Image: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams
MASS MoCA will host the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth on August 21 for the first work-in-progress performance of ‘The Puerto Rico Experiment’, a new concert-length project developed with Puerto Rican-born composer Angélica Negrón and Brooklyn-based indie electronic transnational band Balún. The performance is set for 7 p.m. in the Hunter Center in North Adams, with tickets listed at $38 in advance and $58 preferred.
The museum describes ‘The Puerto Rico Experiment’ as a new song cycle built from a series of sonic vignettes for voices, framed by acoustic and electronic textures. The work draws on the expressive possibilities of the human voice, reimagined Caribbean folk traditions, and layered electronic sound to create a musical environment moving between history, memory, and a speculative future. MASS MoCA is presenting the piece as a new work-in-process performance rather than a finished premiere.
According to the event listing, the project was created in collaboration with four Puerto Rican poets: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Nicole Delgado, Mara Pastor, and Ashley Pérez García. Each song reflects on a specific historical moment or site of experimentation, including mass sterilization campaigns, the imposition of English in early twentieth-century public schools, Monsanto’s open-field GMO trials, UFO sightings in Lajas, the Arecibo Observatory, and the United States Navy occupation of Vieques.
The museum’s description frames the cycle as an effort to reclaim experimentation as a collective artistic act. It says the performance space will become a site of historical reflection, embodied memory, radical listening, and shared imagining, where past and present converge and new cultural and political possibilities can be rehearsed in real time. The event page also says the piece imagines new experiments for the near and distant future and invites audiences to envision decolonial possibilities and alternate realities through collective social dreaming.
Roomful of Teeth is returning to MASS MoCA for the project. The ensemble is known for its contemporary vocal work, and the museum’s newsletter says the group is bringing the new piece to North Adams in collaboration with Negrón and Balún. The same newsletter places the concert among a series of late-summer events at the museum, including comedy, book talks, and public programs, while the concert itself is listed separately as a performing arts presentation.
The performance will be followed immediately by a conversation and Q&A in the Hunter Center with Negrón, Roomful of Teeth artistic director Cameron Beauchamp, and musicians from Roomful of Teeth and Balún. MASS MoCA says the discussion will focus on the inspiration for ‘The Puerto Rico Experiment’ and offer audience members a chance to ask questions about the work. Commission and development support for the project is credited to The Democracy Cycle, a program of Perelman Performing Arts Center | PAC NYC and Civis Foundation, with additional support for Roomful of Teeth’s residency at MASS MoCA from the National Endowment for the Arts.
