The Martin Duberman Reader (10 page)

WEINRIB: There were a lot of people looking at clocks. And there was a podium, I mean a lectern, and Cage was at it. . . . It was to the side. . . . And he started to lecture. . . . He read it. And as he read it things started to happen. But he just kept reading, as I remember, all evening.

DUBERMAN: What was the content, do you remember?

WEINRIB: I don't remember. Except there was—there were some quotations from Meister Eckhart. . . . I don't remember much else of the content. It was cut into very often. But he just kept reading. And then there were a number of things that happened. And there was Rauschenberg with an old Gramophone that he'd dug up. And every now and then . . . he'd wind it up and play this section of an old record.

DUBERMAN: What was he playing?

WEINRIB: Just old hokey records, as I remember.

DUBERMAN: Old popular records?

WEINRIB: Old records I'm sure he bought with the machine. 1920s. 1930s. Then Cunningham danced. Around the whole area.

DUBERMAN: Around this core of chairs.

WEINRIB: Yes, danced. And—

DUBERMAN: Were there aisles between—

WEINRIB: No, I remember we all sort of sat together.

DUBERMAN: In the center.

WEINRIB: Yes. Might have gone out to one side, but I think we all sat around. So now . . . Cunningham . . . came out and danced pretty much, going around, and then I remember a small dog we had—helped the spirit of the happening by chasing Cunningham.

DUBERMAN: That was not programmed.

WEINRIB: No. Barking and chasing him around. And then M.C. Richards was up on a ladder—she mounted this ladder. I think she read sections of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poems, from the ladder. And then Olson had done this very nice thing where he had written a poem which was in parts, it was given in parts to a section of the audience . . . had to do with fragments of conversation . . . all of a sudden somebody would get up from the audience and just say this little bit. And then sit down. And then somebody else in the audience would stand up and say their bit . . . I believe Olson had written the whole thing out before. And given them their parts. So this happened, this
was again another—you know, fragment. That occurred. . . . I'm sure David Tudor, the pianist, also was part of it . . . I think he played Cage's Water Music . . . where you pour water from one bucket to another. And then David played, I believe, prepared piano, and also a number of noisemakers that were all part of this piece. So that also came into it.

DUBERMAN: These things were happening simultaneously or—

WEINRIB: No, no.

DUBERMAN: One at a time?

WEINRIB: One at a time. Sometimes an overlap, but, you know—

DUBERMAN: As a member of the audience you could concentrate on each one because there weren't too many things going on?

WEINRIB: But there were a number, and that was their idea—you know, they've often talked about that. It's a three-ring circus.

DUBERMAN: How long did it last?

WEINRIB: It was a long thing. Long.

DUBERMAN: And what impact?

WEINRIB: I really don't know. . . . Mrs. Jalowetz . . . she had this funny thing, very much like Wolpe, you know? It's like these people, they come from your German radicalist tradition, you know, all related to Schonberg and those people. But they could never make the next step, the next leap . . . I remember her reaction. She sat there—and she was a beautiful woman. “Deep in the middle ages” . . . she just kept saying it like an incantation: “Deep in the middle ages.” And she respected John and liked him. . . . Olson was sitting right
next to her. . . . I felt with the poem he'd just gone along with the joke. . . . I remember he sort of played it cool. Because Mrs. Jalowetz was talking to him and trying to—and he just sort of played it cool.

DUBERMAN: Noncommittal.

WEINRIB: Yes, sort of.

DUBERMAN: “An interesting experiment.”

WEINRIB: Yes . . . you know he had often talked about theater . . . he and Huss often talked about theater and what theater should be. . . . Their idea of what vital American theater was, you know, were those few pageants that went on in the South. You know, the Indian pageant, Cherokee—

DUBERMAN: Paul Green's stuff?

WEINRIB: Yes. . . . I remember at one point that came out as the greatest American drama.

DUBERMAN: That's weird.

WEINRIB: But that's the kind of thinking that often happened, you know, way-out thinking which was not way-out, really. Just extreme. But those pageants—I remember Huss talking to me about it once, you know, like that's where drama was.

DUBERMAN: Spectacle.

