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On the periphery of the dimly lit stage of Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre, four musicians are setting up musical instruments, laptops, and various musical gadgets in preparation for the evening’s all-night performance. Audio cables snake across the stage to converge in the centre, where a technician is plugging them into the most unlikely of mixing units, a chessboard. To everyone on stage, none of this is a surprise, and for two in particular, the setup feels very familiar. Gordon Mumma and David Behrman were on the same stage forty-two years earlier during the original performance of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp’s Reunion. Finding themselves on the verge of restaging the event, they smile at each other and say how pleased they are to be back.
Mumma and Behrman are direct links to the original Reunion performance, held in Toronto in 1968. They, and the now deceased David Tudor, provided the musical feed to a chess match between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp at the original event. The chessboard, created by University of Toronto graduate student Lowell Cross, was designed as a mixing board, which put out to the audience up to sixteen channels of sound, depending on the configuration of chess pieces on the board.
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Image by: Eldon Garnet
Chris Kennedy is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based out of Toronto. He has programmed for the Images Festival, the Pleasure Dome screening collective, the Free Screen at TIFF Bell Lightbox and he co-founded the Early Monthly Segments film salon. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. More information on his work is available at www.theworldviewed.com