The Mutables – 09 October 2025

Centered around Kat Mustatea’s BodyMouth speech producing instrument, The Mutables tells the story of a woman (Marie Lloyd Paspe) who has had an accident that has caused her to lose her ability to produce speech. She dances out her pain in a choreographed world of Romanian lelele (Feliz Bryan, Lo Poppy, Jonathan Colafrancesco) who are wearing sensors that use spatial relationships to create phonemes (the smallest possible units of sound). In the first half of the performance, each lelele is capable of producing every element of sound through their movements in x, y, and z space. In the second half, the woman acquires her own set of sensors, symbolically her own voice, but the sensors on the lelele and her sensors are now limited, with each person responsible for more accurately producing just a small part of what it takes to make intelligible speech: vowels, consonants, pitch modulation, etc. What they could once create as individuals now requires a collective. There is one more character in this space, opera singer Rocky Duval who, in the first half, sings a hauntingly beautiful aria that makes speech seem pedestrian yet still unattainable. In the second half, she repeats the woman’s words as a quiet shadow, as the woman is mastering speech.

The picture is completed with music (Kamala Sankaram) and beautiful featured fashion (Camelia Skikos) and costume design (Paulina Olivares), in what is otherwise a utilitarian space. It seemed to be Mustatea’s intentions for the BodyMouth instrument to seamlessly integrate into the music and the world of the story such that it wasn’t always clear who in the space was responsible for which sounds. Part of this involved constant choreography. For a story told primarily through dance in which spatial relationships are crucial, the three quarter round space seemed to have a lot of bad sightlines as nearly everything was directed in the same direction. While those on the sides definitely saw a whir of bodies, I’d imagine it was harder to understand the storyline, though it may have been easier to understand BodyMouth as they were positioned where they could see the sensors’ playback monitors. There were moments in the show that resonated with me and felt profound, and other times when the brief, 45-minute performance felt too repetitive and I struggled to understand what was happening on the narrative end.

I have no doubt of the brilliance of creator Kat Mustatea, especially because I was privileged to hear her thoughts in a talkback following the show. The number of concepts that Kat had carefully infused and interwoven into the show that had not occurred to me in the watching of it were astounding. I found myself leaving the talkback much more excited about the show than I was at the show’s conclusion. Truthfully, I think Mustatea tried to take on too many concepts in a brief amount of time, and it read to the audience as chaotic and difficult to understand from a traditional theatre lens. The Mutables was a beautifully intimate portrait told through dance, sound, and speech production, but it’s not quite ready to contain the rich dramaturgical aspirations that Mustatea is trying to share. Strangely, I think the telling of this story and the lelele is held back by BodyMouth, and that there must be a simpler narrative that could be paired with BodyMouth that would leave audiences with a much higher level of understanding of the absolutely astounding instrument they are observing. I applaud this noble effort, and I think that Kat Mustatea, who identifies first and foremost as a playwright, has a lot of options in terms of shaping the next iteration of this story and the next integration of BodyMouth into artistic practice.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Emily Owens PR.