“Beautiful Trouble” is a 5-act live performance by Natacha Diels and JACK Quartet about simplicity and beauty. Each act (or episode) describes a particular mini-plot in the style of television’s “The Twilight Zone” or Robert Ashley’s TV opera “Perfect Lives.”

The oversaturation of our current era is the driving force behind “Beautiful Trouble’s” focus on simple human beauty. The work is representative of The New Discipline, a practice of contemporary art influenced by Fluxus, Dada, the Uncanny Valley, and the social impact of ubiquitous cameras. It incorporates narrative, video, staging, and choreography to craft social commentary.

“Beautiful Trouble” creates a tangible and understandable human moment through the power of performance, both heard and seen.

JACK will premiere “Beautiful Trouble” at Penn Live Arts in January 2024, with its New York premiere at Roulette in March 2024. They will tour it internationally through 2025.

JACK Quartet – Performers
Christopher Otto violin
Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell cello

Natacha Diels composer, director, video designer
Julia Bumke lead producer
Matthew Craig technical director, sound designer
Kent Sprague lighting designer
Maile Okamura costume designer

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.

Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected experimental string quartets performing today. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music. The quartet was selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, nominated for GRAMMY Awards for recordings in 2018 & 2022, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant, as well as the Fromm Music Foundation Prize.

Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. JACK’s all-access initiative, JACK Studio, funds collaborations with a selection of artists each year, who receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new works for string quartet.

Natacha Diels‘s work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes “Papillon and the Dancing Cranes,” for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018, Dear Antwerp 2021) and “Somewhere Beautiful.” a solo project premiered at Klangspuren Festival (2022).

With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About) and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003). Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of new music composition, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.