Live Ideas: Pauline Oliveros and Ione’s Water Above/Sky Below Now! + John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather
Pauline Oliveros and IONE have worked collaboratively since 1985. They have created four large operas and frequently perform improvisation that features spoken word and sonic vocals (by IONE) with harmonica, accordion and electronic music (by Oliveros). For Live Ideas, they will perform two works—one premiere and one older work—using Oliveros’ new V Accordion and Expanded Instrument System to produce truly unique, of-the-moment sound art.
The second half of the evening’s performance features Cage’s 1976 Lecture on the Weather. Combining music, text, projected images, lighting and a weather soundscape, the work is a softly political piece containing Cage’s concerns (social, political and environmental in nature) regarding the direction the country was then taking. Equally as relevant today as the year it was written, the installation features excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s writings—Walden: Life in the Woods and On Civil Disobedience—selected by means of I Ching chance operations. Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in observance of the bicentennial of the United States of America in 1976, it was to be performed, according to Cage, by 12 men, “preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens.”
Featuring Thomas Bartlett, Justin Bond , Anne Carson, Bob Currie, Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, Bill T. Jones, Eyvind Kang, Yates McKee, Pauline Oliveros, Beth Povinelli and Doug Wieselman.