WEINRIB: Yes. Exactly. And of course in a certain way they might have been right. They might have picked the wrong heroes. Like the happenings, for better or worse, were—that's exactly what they were based on . . . afterwards I didn't say, “God, this is really new! . . . a new theatrical experience!” I'd seen M.C. read poetry and I'd seen Merce Cunningham dance. So in a funny way I didn't see it as that unique an act. . . . It didn't excite me, not that much.

LITZ: They all got excited about these new ideas in music and so forth. Chance. and they did the happening. . . .I thought Merce wrote some music for it. I think he did. It was a little bit of everything. Merce was playing the piano at one point, as I remember.

DUBERMAN: Didn't Rauschenberg do the backdrops?

LITZ: He may have done something, yes.

DUBERMAN: And M.C. read—

LITZ: And M.C. was reading, and—

DUBERMAN: And Merce was back and forth in the aisles, I've heard . . . what else was going on?

LITZ: Oh, M.C. came in on a—something that they were dragging, or maybe someone was playing the part of a horse, I don't know. Or there was some structure that—like a little car, or a—maybe it was a big basket or something, I don't know. I can't remember. But I picture her coming in on a horse. . . . Some kind of a movable structure . . . it's like a dream to me now, you know . . .

DUBERMAN: You don't recall any details of the evening?

LITZ: No, except that it was in French and I didn't understand it. I didn't understand the words. I could see visually what was going on. But you weren't supposed to understand it literally.

CUNNINGHAM: It was just an evening of theater. Theatrical event. Arranged in that particular way . . . this involved not only music and sound and dancing but all those other things. And there was a dog who chased me around, I remember . . . it didn't bark . . . just started dancing up and down those aisles, and followed me around. . . . And there were some other things going on. Not constantly, you know, but other minor—I don't mean minor, but things that went on for a short period of time and then stopped, and then somebody else did something else . . . with no other relationship than that they went on at the same time. That is, the music didn't support the dancing and so on, and the visual thing over here wasn't to decorate what I was doing, nor was I to have anything to do with what anybody else was doing necessarily . . . movies and whatnot . . . one was on the ladder. I think that was either Bob or M.C. or Olson. I've forgotten which. Or perhaps they both were. And they may have moved the ladder during the course of the thing.

DUBERMAN: Did you actually rehearse for the evening?

CUNNINGHAM: No. We just did our things, so to speak, separately. I improvised the whole thing. What I did ahead of time was just to work a little bit in the aisles just to know the kind of—how much I could manage without kicking somebody. . . . But other than that I don't think any of us did any rehearsing . . . conventional music has a beat, which one feels subject to one way or another, you know—you go against it or with it, or some way. Whereas the music that I use—and I'm sure the music that David Tudor played that evening—would not have had a beat. It would have been perhaps Cage's music or other composers, I don't remember exactly what was played. . . . Cage and I had worked that way for a long, long time. With the music and the dance. But this of course involved more elements. This involved the poetry . . . and the visual things . . . there were movies, it seems to me. . . . No—
well, maybe there were paintings . . . I have a recollection of suddenly at the last minute something else being included . . .

DUBERMAN: Can you tell me a little about the theory, if there is any such thing as a theory, as to what value there is for these separate activities to be going on simultaneously.

CUNNINGHAM: I think the values—if you're going to use that word—is in respect to the way life itself is all these separate things going on at the same time. And contemporary society is so extraordinarily complex that way. Not only things going on right around you, but there are all the things that you hear instantly over the television, that are going on someplace else . . . that idea of separateness, of things happening even though they are separate, they're happening at the same time . . . Rauschenberg showed his paintings. I don't know whether they were the black paintings or the white paintings. But he showed them in it.

CAGE: I think there's a slight difference between Rauschenberg and me. And we've become less friendly, although we're
still friendly. We don't see one another as much as we did. . . . I have the desire to just erase the difference between art and life, whereas Rauschenberg made that famous statement about working in the gap between the two. Which is a little—Roman Catholic, from my point of view.

DUBERMAN: Meaning what?

CAGE: Well, he makes a mystery out of being an artist.