Page 39 - Demo

The Merce Cunningham Dance Co. in \zil Photo)BAM Opens Next Wave With lrish/ Avant Garde Piece:' R o a r a t o r i o ' s ' C a g e y C o m p o s e rBY ARTHUR KROEBERFor the next wave to open with a sevenyear-old work by composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham %u2014 whose collaboration began in the early 1940s %u2014 may strike some in New York%u2019s trendconscious artistic community as a bit odd. Yet the choice of two artists who have ridden so many waves of the avant-garde without losing their freshness or impact testifies to the profundity and importance of Cage%u2019s and Cunningham%u2019s challenge to traditional aesthetic concepts.%u201cRoaratorio,%u201d a 50-minute work involving 15 dancers, five live musicians and a tape of sounds from around the world, is being per- %u2018formed for the first time in America, although an early version aired on West German radio in 1979 and the first staging was done in France four years later.The work draws both inspiration and material from James Joyce%u2019s fantastic language-game, %u201cFinnegan%u2019s Wake,%u201d which Cage regards as the greatest book of the 20th century.IRISH MUSIC MEETS AVANT GARDE.The structure of %u201cRoaratorio%u201d is as complicated as the text on which it is based.The strictly musical element is provided by five Irish musicians playing traditional injIt's very simple.D o youunderstandyour dream s? The answer ofcourse is no, and m y music isno m orecom plicatedthan that. A ndw o u ld n 't yousay that yourdream s touchyou m ore thananything youcan understand?Composer John Cage(Rex Rystedt Photo)struments: Paddy Glackin on the fiddle, Seamus Tansey on the flute, Mel and Peadar Mercier on the bodhran (a percussion instrument), and Liam O%u2019Floinn on the uileann pipes (Irish bellows-type bagpipes).Cage himself will chant selections from Finnegans Wake; the final element is a tape, which is made up of recordings of ambient sounds from various places mentioned in Joyce%u2019s book, as well as songs sung by the late Joseph Heaney, a well-known Irish popular singer. The sounds are different in each performance: Cage gives the musicians their cues but they are free to play any of a predetermined selection of notes, and Cage splices a new tape each night.Cage, who turned 74 last month, began %u201cRoaratorio%u201d in 1976, after the literary journal Triquarterly asked him to write an article or composition for a special issue on %u201cFinnegans Wake.%u201dCOMPOSED BY CHANCECage worked in a characteristic manner in an attempt to create a text that was the product of chance rather than of his own intentions. He went through Finnegans Wake almost in the manner ot a cryptograpner, using the words %u201cJames Joyce%u201d as his key. He looked first for a word with a j but without an a; then for a word with an a but Continued on Puf>e 13O c to b er 9 ,1 9 8 6 , T H E P H O E N IX , Page 11