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 premiere was held on May 23, 2019 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 first 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 himself, 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 of the piece is based on contrasts: loud and soft, high and low, etc., with a psychological tension that is quite unusual for Cage. Upon listening to his own score again, he found it rather interesting—a real gem that he was the first to be surprised to learn he had composed. 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. It is a youthful play, full of conflicting and very intimate 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.”

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley

Source: Ballet de Lorraine