"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If youd like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org.
Laura Kuhns guest this week is Paul Lazar, an award-winning actor, director, and (often dancing) performer who has appeared in more than 30 feature films, including "Silence of the Lambs," "Snowpiercer," and "Philadelphia." He is founding co-artistic director with Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater, appearing in works for Big Dance since 1991. He came to Kuhns attention through the enthusiastic critical response to his "Cage Shuffle," a 50-minute dance/theater solo in which he speaks a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his score Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing fixed choreography by Parson. In all of Lazars iterations of "Cage Shuffle," Cages stories are spoken in random order with no predetermined relationship to the dance, yet chance serves up its inevitable blend of uncanny connections between text and movement. Cages humor, intellect, and iconoclasm find new expression in Lazars realizations, which adds dance to Cages original performance instructions: Read stories aloud, paced so that each story takes one minute, using chance procedures or not.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his "Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage" (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book hed ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and theres John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 433, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.
Paul Lazar
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:58:19
1
May 27, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
![<?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/rp-navimg.gif)
![Support the <?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/support.png)
