Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
John Cage (1912–1993) is widely regarded as one of the most pervasively influential figures in the arts in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Although best known as a composer, Cage expanded perceptions of what could constitute theatrical performance, and in this essay Natalie Crohn Schmitt assesses the nature and significance of Cage's intermedia performances and their immediate influence on other such work. Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Northwestern UP, 1990) is an analysis of contemporary theatre based on Cage's aesthetics, and essays of hers on Cage have appeared in other journals and in anthologies devoted to the artist. She has previously written in NTQ on Stanislavski (NTQ 8) and on performance theory in its historic moment (NTQ 23). Schmitt is Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in Japanese in a Cage commemorative issue of the Japanese journal Music Today.
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5. Until his death, Cage continued to collaborate with Cunningham's dance company in this way. From 1954 to 1966, Robert Rauschenberg functioned thus unimpeded as the company designer, only to be succeeded in this position by Jasper Johns. A host of others also occasionally served as such collaborators: Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, Conlon Nancarrow, La Monte Young, and David Tudor among them.
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