six dances for prepared piano is a series of six subsequent performances of koreografska fantazija br. 3: open processes, performed in March 2019 at Zagreb Dance Center at the performances & talks program. The work explores a process-oriented structure, John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, and the spatial architecture of a dance studio.
six dances for prepared piano documents six consecutive performances; the first two performances were rehearsals and the subsequent four performances were public. However, each performance is entirely public in terms of its gesture of practice anchored in the immediate reality of dance’s coordinates. In this sense, the performances do not rely on the audience’s gaze but work with their own stability, held by a spatial, architectural, and emotional elements. In turn, an observed performance enhances the cohesion of the performance matter. As a witnessed event, it enhances the choreographic thesis, developing its dramaturgy as the interaction between a performance and a space of attention. The concluding video features a conversation with the students from the State Conservatory for Contemporary Dance Ana Maletić in Zagreb.
The research journey of this choreographic work extended to nearly a year. Where does a premiere, a work, a performance, begin and where does it end? In this dance, it begins at every moment and ends only temporarily. The temporariness invites each dancer to negotiate between the performance as it takes place, the conceptual premises of it, and the dramaturgy of the choreography. The six recordings testify to the collaborative efforts of five exceptional dance artists who work, experiment, and synthesize the trajectory of performance’s materiality and how it ultimately unfolds. In this sense, the circumstances of the choreographic process were part of the work’s structure, but they also presented an opportunity to learn together. A dance gesture is not only the production of knowledge; it is this unique knowledge. Not only as the knowledge of dance, dance knowledge, but knowledge in a broader sense. Dance as a practice generates knowledge that cannot be encapsulated in a thematic sequence. It is difficult to accumulate and even more challenging to situate, without undermining the intrinsic value of this unmarkedness.
The choreographic and performative work visibly culminated in some kind of dimensional form. This dimensionality suggests that the form not only resonates as a tangible entity but also as a spatial presence, which is itself considered a form as well as an event. Cage has transformed the piano’s sound by colliding it with objects and their functions. This gesture allows for a poetic exploration of a single screw or bolt as a potentially classical, though industrial, form. These industrial, seemingly undifferentiated objects were thus infused with meaning, no matter how minimal. This resulted in twenty short pieces, comprising sixteen asymmetrically arranged sonatas and four interludes. Each sonata features a concise sequence of natural numbers and fractions that shapes its structure, granting each melodic line a unique and distinctive quality. This implies that the piano, with its complex historical development, creates opportunities for both deconstruction and reinterpretation of its formal elements. Form as event and, subsequently, as sound.
On the other hand, these reflections are research that follows the experience of the choreographic performance itself. While the piece was under construction and its parameters still being worked out, we have recognized ourselves in the situation that Cage describes as going to the kitchen to get a plate: “I went to the kitchen, got a pie plate, brought it back into the living room, and placed it on the piano strings. I played a few keys. The piano sounds had been changed” (Cage, 1973). Similarly, this choreographic work necessitated a continuous reaching for metaphorical plates, screws, bolts, and spoons, in a dense collision with existing knowledge while playing a few keys to see what might change.
We view John Cage’s works not as iconic phenomena but as familiar processes of a fellow artist. Cage was a regular presence at the Music Biennale in Zagreb during the 1960s and 1970s, both as an artist and a friend, and his work resonates in Zagreb’s experimental lineages. This piece, therefore, might be a contemporary expression of this broader belonging, reflecting experiments across time that are still ongoing. Finally, Cage writes, “the prepared piano, impressions I had from the work of artist friends […] all led me to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be.” In this sense, we dedicate these six dances to this and such, prepared, piano.
Marjana Krajač
