This spring, Pig Iron Theatre Company and Daedalus String Quartet are visiting Swarthmore College to host masterclasses, workshops, and an original multidisciplinary performance. These events, which are part of the 2025-26 Cooper Series, will incorporate visual art, nonfiction storytelling, puppetry, dance, theater work, and music. 

The performance, titled Bartók’s Monster, is described by the Pig Iron Theatre Company as a lecture turned fever-dream; the piece adapts author Jay Kirk’s genre-bending memoir on the life of Hungarian composer Bela Bartók through the incorporation of live string music and object-performance art

“This project is truly interdisciplinary in a way I’ve rarely experienced,” said Dan Rothenberg ’95, founding member and co-artistic director of the Pig Iron. According to Rothenberg, the piece was first conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jay Kirk reached out to Rothenberg, Daedalus Quartet cellist Thomas Kraines, and object-performance specialist Sebastienne Mundheim to ask if any of them were interested in developing live entertainment for the release of his book on Bartók, Avoid the Day. The book, which recounts both Bartók’s life and Kirk’s own experiences researching the composer, has been praised for its unique combination of memoir and historical writing.

“Really Jay just wanted maybe one of us…at his book launch, but all of this got derailed during the pandemic. And Sebastienne really got excited about all of us working together on something; she really took the lead in making sure we had regular meetings to brainstorm for a couple of years,” Rothenberg added.

As the pandemic receded and live performance began to look like an option once more, the artists worked together to create an original piece combining their talents. Mundheim developed what she called an “impressionist dramaturgy-script” of all of the images from Kirk’s book that she found moving. She then brought these images to Rothenberg and their other collaborators, who discussed the interdisciplinary potential of these motifs. 

“We were excited about the dark earth, the idea of vampirism as a metaphor for artistic inspiration, about the void at the center of Jay’s book, and the folk tale of magical stags at the center of [Bartók’s] Cantata Profana,” Rothenberg said. He noted that the question soon became whether or not the group could fit everything they’d been drawn to into a single piece. 

Ultimately, the piece took the form of a ‘lecture demonstration,’ a style both parodying and paying homage to collegiate academic talks. Rothenberg explained that he’d hoped this narrative frame would be “disarming.” Kirk’s book is composed of a combination of historical writing, narrative memoir, and fragments of existentialist pseudo-horror. The Bartók’s Monster team aimed to reflect the disjointed nature of the original work through the staging of a gradually imploding scholarly lecture.

“I really like to make pieces where you think you might get one thing and then you’re disappointed but end up with a new thing you didn’t expect or know you wanted,” said Rothenberg. “[Pig Iron does] a lot of meta-theatrical stuff. And [Bartók’s Monster] is very handmade, which is a quality we care about a lot. What’s unique about it is the marvelous [Daedalus Quartet] performing a survey of difficult, inspiring music; I myself learned a lot about Bartok and 20th century music working on this piece.” 

Certain aspects of the multidisciplinary production process, he added, made for unique challenges. Attempting to adapt a rich and extensively researched nonfiction work into a single performance required the strategic removal of many original elements that the artistic team had loved. In order to minimize the material cut, the group worked with writer-performer Alex Tatarsky to transform the prose from Kirk’s work into language that would resonate with audience members in an abbreviated lecture format. 

Another obstacle Rothenberg described was the physical dimension of the piece. Mundheim designed sculptures and stage objects from paper; as the objects resemble puppets but function slightly differently, actors had to be trained in a specific movement-theater vocabulary. Rothenberg emphasized that these challenges were liberating, clarifying that confines are invaluable in the process of refining an expansive piece. 

The masterclass workshops accompanying Bartók’s Monster allow Swarthmore students to explore the enriching challenges of the artistic process for themselves. 

On March 18 at 12pm, the Lang Concert Hall will host a masterclass with the Daedalus Quartet. Since its founding, the quartet has won top prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and venues all over the world. Student musicians will have the opportunity to develop their technical and theoretical abilities with the guidance of award-winning performers Min-Young Kim, Matilda Kaul, Jessica Thompson, and Thomas Kraines. The masterclass is free and open to the public.

Due to recent winter storms, the “Objects and Environments in Performance” and the “Perception and Narrative Nonfiction” workshops have been postponed . They’ll be rescheduled later this semester, so keep an eye out for them on the Swarthmore College website. 

The “Objects and Environments in Performance” workshop will be run by Mundheim. He’ll lead the class through the practical and theoretical elements of visual performance design, helping students to devise ensemble work for their own future projects. 

Kirk will run a workshop called “Perception and Narrative Nonfiction.” He’ll share the concepts and techniques that influenced the production of his book on Bartók, as well as introducing masterclass attendees to some of the broader narrative strategies employed by nonfiction writers. 

Bartók’s Monster will arrive on campus on Friday, March 20. It will run for three performances, playing at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday with a 2 p.m. matinee preceding the Saturday evening show.