LISTENING TO JOHN CAGE......

No-one in my immediate circle likes modern music or modern theatre for that matter. Opera has to be traditional  and music needs to be classical. Since Gianni has returned to Italy I really am « alone » on this scene. I don’t know why there is such an important event for Robert Wilson on in Paris, but there is. It may well be for the Autumn Festival but this one in particular is not really clear to me. After all he has been back in Paris for productions 18 times over the last 40 years. 

I have booked four shows in the series and am sorry that I didn’t book more. Too late now as there are people who like his work. The theatres are full. 

It was a reading by Robert Wilson called « Lecture on Nothing » by John Cage. This hour and a quarter "lecture" follows that of John Cage’s first performance of his own work in 1949 in New York. Some critics have qualified it as being one of the most important poetical manifest of the 20th century…..well…..

As usual I was at the Louvre auditorium well ahead of time to see this……

10 minutes later it was this and 8pm was upon us.

So some people like Robert Wilson and John Cage !

No sign of the doors opening. Then they did and by 10 after 8 I was seated. Robert Wilson must have been sitting on the stage for 15 minutes, watched by « someone » high up. He sat like this until 8-30.

 No movement apart from a slight batting of his eyes. Then the most dreadful blast of sound - unidentified I might add and nothing to do with John Cage’s 4,33 minutes of « silence » (musical work). The noise was deafening. Spectators began to shelter their ears with their hands. 

The character left. The reading began. Wilson traced his hand over pages of paper - which were written on like a musical score. 

He talked about nothing. Derision. Humour. Repetitive music as Cage enjoyed composing.



The deep meaning of "Lecture on Nothing" is that by reducing everything to nothing you begin to understand that art is the experience of the moment, that all that matters is now. I couldn’t agree more.

The piercingly loud, complex electronic sound blared for an unbearable seven minutes, as if attempting to re-create in the audience the response Cage got initially. It was a sound not unlike what you experience when you are given an MRI. It may be awful, but it can also be enjoyable if, deep down, you know it's for your own good.But was this? The noise was deafening. Spectators began to shelter their ears with hands. 


Then came blissful silence.

"What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking," Wilson read, as he began Cage's text while moving his fingers across sheets of paper. After that theatre-of-cruelty electronic blast, we were now, I think, in the right place. As is typical of Wilson, his movements were very slow, his singular touch was seen on every inch of the stage and the lighting was so exquisite that it created a magnificent world of its own.

Cage's text is charming, often amusing, often quotable, equally often intentionally infuriating and profoundly thought provoking.

"All I know about method," Cage writes at the end of "Lecture on Nothing," is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing." Others might call that enlightenment. I call it very philosophical and very true. Well for me anyway.

At that point Wilson lifted his hand for a microsecond and then the stage went black.

I liked it even if at moments the repetition drove me mad.