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‘So Many Things Can Go Together’: the Theatricality of John Cage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Natalie Crohn Schmitt
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 41 , February 1995 , pp. 72 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes and References

1. Cage, John, Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 174Google Scholar.

2. Conversing with Cage, ed. Kostelanetz, Richard (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), p. 211Google Scholar.

3. John Cage, ed. Kostelanetz, Richard (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 115Google Scholar.

4. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, ed. Charles, Daniel (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), p. 161Google Scholar.

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.

6. Kostelanetz, Richard, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 57Google Scholar.

7. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 105.

8. Quoted in Husarik, Stephen, ‘John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969’, American Music, I, No. 2 (1983), p. 6Google Scholar.

9. Reprinted in Kostelanetz, John Cage, p. 173.

10. Cage, John, Europeras 1 and 2 (New York: Henmar Press, 1988), p. iGoogle Scholar.

11. Quoted in Revill, David, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade, 1992), p. 283Google Scholar.

12. Cage, Silence, p. 47.

13. Kostelanetz, John Cage,p. 138.

14. Banes, Sally, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 9–10Google Scholar.

15. Kirby, Michael, ‘The New Theatre’, The Drama Review, X, No. 2 (1965)Google Scholar; Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means, p. 50.

16. See the Fluxus Group manifesto, 1966, in Henricks, Jon, Fluxus Codex (New York: Abrams, 1988), p. 31Google Scholar. Many of Cage's students and associates, not working in a clearly theatrical medium, were also Fluxus members including students Scott Hyde, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Richard Maxfield and associates Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, and Stan VanderBeek.

17. Cage, Silence, p. 47.

18. Schmitt, Natalie Crohn, Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.