Image by Meredith Rogers
John Cage’s Musicircus
Performance created by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey
In collaboration with David Wells, David Tyndall, Meredith Rogers, Kim Lawler, Kate Kantor, Jesse Stevens and with the generous support of over 300 Melbourne artists and performers.
Dusk Until Dawn, BMW Edge, Atrium and surrounds, Federation Square
Friday October 26, 2007 Melbourne International Arts Festival
Image
by Meredith Rogers
"I have not made detailed directions for Musicircus. You simply bring together under one roof as much music (as many musical groups and soloists) as practical under the circumstances. It should last longer than ordinary concerts, start at 7 or 8 in the evening, and continuing, say, to midnight. Arrange performers on platforms or within roped-off areas. There must be plenty of space for the audience to walk around. If you have more groups than places, make a schedule: Group 1 in Place A from 7-9:30; Group 23 in Place A from 9:45-midnight. Etc. There should be food on sale and drinks (as at a circus). Dancers and acrobats."
John Cage, letter dated June 6, 1973
The Musicircus is one of Cage’s omnium gatherum pieces, and was first performed in 1967 in the Stock Pavilion at the University of Illinois.
The 2007 Melbourne performance in the BMW Edge will involve over 300 performers, including acrobats, dancers, orators, painters and other visual artists and musicians, selected through a curatorial invitation and an additional public call for expressions of interest from performers across all art forms in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Additional participants from more tangential fields using chance operations including computer science will be also be invited.
"One very important element is that there should at all times be many people performing simultaneously. The next is that, since none of the musicians are being paid, there being too many of them, the entire event must be free to the public. ... In harmony with the separation of this work from conventional economics, I have not made a score nor have I published one of course."
--John Cage, letter dated December 23, 1979
The performance will last from dusk to dawn on Friday, 26 October to Saturday, 27 October.
Artists will be working in different areas within BMW Edge, Atrium and outside in the Ecology Garden. Specific performance areas within these spaces are designated with light and through the architectural structure of the building. The audience takes a path of discovery which could take in an artist painting, Butoh, Brass Band, Tap dance, performance arts, contemporary dance, images of visual art on the screen in the Atrium, contemporary music for ensemble, soloist and choir within a time frame and environment that is constantly changing. Artists themselves will be working with the creative challenge of performing within this context.
A specific challenge for artists is to suspend the notion of being a sole focal point, while also remaining focussed on the generation of their own performance, that is, artists should resist the temptation to react to what is going on around them, but remain centred in their own artistic creation. This creates loci for audience to wander to and from as they see fit, while remaining in the context of a wider texture of sound and sight.
"Some years ago ... we gave a Musicircus ... in a large gymnasium. We simply had as much going on at a single time as we could muster. And we exercised no aesthetic bias. ... You should let each thing that happens happen from its own center, whether it is music or dance. Don't go in the direction of one thing 'using' another. Then they will all go together beautifully (as birds, airplanes, trucks, radios, etc. do)."
--John Cage, letter dated February 17, 1979
Audiences are mobile and free to choose their sonic and visual relationships. It is not envisaged as a piece that requires any set serial pathway through the work. Work is thus juxtaposed in new, varied and unpredictable ways.
A piano will be placed in the centre of the space, with an embedded soundfield microphone recording the entirety of the performance. This piano will not be played. Material recorded from the event comes back during the event. Another piano will be available to be played and prepared.
There will be spatial and temporal ordering of all elements concerned with the performance by the Curatorial team. This design will consider the chance operations as developed by Cage, his instructions of letting the work happen from its own center, and with the superimposition of a spatial score over the entire performing space designing the performance.
The passage of the event allows for recorded “residues” of material to be re-played at various times before the conclusion.
By siting the choirs and other performers in the usual audience seats at the BMW Edge, as well as elements of sculptural and media coverings, the space at the BMW Edge, Atrium and Ecology garden encourages audience movement and includes many options for the positioning of performance. The audience does not sit down in the seats, but on edges of the theatre spaces, and amongst the performers.
In the spirit of the work, a party atmosphere will prevail with food and drink available (free food and drink will be available for performers), and permission for continual movement of audience through the space. A food van will be placed outside near the carpark entrance to BMW Edge (Mon’s Comedy Cooker). The performance shall also be free.
In tune with Cage’s directive, performers will not be paid, but will get a party bag. The Curation team will also not receive a performance fee. The party bag will include (but is not limited to) a commemorative certificate signed by Kristy Edmunds, and an Artists Pass for the Festival. Each performer will have their name recorded on a program of the event, and each has the option of creating a description of their work in the context of the Musicircus.
Hopes for the Performance
“It is possible to imagine that the artists whose work we live with constitute an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.”
John Cage
We would love this to be an agent for diverse groups of participants to meet one another. We also hope that the crucible of the work might draw some people out of the woodwork, to be involved in what is a celebration of the liberating spirit of collaboration, rigour and chance championed by Cage and Cunningham, amongst others.
The event is seen as a contemporary mapping of the Melbourne Arts community at a particular space and time. We also hope that international/national Festival Artists would like to be part of this event.
Some background
Melbourne has a significant history of practise in contemporary music, stretching back over the past 150 years. The period in which musicircus and similar events arose was also a time of vigorous experimentation and a general liberation of impetus and ideas related to music and performance in general, in Melbourne, as elsewhere around the world.
Keith Humble, Australian composer whilst in Paris in the 1960s developed and participated in a performance form called “Nuniques”, in collaboration with Jean Charles Francois and others, which arose contemporaneously with the musicircus form.
The development of these events reflect the extensive influence of Humble and his contemporaries on music in Australia: part of the impulse for this project is to create a sense of current practice that arose from these influences, with practitioners working across all fields of contemporary music in Melbourne: the parallels of the musicircus/nunique architecture emphasising the legacies of Cage, and Humble in Australia.
Cage’s and Humble's architecture, proposed for a previous era, allows a specific architecture and an expression of current practice to be seen and heard.
The three principles: chance, rigour and collaboration became central to arts practice because of the work of people like Cage and, in the Australian context, Humble.
Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey July 2007.