Courtesy of UCLA Performing Arts An Alphabet is a theatrical
event that juxtaposes eras, occupations and genders.
By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Contributor
Imagine New York in the 1950s. A new generation of artists was
breaking away from the rigid confines of a deterministic art world.
Dance was learning how to construe the body differently. Music was
rejecting the increasingly atonal mush that emanated from
composers. Art was mixing genres, using everyday items to create
chaotic images, to define their world, rejecting Abstract
Expressionism. At the center of this was artist, composer, writer,
and philosopher John Cage, who died in 1992.
“Cage was all of the arts in a sense,” says Laura
Kuhn, who currently heads the John Cage Trust.
If all the world was figuratively a stage to Shakespeare, for
John Cage, the world was literally a stage, where all art forms
merge into a singular experiential environment.
In this spirit, Cage’s 1982 radio play, “James
Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet,” will be
brought to the stage of the Freud Playhouse today and tomorrow.
Directed by Kuhn, “An Alphabet” brings together 14
characters, ranging from James Joyce to Mao Tse Tung to Brigham
Young, for a collage of sights and sounds that defy
categorization.
“You get this merging where sometimes sounds are coming
from people’s mouths and sometimes they are coming from the
environment. They’re all meshed into this one great thing.
It’s really a, and I mean this in a very beautiful way,
disorienting effect,” says Mikel Rouse, who plays James Joyce
and also made into reality Cage’s recently discovered score
for the play.
As he was apt to do, Cage redefined the nature of what he was
doing. Unlike a traditional score of music with notes on a page,
Cage specifies sounds, such as “Australian firebird”
and “Calcutta.” Rouse and his team actually recorded
real sounds from an Australian firebird for the performance, but
sounds such as “Calcutta” required more interpretation.
Far from being deterministic, Cage deliberately left open what the
sounds could be.
“I get the best of both worlds, have my cake and eat it
too. I get to realize an unrealized John Cage score. At the same
time, I get to bring a bit of my aesthetic. Almost as Laura
directed the piece, I directed the musical choices,” said
Rouse, who is himself an established opera composer.
Perhaps Cage is best known for his piano piece, “Four
Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds,” a work which asks for a
pianist to come on stage, open the keyboard, and stay silent for
the time alloted in the title. Before that, Cage experimented with
chance operations, where various sounds would be created based on
the Chinese I Ching or some random lines on a map.
“Cage is an important figure, especially since he calls
into question the structures of thought that we had always
followed. We have to think about them. Mostly what we think
we’re doing when we listen to music is not what he gives
us,” says Musicology Professor Susan McClary, who also
participated in the first reading of “An Alphabet” at
UCLA.
According to Kuhn, Cage’s works continue to be performed
more and more each year, perhaps a sign that Cage was ahead of his
time. Indeed his works and ideas heavily influenced a new
generation of artists, such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Andy
Warhol. Cage broke new ground upon which young artists could once
again work freely and originally.
“I was constantly looking for sources outside to make sure
that I wasn’t crazy, because my composition teachers were
telling me that I was,” Rouse said. “The artists
I’ve always been attracted to, and Cage is one of them, are
the artists who don’t look to try to set up their own schools
and indoctrination. The idea that so much could come from this kind
of influence without sounding like him or being like him is the
gig.”
Indeed, many of Cage’s early electronica works are
precursors of what is today popular electronic dance music.
Minimalism and the rejection of Schoenberg’s serialism could
not be possible without Cage. Pop art also owes a debt to Cage.
“Cage is roundly regarded by Postmodern theorists as the
founder of Postmodernism, the first person who said that we can
make art out of anything. Andy Warhol would not have happened
without this,” McClary said.
Like most of Cage’s works, “An Alphabet” also
involves chance operations, ensuring that each performance will be
unlike the ones before. Many of Rouse’s sounds will occur
improvisationally via a sound engineer. Kuhn furthers the variation
between each performance by casting local actors in eight of the 14
speaking parts, allowing the location of the performance to be
evident onstage.
“We have a caucasian woman in the part of Mao, a black
Rauschenberg, an Hispanic Buckminster Fuller, and an Asian Jonathan
Albert. This is the most multi-racial cast here in Los Angeles that
we’ve had yet. It’s really been a lot of white guys up
to now. The show looks like L.A. in terms of race,” Kuhn
said. “I had not interest in creating another New York art
work and exporting it to places and dumping it down, saying come
see how smart we are.”
Among the touring actors in the show is octogenerian Merce
Cunningham, longtime companion of John Cage and influential dancer
and choreographer, who plays Satie. Jasper Johns, the important
Postmodern visual artist, appears in recorded form as Rrose Selavy
in his theatrical debut.
The text of the piece, which was read at UCLA two years ago
under the auspices of Kuhn’s John Cage Trust, is an artwork
unto itself. Some of the lines are direct quotations from the
authors, and some are imaginings of what they might say. The text,
which will be available at the performance, can be read both
horizontally and vertically in a technique known as
“strings.”
“It’s typical Cage, which is to say that it’s
not like anything else you’ve ever seen, not even by
Cage,” McClary said.
“James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An
Alphabet” will be at the Freud Playhouse tonight at 8 p.m.
and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets are from $25 to $35 and
are available at (310) 825-2101.