Laura Kuhn’s guest this week is Paul Lazar, an award-winning actor, director, and (often dancing) performer who has appeared in more than 30 feature films, including Silence of the Lambs, Snowpiercer, and Philadelphia. He is founding co-artistic director with Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater, appearing in works for Big Dance since 1991. He came to Kuhn’s attention through the enthusiastic critical response to his Cage Shuffle, a 50-minute dance/theater solo in which he speaks a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his score Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing fixed choreography by Parson. In all of Lazar’s iterations of Cage Shuffle, Cage’s stories are spoken in random order with no predetermined relationship to the dance, yet chance serves up its inevitable blend of uncanny connections between text and movement. Cage’s humor, intellect, and iconoclasm find new expression in Lazar’s realizations, which adds dance to Cage’s original performance instructions: Read stories aloud, paced so that each story takes one minute, using chance procedures or not.

Listeners will hear John Cage and David Tudor perform Indeterminacy in tonight’s program, but they can also access video clips of Lazar’s Cage Shuffle via two Vimeo links:

A solo performance of Cage Shuffle, performed by Lazar:

And, a duo performance of Cage Shuffle: A Digital Duet, performed by Lazar and Bebe Miller, available here.

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!