Some Empty Words With John Cage and Merce Cunningham in London by John Roberts

In 1980, John Cage and Merce Cunningham came to London for various performances and to work on a series of interdisciplinary workshops at Goldsmiths College. In Issue 7 of Performance Magazine, John Roberts and Silvy Panet-Raymond talked to Cage and Cunningham about numerous subjects, including Ronald Reagan, what New Wave music is, 1950s happenings and their famed collaborations.

This article has been reproduced as part of Performance Magazine Online.

About the project

Rob La Frenais (founding editor of Performance Magazine, 1979–1987) has collaborated with the Live Art Development Agency to develop the Performance Magazine Online project. All sixty-six issues of Performance Magazine have been digitised and are accessible to freely search, browse and read. A new film by Hugo Glendinning and Alex Eisenberg maps the magazine’s history and legacy. Commissioned features (released May – July 2017) by Anne Bean, Hester Reeve, Lynn MacRitchie, Claire MacDonald and Nahum Mantra respond to the archive and the period when the magazine was published.

Performance Magazine Online is supported using public funding by Arts Council England