The figure at the center of Landon Caldwell's new opera is not a hero. Myrddin Wyllt — Myrddin the Wild — is the older, stranger, less courtly ancestor of Merlin, the wizard most people know from Arthurian romance; the Welsh folklore figure who would later inspire Merlin of Arthurian legend. In the medieval Welsh prophecy poetry that the piece draws on, he is less a magician than a witness: a man who has lost everything and can only describe what is coming.
That is the figure Caldwell has chosen as the frame for Good Work, a five-act operetta with libretto by Caldwell and music by Rob Funkhouser that premieres October 23 and 24, 2026, at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis. It is a genuinely unusual thing for this city: a large-scale, evening-length performance work by a local artist, staged in a museum hall, drawing its structure from medieval Welsh prophecy poetry and its content from family letters and small-town oral history. Nothing about the description suggests a conventional concert. The piece moves through five acts for voice, movement, ensemble, and video, and it is built to be different every time it is performed.
Caldwell is an Indianapolis-based multidisciplinary artist and composer whose work has largely centered on sound as an everyday experience rather than a concert-hall one. His practice runs through multi-channel installation, film and video, writing, improvisation, radio art, and performance, and returns again and again to how regional identity is shaped by the sounds around it — industrial landscapes, rural quiet, community gatherings, the small domestic moments that mark a day. Good Work is the first time he has taken those recurring themes of environment, family, and class into a large-scale performance work.
The project, by Caldwell's own account, began as an attempt to reclaim two inheritances: a lost American family lineage and a feeling for one's own bioregion. He writes from the conviction that people can only imagine futures they have the perceptual vocabulary to conceive and a place to build — that a future has to be pictured before it can be made. Good Work is an effort to assemble that vocabulary out of both halves: lost mythologies on one side, inherited place on the other. He calls the result a work of abstract regionalism, and treats folklore, family letters, and small-town oral history as source material of equal weight, layered into a single performance made of asynchronous parts.
The methods are as unconventional as the sources. Roles are anonymized. Objects stand in for characters. The score 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. That instability is the point. A work about inheritance that could be performed identically every night would be making a different argument than one that can't quite be pinned down.
The music is by Rob Funkhouser, a recurring collaborator of Caldwell's across several sound-based projects, including the community gathering Sonic Potluck and the 48-channel sound sculpture Sound Field. In Good Work, Funkhouser's score runs on its own timeline alongside the text, movement, light, and video rather than underneath them — another of the asynchronous parts the piece is assembled from. The ensemble includes Mark Tester, Jess Dunn, Hirotaka Inuzuka, Luke Garrigus, Jesse Lee, Eric Salazar, Funkhouser, and Caldwell himself.
The venue is part of the story too. The Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis, known as CAMi, occupies a 12,000-square-foot former manufacturing building at 1125 Cruft Street, built in 1908, in the city's near southeast side. It is run by Big Car Collaborative, the artist-run nonprofit that renovated the long-vacant structure into a home base for its work and for partnership-based community programming; the building was formerly known as Tube Factory artspace. CAMi describes itself as a commissioning and non-collecting museum with nine galleries, and its campus now includes the main building, the Guichelaar Gallery, eighteen homes for long-term and visiting resident artists, and a public greenspace and art park with an amphitheater. The performance takes place in the museum's Frank and Katrina Basile Performing Arts and Event Hall. The setting — an industrial building turned commissioning museum, on land the organization acknowledges as the unceded territory of the Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Osage, Shawnee, Myaamia, Muskogee, and other Indigenous nations — sits oddly well with a piece about what a place remembers and who gets to carry it.
Good Work is funded by the Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund, a program of the Herbert Simon Family Foundation. The fund is explicitly designed for exactly this kind of project: it supports individual artists, collectives, and collaborative teams in pursuing daring work, with awards of $20,000 per recipient in the 2025–2026 cycle, and it names Caldwell among that cohort. The program also includes a final public event and exhibition in October 2026, curated by Rishard Allen and Lindsey Lord, which is the context in which this premiere lands.
As for what the piece actually asks: Good Work is described as an inquiry into what it means to dissolve into a place, and to find yourself in service to others. That is a fair summary of where the Myrddin material leads. The wild man of the Welsh poems is a figure who lost his place and then spent his gift describing what would happen to everyone else's. Caldwell's operetta takes that old voice and sets it against family objects, regional folklores, and the oral history of Midwestern towns — asking, in effect, whether the prophecies we need now are the ones buried in our own attics and church basements.
There are two chances to see it. On Friday, October 23, doors open at 7 p.m. with the performance at 8 p.m. On Saturday, October 24, doors open at 1 p.m. with a 2 p.m. performance. Tickets are $20 and are available through CAMi; the museum's general admission is free, but special events carry a ticket price. Given that the score is reordered and improvised at each performance, the two dates are not interchangeable — they are two different tellings of the same unsettled memory.