helicopter
HELICOPTER - Marie Lloyd Paspe, Rocky Duval, Felix Bryan, Lo Poppy, Jonathan Colafrancesco
HELICOPTER VOICEOVER - Kamala Sankaram
Venue and Ticket Information
Experience The Mutables at the HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Avenue (entrance on Dominick Street), New York, NY 10013—nestled in Manhattan’s vibrant West Village. For showtimes, events, and the 2025–26 season lineup, visit HERE Arts Center Tickets & Events.
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