Triple Canopy is pleased to present the fourth evening of Cage Transmitted: Celebrating + Playing John Cage, a year-long series of performances and events to celebrate John Cage’s centenary. The evening will feature two rarely seen performances that reflect on Cage’s relationship to Marcel Duchamp.

Robert Whitman will perform Inside Out, a theater piece incorporating slides and film that was first presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987 and has never before been performed in New York.

The evening also includes the first public screening of a video of Cage reading Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet. An Alphabet was commissioned in 1982 by Cologne's West German Radio, and was devised as a radio play. The piece postulates an imaginary encounter between the narrator, ostensibly John Cage, and sixteen creative personalities who represent “an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.” Virginia Dwan of Dwan Gallery invited Cage to read the text of An Alphabet in 1982 and videotaped the performance.

Cage Transmitted: Celebrating + Playing John Cage is organized by Norte Maar in collaboration with Experiments in Art and Technology, and will span the year of 2012. The series consists of music, poetry, theater, visual art, performance, and dance by, for, or about Cage and his life and work.

Participants
  • Robert Whitman is best known for his seminal and continuing work in creating innovative, non-narrative, imagistic theater pieces. He was a member of a group of visual artists—among them Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg—who began making theatrical work in the early 1960s that was performed in ad hoc spaces on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whitman has since presented more than forty theater pieces in the United States and abroad—works that are visually and aurally rich, incorporating actors, films, slides, sounds, and evocative props in environments of the artist’s own making.