EdgeCut Presents DOUBLE BILL: Kat Mustatea | Ka Baird

EdgeCut Presents DOUBLE BILL: Kat Mustatea | Ka Baird
EdgeCut presents its inaugural show: a double bill of boundary-pushing new works by Kat Mustatea and Ka Baird that activate language, sound, gesture, and technology. Presented at its brand new home, Edge Space, a co-op for live performance experiments in SoHo.

Where: Edge Space, 457 Broome Street, Lower Level
When: May 22–24 at 8 PM (doors at 7:00 PM)
Tickets: https://www.edgecut.org/events/edgecutpresents-katmustatea-kabaird

About the Venue

Edge Space, a project of EdgeCut Arts, is a brand new white-box studio and event space in the heart of SoHo, NYC. This double bill will mark the first public performance presented at Edge Space, kicking off an exciting evolution of the space, with new programming, events, and artists-in-residence.

About the Works

BodyMouth by Kat Mustatea is a unique sensor-based instrument for embodied speech. This eerie performance intertwines bodies and vocals as dancers sound out words phoneme-by-phoneme by enacting specific gestures in sequence, turning the body quite literally into a mouth. Situated at the edge of experimental opera and dance, the piece is inspired by ielele—female forest creatures in Balkan folklore whose voices were said to lead men astray. The project is a meditation on the question What does it mean to have a voice?, a provocation to the bleak histories of totalitarian rule where alternate modes of speech became an urgent form of survival and resistance.

DIRECTION & SCRIPT: Kat Mustatea | MUSIC: Kamala Sankaram | CAST: Rocky Duval, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Carl Ponce Cubero, Felix Bryan, Emily Pope | CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY: Yonatan Rozin | ASSOCIATE CHOREOGRAPHY: Marie Lloyd Paspe | COSTUMES: Camelia Skikos | STYLING: Kari Love | CREATIVE PRODUCTION: Alex Darby (Hybrid Studio) | PHOTOGRAPHY: Bogdan Pastor

a thousand miles of hungry static by Ka Baird is a new performance that explores the spectral forces of reality through various sonic encounters, physical movement, and colored light. The piece presents The Spectral in direct opposition to The Spectacle as a force that disturbs and awakens, rather than pacifies, us.

About the Artists

Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist whose experiments with language, live art, and the computational uncanny articulate the absurdities of being human in an increasingly algorithmic world. BodyMouth, a bespoke computational instrument that turns the body into an organ for speech, was a finalist for the 2024 Guthman Prize for new musical instruments, the 2024 Lumen Prize, and a Creative Capital award, and has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, in Harper’s Magazine, and Gizmodo. Read an interview with Kat Mustatea about the instrument in HowlRound.

Ka Baird is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. a thousand miles of hungry static continues Baird’s investigation into sound's outer dimensions through performance. The piece features extended voice and microphone techniques, live-processed flutes, samples, feedback, fractured rhythms, and wearable MIDI interfaces that both trigger and manipulate sound. The performance embodies Baird’s signature tone that is simultaneously confrontational, mysterious, visceral, and humorous.