$20, click here to purchase tickets
Good Work is a five-act operetta with libretto by Landon Caldwell and music by Rob Funkhouser, premiering October 23 & 24, 2026 at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis.
Its framework draws on Myrrdin Wylt, the Welsh folklore figure who would later inspire Merlin of Arthurian legend moving through five acts for voice, movement, ensemble, and video, drawn from collective memory, vernacular, and the Midwestern psyche. It examines family objects, regional folklores, medieval Welsh prophecy poetry, and local oral history. Good Work asks what it means to dissolve into a place and to find yourself in service to others.
Caldwell is a multidisciplinary artist and composer based in Indianapolis, working primarily in and around the Midwest. His practice centers on sound experiences, using multi-channel installation, film and video, writing, improvisation, radio art, and performance to explore how people encounter sound in everyday life, and how regional identity is shaped by the sounds that surround it: industrial landscapes, rural quiet, community gatherings, and the small domestic moments that mark daily life. Good Work extends that inquiry into a new form, bringing his recurring themes of environment, family, and class into a large-scale performance work for the first time.
The piece began as an attempt to reclaim two inheritances: the lost American family lineage and a feeling for one’s own bioregion. Caldwell writes from the belief that people can only imagine futures they have the perceptual vocabulary to conceive and a place to build. Good Work is an effort to build that vocabulary out of both, reclaiming lost mythologies with inherited place. Structured as a work of abstract regionalism, the operetta treats Welsh prophecy, family letters, and small-town oral history as source material of equal weight, layering them into a single performance built of asynchronous parts.
Roles are anonymized, objects stand in for characters, and the score itself is built to resist a fixed telling, improvised and reordered with each performance, so that memory in the piece is never settled, only carried forward. This mirrors Caldwell's broader practice: installations, performances, and recordings that evolve together, moving fluidly between gallery, performance, and broadcast contexts, always in search of what might be called the modern Midwestern psyche — how place, labor, and family history continue to shape contemporary life.
The score is the work of Rob Funkhouser, a recurring collaborator of Caldwell's across sound-based projects including the community project Sonic Potluck and the 48-channel sound sculpture Sound Field. That ongoing partnership carries into Good Work, where Funkhouser's score operates on its own timeline alongside the text, movement, light, and video.
Good Work is performed by an ensemble including Mark Tester, Jess Dunn, Hirotaka Inuzuka, Luke Garrigus, Jesse Lee, Eric Salazar, Rob Funkhouser, and Landon Caldwell.