By Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing ★★★★
Robert Wilson, Arts Centre Melbourne, August 24
Robert Wilson sits at a desk – impassive, in whiteface – while the audience files in for John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. He may consciously invoke the ghost of Brechtian theatre, but right from the start Wilson brings an implacable thereness to the art of getting nowhere.
Cage's words are there, too. Crumpled balls of discarded print carpet the stage floor; the entire scene is framed by imposing banners majusculed with textual fragments, creating a transient monument that might itself be a propaganda of nothing, or at least a salvo against any impulse to merely intellectualise what follows.
Robert Wilson brings an implacable sense of "thereness" to his delivery of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing.Credit: Lucie Jansch.
Music, then. Or sound. Long waves of electronic noise scour the shores of the mind. From on high, a tuxedoed man holds a monocle (or is it a camera lens?), sweeping his gaze through the audience, inspecting it meticulously as his face assumes inscrutable, half-buried expressions.
The soundscape becomes progressively more intense and hostile; irradiating your mental equipment, as if sterilising it for some sort of procedure. Wilson prepares to speak with an almost geological slowness.
And suddenly, the prologue is over. Wilson begins to perform the composed lecture, observing every poised pause and cadence of it, in a light Texan lilt that can leap from casual drone into highly coloured and modulated resonance.
He draws out how playful Cage can be. One sequence, which involves a musing repetition on irritation and pleasure – on how one must surrender to tedium to acquire a taste, to stop wishing you were somewhere else in order to be truly present – is relaxing and maddening and rather droll.
First, Wilson avails himself of Cage’s invitation to go to sleep. A recording of the composer giving the lecture then plays, accompanied by a mischievous animation of him smoking a cigarette. When Wilson wakes and recapitulates the text, he runs the gamut of reactions the audience might feel at Cage's repetitiveness, from sedulous concentration to a comic frenzy of annoyance.
It's a piece that will delight music nerds – Cage’s philosophy contains provocative reflections on structure, form, content and method, as well as jokes about Bach and Brahms – though it should inspire any artist in any medium to reflect on their own process.
Wilson also makes Lecture on Nothing fun. Indeed, the audience seemed so entertained by his performance they didn't take up his offer to have "a discussion" afterwards.