Word: cage
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...says Composer John Cage, "am a hunter." Last week White Hunter Cage's latest quarry was on display at Manhattan's avant-garde off-Broadway theater, Circle in the Square. Even to the battle-scarred ears of the beard-and-ponytail set, it seemed one of the queerest beasts ever found in captivity...
...Cage's self-styled "anarchistic situation" lasted for 30 minutes and was titled Theatre Piece. The composer himself stood in a corner with his back to the flimsy curtain. On the badminton-court-sized stage were eight performers confronting a weird assortment of props: a grand piano, a tuba, a trombone, a cluster of plastic bags hanging by a thin wire and dripping colored water into a washtub, a swing, a string of balloons, a pair of bridge tables littered with the debris of some nightmarish New Year's Eve-champagne bottle in bucket, movie projector, alarm clock...
...grey-flannel slacks walked over to the balloons and started popping them with a pin. A contralto in a sickly green satin cocktail suit began singing St. Louis Blues. A dancer in a black leotard skipped rope while the pianist slammed the keyboard with his elbows. "Five!" cried Cage, his arm descending like the second hand of a clock. Sneakers hit the piano strings with a dead fish. Black Leotard read a newspaper while marking time to the wail of the trombone by flipping a garbage can lid with her foot. The men at the bridge tables popped the champagne...
...whole thing, explains 47-year-old Composer Cage, was a simple exercise in "indeterminancy." Back in his relatively traditionalist period, Cage composed pieces for percussion orchestras, featuring prepared pianos and weird electronic effects. But now, he says, he has no further interest in "expressing myself. I have no desire to improve on creation." The new object is to surprise not only the audience but the performers and the composer himself. When he was asked to write a piece for the Circle in the Square Composers' Showcase series, Cage sat down and worked out his basic time scheme according...
...most poignantly comic weirdie of the lot was Waldemar Schindl, a soulful inventor living in an isolated hamlet in the Austrian Alps. When King visited him in the late '20s, Schindl unveiled a machine that looked like a badly made cast-iron bird cage. The contraption gave an enormous heave and one of the wires stabbed at a piece of paper. It suddenly dawned on King that "that poor old chowder-head had - all by himself up here in this moonstruck eyrie - reinvented the typewriter...