Photo Credit: Joe Lamberti. "Beautiful Trouble," Penn Live Arts, February 2, 2024.
Beautiful Trouble by Natacha Diels
Rocketing ecstatically between sadness and joyfulness, Natacha Diels’s Beautiful Trouble is an evening-length ‘opera’ (as dramatic spectacle) for JACK Quartet that explores a slim window of human existence. Moments gathered like precious stones coalesce to create both sense and nonsense, forming a logic all the piece’s own. Organizing the stones just so reveals clarity in chaos, if only for a moment.
Touching on elements of:
work ethic (humans as puppets),
dystopia,
the beauty of nightmares,
unmistakable loves,
childlikeness (play),
just music,
protest (no more wars),
loss,
nature as commodity (or not),
the beauty of silliness (playful nonsense),
long walks,
and wholeness.
“Beautiful Trouble is a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft, and a testament, however offbeat, to the JACK Quartet’s unshakeable courage and coherence.”
Beautiful Trouble was developed with support from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, TIME:SPANS, The Barlow Foundation and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. Workshops were hosted by Mannes School of Music at The New School.
“With typical eagerness, aplomb and occasional deadpan wit, the JACK foursome plunged into the composer’s wide-ranging, intricately plotted melange of sound and images”
Photo Credit: Joe Lamberti. "Beautiful Trouble," Penn Live Arts, February 2, 2024.
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Act 1: On Monday: The quartet begins as puppets, performing not-quite-repetitive movements that coalesce and diverge from one another to craft the narrative. Spoken text forecasts what strange circumstances will befall you on the days of a week, in some future dystopia. When the dystopia cracks, in a period of peace, the quartet builds a fantasy landscape of outlandish protest signs, sad flailing inflatable arms, and the omnipresent moon. A quasi-nightmarish reality eventually snaps back into place. The quartet performs at a fancy restaurant.
Act 2: Nightmare for JACK (a ballet): The musicians perform a ballet comprising exaggerated versions of the motions involved in playing their instruments—a counterpoint to the musical material, as well as a cobweb of complexity upon which to lay the nightmare. Sometimes the piece pursues dreamlike streams of consciousness; at other points, the progression is more linear and concrete. Ultimately, the quartet acts as night guardians, helping to put the forest to sleep.
Act 3: Sometimes it’s the Last Time: The forest is asleep, and the quartet is in the dark, echolocating with whistles and clicks. As the members tentatively explore a new environment, their world erupts into brilliant chaos. They subsequently search for melodic stability in dense, perpetually sliding sound clusters, a musical metaphor for finding beauty in the journey and taking pleasure in the unique (unrepeatable). This gives way to music that plays on the symbiosis and conflict of the canned versus the real, through pop lyrics, playful nonsense, and a visual background of stock video alongside AI-generated images. Finally, the quartet gathers in song around the campfire, characterized by banjo music, children’s games, and a confusing quest to understand a map.
Act 4: Interlude: The quartet takes an intermission in the form of learning a new board game. Momentary outward focus allows for recalibration.
Act 5: Beautiful Trouble: A long walk through a grassy field, a search for the elusive “beautiful.” Sometimes one finds loss; at other times, wholeness. In each there is cherished absurdity.
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World Premiere: February 2, 2024
Penn Live Arts, Philadelphia, PANew York City Premiere: March 15, 2024
Roulette, Brooklyn, NYJACK Quartet will tour Beautiful Trouble internationally through 2025.
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COMPOSER, DIRECTOR, VIDEO DESIGNER | Natacha Diels
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, SOUND DESIGNER | Matthew Craig
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Kent Sprague
COSTUME DESIGNER | Maile Okamura
LEAD PRODUCER | Julia Bumke
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Length: Approximately 75 mins.
Preferred venue: theatrical space (black box or similar) with a/v capacity and full-size projection screen and lighting rig, 200-1000-person audience capacity.
Opera for string quartet, with team of 5: 4 musicians, 1 composer/technician.
Tech rider and lighting plot are available upon request.
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