COMING UP!

Cage / Joyce: Finnegans Wake

Thursday, June 11, 7pm

In person at Time & Space Limited, Hudson, NY

Tickets: $15 general admission / $12.50 TSL members / $8 students

Join us for an evening featuring film excerpts of One Little Goat Theatre's FINNEGANS WAKE project, plus a performance of Joyce songs by John Cage.

Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.

—Gertrude Stein

This special event comes just in time for Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce! . . .

Since 2023, ”Toronto’s enterprising One Little Goat Theatre Company" (The New York Times) has been filming all 17 chapters (30 Hours) of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various cities and locations, screening and releasing each chapter as completed, marking this as the first "audio-video book" of Joyce’s extraordinary novel. They will complete the film project in time for the 90th anniversary of the book’s publication, May 4, 2029.

John Cage loved Finnegans Wake and created multiple works engaging with it, from what became a beloved staple of the Cunningham Dance Company, Roaratorio, to his several “writings through” of Finnegans Wake performance texts, to individual songs.

The John Cage Trustinvites you to an evening at Time & Space Limitedfeaturing excerpts from the first five filmed chapters of One Little Goat Theatre’s monumental Finnegans Wake project, presented by Director Adam Seelig and featuring virtuousic peformances by Irish-Canadian actor Richard Harte. Intended to be heard as much as read, Joyce’s 628-page novel is essentially impossible to read, and yet Dublin-born actor Richard Harte has a remarkable knack for it. The evening will also include a performance of a set of John Cage songs related to Finnegans Wake, performed by soprano Jaclyn Hopping,accompanied by John Cage Trust Executive Director Jeffrey Lependorf, who will also join Adam Seelig in conversation.

Finnegans Wake (1939) is that very incomprehensibility that anyone can understand because Joyce’s notoriously gnarly dream-novel is oddly, absurdly, obsessively funny. It is, in short, a comedy, a comedy that, in Joyce’s words, “is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all [they] need do is read it aloud.

Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition

June 27–July 31

Stevenson Library, Bard College (1 Library Road, Annandale on Hudson, NY)

Opening Event on June 27: a free, immersive performance of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” along with “Extended Lullaby”—1pm