Bertrand Chamayou & Élodie Sicard

To calculate John Cage squared, you must recall the historic importance of his statements on art, but also reveal the choreographic origins of his "prepared piano": a fascinating operation, accomplished with brio by Élodie Sicard and Bertrand Chamayou.

Iconic composer of musical modernity, but also an essayist and plastic artist, John Cage remains a symbol of experimentation and radical disruption, as attested in his score composed entirely of silence, 4’33. But as a collaborator of Merce Cunningham or Syvilla Fort, he was also closely associated with the choreographic arts, and it is the richness of this lesser-known relationship that the pianist Bertrand Chamayou and the dancer-choreographer Élodie Sicard wish to give place of honour. On 12 works composed in the 1940s, they have imagined a piece in which a dancing body evolves around four prepared pianos, in a reflective gesture raised "to the square". In 1937, for a ballet called Bacchanale, Cage had the idea to replace the percussion with a piano onto which he had attached various objects of wood, metal or rubber. New sounds were thus born, and a new page written in the history of music. So it seems only right and proper that the "prepared piano", the emblematic instrument of modernity, should return to the art of dance from which it was born.

In partnership with 

Concept Bertrand Chamayou & Élodie Sicard

Piano Bertrand Chamayou
Choreography and dance Élodie Sicard
Preparation of pianos Anna Paolina Hasslacher
Lighting Philippe Gladieux
Sound The Mono Company
Costumes Cédrick Debeuf
Dramaturgical advisor Jérémie Scheidler
Choreographic advisors Léa Lansade & Paul Girard

With thanks to François Chaignaud

John Cage (1912-1992)

Œuvres musicales composées entre 1940 et 1945 :
Mysterious Adventure*
The Unavailable Memory of*
Primitive
In the name of the Holocaust*
The Perilous Night
Root of an Unfocus*
Daughters of the Lonesome Isle
A Valentine Out of Season
Tossed As It Untroubled*
Bacchanale
Our Spring Will Come
And The Earth Shall Bear Agin

—
* œuvres composées pour Merce Cunningham