This recording structure relates to Cage’s original event in which performers framed the audience, themselves seated centrally and facing outward - each viewer observing different activity. The lens observes the students’ action and the supporting film crew in a circular orbit. Correlational performances occur within the black box theatre, recorded by a camera installed upon a track in a 360 degree formation. Students are variously recorded preparing work, speaking publicly in the dining hall, and playing the piano - all are parallel performances embedded within the reality of the school day. Taking place over a single day, the work’s sensitivity to the passing and structuring of time is redoubled by a self-reflexive approach to the camera. Billing’s revival of this exercise, however, sees the instrument function as a site of collective ownership and cross-disciplinary creation.įormally, Each Moment is distinguished by its attentive negotiation of time. Notably, Cage’s Prepared Piano Pieces had been removed from the A Level music syllabus as the work’s ambivalent status challenged conventional academic assessment. In the film, students collect material across departments, inserting a myriad of objects such as toys, art utensils, cutlery, science equipment and office stationary. In this, Cage sought ‘to place in the hands of a single pianist the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra’ with the prepared piano serving as a precursor to his later experiments with chance. Originally, the act of preparation was designed to contort the instrument’s sound by inserting bolts, screws, erasers and other objects between the piano strings. By revisiting Cage’s historical texts, the performers consider the meaning of improvisation, success, authorship and artistic autonomy in relation to everyday experience and chance events.Įach Moment features a reconsideration of Cage’s Prepared Piano Pieces (1938-54). The performers recite this titular lecture as well as Cage’s Lecture on Something (1951) alongside poems written themselves. The work’s title directly quotes Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959), which becomes a poignant motif throughout the film. The project thus advocates a means of thinking the past through the personal, coincidental and relational. Collectively, the students were invited to imagine what could have taken place around, before, during and after the event, articulating responses through dance, music, theatre, poetry, painting, philosophy, photography, dj-ing and film production. Experimenting across disciplines, Billing encourages a practical and poetic approach to learning, which challenges the values of failure and success, process and outcome. These contradictory recollections, gaps in historical revision and the anonymity of Cage’s content serve as a point of departure for the students. In lieu of photographic or video documentation, the original happening lives on today through memories and audience testimonies. The event featured dance, painting, music, film, live readings and performance created by Merce Cunningham, Franz Kline, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Nicolas Cernovtich, MC Richards, Charles Olsson and John Cage. Cage’s Untitled Event was originally held in the dining hall of Black Mountain College and although Cage arranged time slots, the event was primarily informed by chance with activities taking place simultaneously. Testing the differences between educational systems and what qualifies as knowledge, the project creates a dialogue between the School, founded in 1532, now selective, independent and fee-paying and the defunct Black Mountain College, founded in 1933, specialising in liberal arts education. In the film, the new centre is seen in the context of the School’s historic building facades, its grounds and great hall. Each Moment continues Billing’s long-held examination of performance by creating a fictive space within a documentary premise, exploring the generative relation between actual and contrived events.Įach Moment was commissioned by Bristol Grammar School to commemorate the opening of the 1532 Performing Arts Centre, connecting artistic departments in the school as well as the new theatre and wider audiences in the local area. The film records students mostly from Bristol Grammar School, UK, engaging in an experimental, improvisational and multidisciplinary process open to failure, exchange, and imagination. This collaborative project reimagines Untitled Event (Theatre piece number 1, 1952) by John Cage - the first known happening or multimedia art work held in Black Mountain College, USA. Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Johanna Billing’s recent moving image work, Each Moment Presents What Happens (2021).
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