Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik: Cage Open. A Truck Passing by a Music School (2025)
Saturday, 22 November at 8:00 p.m.
dance performance premiere with live music
The Old Power Station
The work Cage Open was created in collaboration between the New Music Forum and CoFestival. The two festivals have a shared interest in artistic creativity. In the twentieth century, this creativity was driven by the imperative of innovation through avant-garde and modernist artistic aspirations. We decided to join forces for a combined festival day since they take place in the same November slot. Selected works by John Cage, which marked contemporary music with their radical openness and freedom of interpretation, will accompany the choreographic work of Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik, in a live performance by members of the New Music Forum Ensemble. Podrzavnik and Tomášik create their choreographic oeuvre in the local contemporary dance scene, using open, improvised, and predetermined choreographic structures. They draw from a broad spectrum of compositional choreological principles and collaborate closely with musicians in their works.
John Cage (1912–1992) is one of the few composers whose influences extend beyond the borders of music – because he moved through various artistic environments. After studying with Arnold Schönberg, he decided to dedicate himself entirely to music, creating compositions for percussion. Cage was passionate about expanding musical material, and the prepared piano should be understood in this context. He inserted various objects between the piano strings, transforming the piano from a melodic-harmonic instrument into a percussion instrument. His compositions The Mysterious Adventure (1945) and Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947) are written for prepared piano. He created the former for a dance performance by Cage’s partner Merce Cunningham, and the latter for Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, in which Marcel Duchamp’s dreams were furnished with Cage’s music.
Cage sought new sounds even more radically, as demonstrated by Imaginary Landscape No. 1, the first electroacoustic composition. It was created as accompaniment for Cocteau’s ballet The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower; in the composition, Cage used technical aids available in the studio environment in 1939: gramophone records with recorded frequencies and turntables with variable playback speed.
Cage expanded not only the material aspect of music but also the “mental” aspect. From Eastern philosophies, he adopted the idea of the non-intentionality of art, leading him to incorporate chance into the compositional and performance process, or to the concept of indeterminacy, where the composer increasingly retreats from the artwork as its author. A typical example is Variations III (1962), which was intended for “any number of performers performing any actions.” The score consists of two transparent sheets of paper with circles that can be interpreted almost arbitrarily as musical notation. This means that most of the responsibility shifts from the author to the performers.
Even in his late works, Cage deliberately retreated from compositions. The Perpetual Tango (1984) is based on Erik Satie’s unfinished composition Sports et divertissements. Cage clearly adopted Satie’s rhythm with the pitches undetermined and only the direction of pitch movement indicated. The final cycle of Cage’s compositions are the number pieces. These are works that have numbers in the title. The first number indicates the number of musicians and the second the sequential number of the composition intended for that number of musicians. Composition Two6 (1992) is the sixth in a series of compositions for two instruments. Numbers also dominate the musical notation. Here, Cage determines the time frame in which a specific sound must occur. Most often, this is an isolated long tone. The outcome is music that is remarkably tranquil in its focus and introspection.
John Cage strongly influenced the development of dance art with his radical artistic ideas as a collaborator of choreographer Merce Cunningham and his ensemble, initiating a reform of dance production among the generation of young dance artists at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s that changed contemporary dance forever. Cage Open is a choreographic work located between performance, ritual and process. Rauch Podrzavnik and Tomášik have unequivocally identified the object of dance within it as a “responsive body.” This body will inevitably develop a living connection with Cage’s philosophy, articulated in the famous collection of essays Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Cage’s musical starting point is listening. This is the prerequisite for music because sounds are always available to us. This perceptual negative of production is as current and radical in 2025 as it was in 1961, given the amount of blindness, silence, and ignorance concerning global events in the international political sphere. “The responsive body” of the choreographic work Cage Open will be initiated with auditory, visual, conceptual, and emotional elements, allowing artists and spectators to jointly discover the new in the familiar and the (r)evolutionary in the seeming and the obvious, according to the creators.
Music: John Cage: Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Variations III, In a Landscape, Two6, The Perpetual Tango, The Mysterious Adventure, Music for Marcel Duchamp
Project concept: Rok Vevar, Jasmina Založnik
Choreo-direction: Milan Tomášik, Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Co-creation and performance: Bojana Robinson, Martin Kilvády, Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik
Members of the New Music Forum Ensemble: Nina Prešiček (piano), Deyan Muc (violin), Urška Rihtaršič (harp), Alenka Jezernik (percussion), Jože Bogolin (percussion), Peter Jeretina (percussion), Klemen Juvančič (percussion), Rok Zalokar (electronics)
Music selection: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik and Milan Tomášik
Lighting design: Borut Bučinel
Spatial design: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik, Milan Tomášik and Borut Bučinel
Video: Darko Sintič
Video editing: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Executive production: Mojca Prešern Levstek, UHO Society
Production: DUM – Association of Artists
Co-production: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and UHO Society (New Music Forum)
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City Municipality of Ljubljana, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Inotherm d.o.o.
Organised by: DUM – Association of Artists, NDA Slovenia, Kino Šiška and UHO Society in collaboration with Bunker
Supported by:
Cover photo: video still