Mouth Pieces

Premieres of two performances by Nate Wooley and Maya Martinez, followed by a conversation with C. Spencer Yeh.

As Freud would have it, the mouth is the first body part we’re aware of: It’s where nutritional needs and incipient sexual desires are satisfied. The mouth is the body’s largest orifice, a gaping hole in the face that enables us to eat, drink, and communicate. It’s long been theorized as a threshold between the self and the other, inside and outside. As the scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins has put it, the mouth threatens “the foundational fantasy of a contained autonomous self.”

For Mouth Pieces, Triple Canopy has invited two artists to create new performances that consider the mouth. The composer, improviser, and writer Nate Wooley will perform a new solo work in which he reflects on how four decades of playing the trumpet has transformed his lips, jaws, teeth, and tongue. In verse, prose, music, and movement, Wooley will contemplate what it means to truly commit to something—in his case, putting metal to his lips for several hours every day—as well as the consequences, from small devastations to subtle disfigurations. Wooley will ask: Can others ever understand these marks of dedication?

The writer and performer Maya Martinez will take up Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1973)—a notoriously demanding short play that stars a woman’s disembodied mouth delivering a breakneck, riotous monologue—as inspiration for a new performance score that considers words as characters, accents as tones, and marks on the page as mutable gestures. In her performance of the score, Martinez will preserve Not I’s chiaroscuro mouth (the central image of the play), but otherwise rewire Beckett’s text in the tradition of phonopoetics: a style of performance pioneered by Katalin Ladik that employs techniques from spoken word and experimental music to push sound poetry to its extremes.

Mouth Pieces is organized in collaboration with contributing editor C. Spencer Yeh, who will moderate a post-performance conversation with Wooley and Martinez. New York Television is providing production support and will livestream the program. Mouth Pieces is part of Not Nothing, an issue of Triple Canopy devoted to holes: openings, orifices, abysses, and portals; sites of violence and regeneration, fodder for philosophy and fantasy.

RSVPs are required. If registration is sold out or has ended, you’re welcome to arrive early and wait in our standby line, which forms 30 minutes before the event starts. All remaining seats will be released when the program is scheduled to start. If you have RSVP’d and arrive after the event’s start time, we cannot guarantee entry.

Participants

Maya Martinez is a writer and performer raised in Florida and living in New York. Her collection of plays, Theatrics (2025), is out now with Wonder Press in collaboration with Metalabel.

Nate Wooley is a Brooklyn-based improvisor, composer, and writer.

C. Spencer Yeh is an interdisciplinary artist, improviser, and composer known for his music project Burning Star Core. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. Yeh is on the advisory board for Montez Press Radio, is a contributing editor for BOMB and Triple Canopy, and was a former programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn.