Day Five, Six and Seven:

As often happens – I get behind on this blog stuff and have to ram a bunch of days together – but in this case that makes sense. Cage to Fluxus to the Fluxus Project. The point with this string of material is to explore the idea of indeterminacy in a variety of ways. We started off with the Cage inspired piece we used for the Gen Art class – basically a grid with 10 second timed intervals and sounds that are loud, soft or silent. Each group fills in the sounds however they see fit. It always gets loud, which typically isn’t a problem, except, now there is a class directly below us. Been hoping to offer classes in that space for years, I just hadn’t thought through the consequences for those of us above. Bob, who is teaching there, is a good sport, so it all works out. The Cage conversation went well – good thoughtful comments by the students on 4’33” and on some of his ideas about sound. Cage, of course, sets the tone for LaMonte Young and the Fluxus folks. Since we had been discussing Trisha Brown’s Solo olos piece that was performed last year I showed a video of one of the rehearsals. It was nice to have a couple of dancers in the class to help answer questions about the piece. This was a nice lead in to discussing LaMonte Young’s essay and ideas. I like that he shifts the kind of aggression by the Futurists and Dadaists into something else. This lead to discussing the Fluxus material. Hard to assign the Fluxus project without some introduction. This took us into the Fluxus project – each student had to develop three Fluxus inspired pieces written out on index cards. The cards are shuffled and passed out and then one at a time students interpret them. This really has to be one of my favorite projects – it has evolved over years of teaching it until it took this form with the Dissonance class. It is always a fund day and everyone gets to share in that performance/audience space. What will be different about this time is that we will take that understanding into a discussion/presentation of Happenings. The Happenings bit will close out the “historical” section of the course. So far we have generated a nice list of terms and ideas that will become the foundation for moving into the performance art material. So far we have: Defamiliarization, recontextualize, juxtaposition, dynamism, simultaneity, play, liminal, chance, concept/idea, implied action, implied body, implication of spectator, ground/location/space. Not bad for a few weeks work.