Cage, Zen & Chance
ReVIEWING Black Mountain College International Conference
Co-hosted by BMCM+AC and UNC Asheville at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center, North Carolina
Following the structure of a reading group and imagining shared thinking as an artistic form, this performance’s focus was to speculate with the act of reading aloud "The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, On the Transmission of the Mind" and other texts in which Cage references Huang Po's test. Huang Po was a Zen master in the ninth century who taught in allegories delivered as sermons, tales, and dialogues portrayed in this book, like most Eastern spiritual teachers. Cage read Huang Po’s teachings as a late-night performance at Black Mountain in the summer of 1952.
Participants sat in the round and rolled the dice to determine what part of the text to read kept on a stack of envelopes numbered 1 to 64. They were invited to express their opinions through group discussion and improvisation through an informal conversation and spontaneous reactions. This performance strived to offer a platform that facilitated a space of mutual respect and reciprocal learning as an experiment in collective thinking and reading.