Performance
John Cage: How To Get Started
Sunday, October 30
Doors Open at 1, Show at 2
Admission: Free
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
4454 Woodward Ave.
Detroit
How to Get Started is a collaborative experiment that explores improvisation and the origin of ideas. In the piece, three community leaders will take the stage with ten note cards containing present thoughts and concerns. They will shuffle the deck, and speak “off the cuff” on each idea. Each monologue will be recorded in collaboration with a sound engineer and looped back as the next card is addressed, creating, in the end, a complex acoustic layering of ideas.
This presentation of How To Get Started will be performed by:
Michael Stone-Richards
Michael Stone-Richards
Michael Stone-Richards teaches Critical Theory at the College for Creative Studies and was recently appointed Chair of the Committee on Critical Studies. He is a co-founder, with Addie Langford, of the journal Detroit Research and founding editor of the journal. Michael works on Critical Theory, Social Practice / Biopolitics, modern poetry and poetics (from Romanticism and the post-Symbolist era to Breton, Celan, Prynne, Cha, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham), performance, the avant-garde at the intersection of philosophy and art history (Surrealism, the Situationist International, Breton, Blanchot, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida). He is completing a book (in Biopolitics and Social Practice) on Care of the City: Ruination, Abandonment, and Hospitality in Contemporary Practice, and an extended commentary on "Suzanne Cesaire Great Camouflage." His most recent project concerns Surrealism, dance, and philosophy. The work of Cage has been a lifelong preoccupation.
Alison Wong
Alison Wong is an artist, curator, and educator. Her studio practice is based out of Butter Projects in Royal Oak, MI, an artist run studio and exhibition space that she founded in 2009. Wong currently holds the position of Director at Wasserman Projects and adjunct faculty at College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.
James Cornish
James Cornish is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and third-generation native of Detroit proper. He is the composer of three operas, including an opera using the ancient Sumerian epic of Gudea, which debuted in 2011 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. James also writes operas based from contemporary urban poetry.
James is the recipient of state and national arts grants, including the NEA's American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius (2009). He was commissioned to compose a series of dance pieces in public spaces in Detroit (2011). He curates the experimental music series Radical Sounds Detroit at the Detroit Contemporary gallery and is the co-founder of the Detroit Free Arts experimental music festival.
This event is brought to you courtesy of MOCAD and The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, in collaboration with John Cage Trust and Slought. It is curated in situ by Laura Kuhn (former IH Visiting Fellow), Aaron Levy, and Arthur Sabatini. Exhibit design in collaboration with Amanda Krugliak. Project design by Ken Saylor and Project Projects. Sound design by Peter Price and Seth Chrisman.