John Cage: "How to get Started"

How to Get Started is a collaborative experiment that explores improvisation and the origin of ideas. In the piece, three community leaders will take the stage with ten note cards containing present thoughts and concerns. They will shuffle the deck, and speak “off the cuff” on each idea. Each monologue will be recorded in collaboration with a sound engineer and looped back as the next card is addressed, creating, in the end, a complex acoustic layering of ideas.

About HOW TO GET STARTED
John Cage conceived HOW TO GET STARTED almost as an afterthought—a performance substituting for another that had been planned in 1989 for delivery at “Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Mu-sic” presented by Bay Area Radio Drama at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch, in Nicasio, California. In his introduction, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, while exploring the usefulness of improvisation, a subject about which he had long been deeply ambivalent. He proposes a col-laborative framework in which sound engineers capture and subsequently layer his extemporized monologue, which consisted of ten brief commentaries on top-ics then of interest. This amounted to an experiment having to do with thinking in public, before a live audience.

Twenty years after John Cage's first and only performance of HOW TO GET STARTED in Nicasio, the John Cage Trust and Slought Foundation joined forces to create an interactive installation enabling the public to add yet another layer to the mix: your extemporizations on your ten topics of interest, in your voice. Drawing upon Cage’s realization of HOW TO GET STARTED as a script in effect, performers have been invited to participate in its further life, both in public settings and in the more intimate, specially designed recording studio at Slought.