7ª Bienal do Mercosul

\"Late in September of 1958, in a hotel in Stockholm, I set about writing this lecture for delivery a week later at the Brussels Fair. I recalled a remark made years earlier by David Tudor that I should give a talk that was nothing but stories. The idea was appealing, but I had never acted on it, and I decided to do so now. When the talk was given in Brussels, it consisted of only thirty stories, without musical accompaniment. A recital by David Tudor and myself of music for two pianos followed the lecture. The full title was Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music. Karlheinz Stockhausen was in the audience. Later, when I was in Milan making the Fontana Mix at the Studio di Fonologia, I received a letter from him asking for a text that could be printed in Die Reihe No. 5. I sent the Brussels talk, and it was published. The following spring, back in America, I delivered the talk again, at Teachers College, Columbia. For this occasion I wrote sixty more stories, and there was a musical accompaniment by David Tudor - material from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, employing several radios as noise elements. Soon thereafter these ninety stories were brought out as a Folkways recording but for this the noise elements in the Concert were tracks from the Fontana Mix. In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it\'s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can. The continuity of the stories as recorded was not planned. I simply made a list of all the stories I could think of and checked them off as I wrote them. Some that I remembered I was not able to write to my satisfaction, and so they were not used. My intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest that all things - stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings - are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person\'s mind. Since that recording, I have continued to write down stories as I have found them, so that the number is now far more than ninety. Most concern things that happened that stuck in my mind. Others I read in books and remembered - those, for instance, from Sri Ramakrishna and the literature surrounding Zen. Still others have been told me by friends - Merce Cunningham, Virgil Thomson, Betty Isaacs, and many more. Xenia, who figures in several of them, is Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, to whom I was married for some ten years. Some stories have been omitted since their substance forms part of other writings in this volume. Many of those that remain are to be found below. Others are scattered through the book, playing the function that odd bits of information play at the ends of columns in a small-town newspaper. I suggest that they be read in the manner and in the situations that one reads newspapers - even the metropolitan ones - when he does so purposelessly: that is, jumping here and there and responding at the same time to environmental events and sounds.\" - John Cage, Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage

Laura Kuhn fue invitada por la Curaduría General de la 7ª Bienal do Mercosul a interpretar Indeterminacy, performance de John Cage, junto a DJ Flu, artista de Rio de Janeiro, quien realizó un set de discos de vinilo de Cage. Durante la performance, que toma la forma de una conferencia, el o la intérprete lee 1 historia por minuto, hasta contar 90 historias escritas por Cage en un total de 90 minutos. La performance se realizó el domingo 18 de octubre en el Almacén A7, Cais do Porto, sede de la 7ª Bienal, en Porto Alegre.

\"Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham\'s cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one\'s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed.\" - John Cage, A Year from Monday