John Cage: (1912 - 1992)

John Cage: inventor, composer, philosopher, conceptual artist, iconoclast, his work always and eventually led towards theater. His most famous work was 4’ 33”, which dissolved the boundaries between art and life, music and noise, sound and silence. The father of the happening, his collaboration with such artists as Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns set the stage for experimental electronic theater in the 1960s.

Merce Cunningham (student of Martha Graham) worked with John Cage for nearly 50 years, together they forged an integration of music and dance that was founded on the independence of artistic disciplines in space and time. Their collaboration involved an agreement in temporal duration, and then independently they generated both music and dance using chance procedures (Merce had only to avoid dancer collision).

Variations V was first composed and performed in 1965 and subsequently toured through Europe (this performance was in Germany). A classic example of electronic Gesamtkunstwerk, the work was a collaboration between Cage, Cunningham, musicians Gordon Mumma and David Tudor, Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Max Mathews (optical light triggers), visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik and Jasper Johns (projections) and the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek. Derived from the happening, in which the line between art and life is dissolved, the work is a surreal juxtaposition of “real-life” movement, objects and images, in non-synchronous combination using chance technique. Source material is taken from home movies and tv sitcoms. Music is generated from taped sounds and live electronic synthesizers. The movement of the dancers triggers sound and projections as a result of the optical light sensors.

"Do you love the audience? Certainly we do. We show it by getting out of their way." – John Cage