Laura Kuhn talks with John Kelly, an award-winning singer, dancer, and writer, as well as performance and visual artist. His performance works range in scale from solo to larger ensemble, and stem from autobiographical, cultural, and political issues. Subjects have included the Berlin Wall, the Troubadours, the AIDS epidemic, and Expressionistic Film, and his character studies have been based on such figures as Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau. His works have been performed at such hallowed venues as Lincoln Center, the Warhol Museum, the Whitney Biennial, PS 122, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and London’s Tate Modern.

Kelly has collaborated with many leading composers, including John Cage, in whose works he’s prominently appeared: these include James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, Lecture on the Weather, Aria with Fontana Mix (with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony), and The City Wears a Slouch Hat, this last in a staged version at Bard College in 2012. We talk today about his leading role in Cage’s “Alphabet,” which he created for its initial run of performances around the world in 2001-2002 in a staged version directed by me, under the auspices of the John Cage Trust!

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!