Roomful of Teeth

Be the first to hear Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth’s new work-in-process performance of The Puerto Rican experiment at MASS MoCA. Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth is thrilled to return to MASS MoCA to create a new concert-length work with Puerto Rican–born composer Angélica Negrón and Brooklyn-based indie electronic transnational band Balún. The Puerto Rico Experiment is a new song cycle built from a series of sonic vignettes for voices surrounded by a mosaic of acoustic and electronic textures. Drawing on the expressive possibilities of the human voice, reimagined Caribbean folk traditions, and layered electronic textures, the work creates a unique sound world that moves between history, memory, and a speculative future. 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. These include 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. Alongside these histories, the cycle imagines new experiments for the near and distant future, inviting audiences to envision decolonial possibilities and alternate realities through collective social dreaming. The Puerto Rico Experiment reclaims the idea of experimentation as a collective artistic act, transforming the performance space into a site of historical reflection and embodied memory, radical listening, and shared imagining where past and present converge and new cultural and political possibilities can be rehearsed in real time. Be the first to hear this new work-in-process on August 21st!