John Cage's "Song Books" allow us to explore the meeting of the American thinker and political anarchist Henry Thoreau and the French thinker and musical anarchist Erik Satie ("The question is not whether Satie is pertinent. He is essential." John Cage). The performance is in a black box. The audience walks between spaces of light which are inhabited by a chef who cooks mushrooms while singing the mushroom solo, a cheerleader and a dork playing chess, a diva and her clairvoyant who does a reading of the "Yi Ching" for her, a blind types who types Satie's phrase "The artist must not needlessly waste his listener's time," over and over again, on three different typewriters and a sound man. We call these moving musical sculptures "sound scenes" (the term was coined by
Stockhausen, who used it for his dancers and electronic music). Three local guests also perform during the evening: a conductor conducts an anarchist chorus ("The best form of government is no government at all." Henry Thoreau), an instrumentalist plays the same solo and a composer replaces the sound man in order to perform two feedback solos. The set is created by two series of slides inspired by Thoreau.
Everyone has a solo. There are six main solos during the course of the evening. These take place in the center ring, except when they take place somewhere else, and are sometimes enhanced by live electronics and/or tape music. The chef sings Satie's phrase "It is music's fault that all of this has happened to me" four times in four different musical styles, recording himself and playing back the tape. The diva sings a cagey version of the Queen of the Night's aria, transformed by Iverson. The clairvoyant plays an indo-cagese drum solo, mesmorizing all of the performers (and the audience). The typist sings a cage-folk song. The cheerleader does a chear in Japonese ("niche niche kore ko niche" "every day is a beautiful day"). The dork does an avant garde theater solo and roller skates.
The style of movement in the sound scenes is borrowed freely from Meyerhold's bio-mechanics. The performers look a bit like automats. When they do their solos, they are freed from these stylistic constraints. The alternation of the exposition of sound scenes and solos is broken by the arrival of the local guest performers, the anarchist chorus, the procession which preceeds the clairvoyant percussionist's solo (the mesmorized performers follow him and sit in a circle around him while he plays) and a collective solo ("I ask those who have not understood to assume an attitude of total humility and total submission" Erik Satie).
In our performance, instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music, theater and danse combine to create a music theater of the senses:
HEARING
"The only thing which gets in the way of noise is music." John Cage The sound world of the Song Books is very rich. The objects in the sound scenes are amplified. We can hear the chess clock dividing time into seconds with aleatoric interruptions as well as the noise of the chess pieces on the board, the sound of the coins of the Yi Ching, the voice of the clairvoyant, the rhythms of the typewriter keys and the computer voice of her "braille speak" repeating Satie's phrase at constantly changing dynamics and tempos, as well as the the noises of the chef and the rhythms of his knife on the cutting board.
SIGHT
What do clairvoyants see that we cannot see? and blind people? Are sighted people blind compared to clairvoyants? Do sighted people hear differently from blind people? How? Are the audience members watching the sound scenes voyeurs?
SMELL
John Cage loved mushrooms. He won a prize on Italian television thanks to his mycological knowledge. The fragrance of mushrooms, butter and garlic will fill the hall.
TOUCH
The audience members are not allowed to touch the performers.

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