For Four Walls

«For the centennial of Merce Cunningham we have proposed For Four Walls, with the original score performed live by pianist Vanessa Wagner. The premier will be held on the 23rd of May at the National Opera of Lorraine, Nancy.

The original dance play, Four Walls was a creation that  incorporated text and choreography by Merce Cunningham with a score for  solo piano by John Cage. After its premier, and only performance in  1944, the piece was lost and forgotten, although in the late 1970’s the  pianist Richard Bunger rediscovered the score among Cage’s manuscripts.  According to Cage his piano score, with a singular voice, acknowledged a  link or prefigured the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich – “It’s  full of passages that get repeated, and it’s all white notes; it’s in C  and it goes on and on”. The structure is of contrasting settings, loud  and soft, high and low, etc, which has a psychological intensity quite  unusual for Cage. He himself upon hearing the discovered score found it  rather interesting – a genuine curiosity, and seemed surprised that he  was its composer! Still within the beginnings of their collaborative  work, the music and what little is known of the dance and staging  precedes what we identify as a Cage/Cunningham work. What we are met  with is their youth, full of introspective and conflicting emotions.

This new reading of the original is interested in this notion of the  pre “Cage/Cunningham”, while understanding it exists in the post their  legacy.

For Four Walls is a wanderlust through room, the individual,  and the history we share. The “room” is a mirrored space that allows  for a situation to be seen as having and not having its confining walls.  Defining infinity, passing through it, or as a reflective space – a  somewhere to remember that we belong to these interconnected spaces and  their temporalities. We see it as a non-place, perpetually vulnerable  and in motion. Where distances are relativized and human differences are  always in flux. We see For Four Walls not as a re-enactment of  the lost original, but as a situation that will allow for its own  history and our history with Merce to be reflected in.»

Source: Ballet de Lorraine