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 intensity and the daily gesture of practice anchored in the immediate reality of dance’s coordinates. In this sense, dance does not rely on the audience’s gaze but works with its own stability. The audience, therefore, enters an already stabilized space, held by a spatial, architectural, and emotional commitment. But simultaneously, and in turn, an observed performance enhances cohesion and elaboration of the performance matter. As a witnessed event, it sharpens and deepens the choreographic thesis, building its dramaturgy on the encounter between a performance and a space of attention. The last video documents an artist talk with students of 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. This temporariness invites a dancer to explore and negotiate between the performance as it takes place, the conceptual premises of it, and the dramaturgy of the choreography. In this sense, the six recordings testify to the collective effort of five outstanding dance artists that work, experiment, and synthesize the trajectory of performance’s materiality and how it finally unfolds. The circumstances of this choreographic process are not only part of the structure of the piece; 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 practice produces knowledge that is generated but cannot be encompassed in a thematic sequence. It is hard to accumulate and even harder to situate, without instrumentalizing the very value of this unmarkedness.
The choreographic and performative work visibly culminated into some kind of pure form. Pure in a sense that the form resonates as form but resonates as space as well, which is also a form and its event. Cage has transformed the piano’s sound by colliding it with everyday objects and their functions. What this gesture enables, in poetic terms, is an examination of a singular screw or bolt as a possible classical, though industrial, form. These industrial, seemingly undifferentiated objects were thus infused with meaning, no matter how minimal. A cycle of twenty short piano pieces comprises sixteen asymmetrically arranged sonatas and four interludes. In each sonata, a brief sequence of natural numbers and fractions defines the structure, giving each melodic line a localized and individual character. In other words, the complexity of an instrument such as a piano, against its historical accumulation, is able to open vast spaces of deconstruction as well as re-inscriptions of its elements of form. Form as event and, subsequently, form as sound.
On another note, these reflections come a posteriori, as a research after the experience of the choreographic performance as such. 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, the choreographic work requires a continuous reaching for the metaphorical plates, screws, bolts, and spoons, in a dense collision with the existing knowledge while playing a few keys to see what’s going to change.
We view John Cage’s works not as iconic or monumental 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 with 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
