As part of Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France, “Light of Dawn” (“Lumière de L’aube”), which opened this week at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, musicians and dancers from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse de Lyon (CNSMD) will perform her seminal work, “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ,” on April 6, 2016, playing Charles Gounod’s “Petite symphonie pour instruments à vent” (1885).History of Western music can be divided into BC (Before Cage)and AC (After Cage.) I was a lucky girl to have bumped into himin my roller coaster life. Us downtown artists called him J.C,for Jesus Christ…not to his face, but when we spoke abouthim amongst us. He was a good friend, and I miss him. [Yoko Ono, Fall 2011] “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ” was first performed at “The 83rd Fluxus Concert: Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall,” New York City on September 25, 1965. With La Monte Young conducting, a chamber group of Fluxus musicians played a score. Soon after the prelude, another group of performers, including Yoko Ono, took to the stage and began wrapping medical gauze around each member of the orchestra and their instruments, as well as the conductor. The musicians continued playing in spite of the ever-increasing impossibility, gradually undergoing a process of metamorphosis, with the score distorting and the music reaching inevitable muffling.A spatial transformation evolved across the stage, with the gauze weaving within and between the musicians and their instruments like a spider-web, until full immobilization occurred, resulting in complete silence. The wrappers then led the whole of the cocoon off the stage, leaving the audience questioning what it is like to listen to their internal music and arousing their inner peacefulness. In Ono’s words: “My works are only to induce music of the mind in people.”In the title of the piece, the word “Sky” denotes freedom from social restraints that normally bind us – those of a collective or an orchestra, for instance. The homage to “Jesus Christ” is a reference to John Cage who not only shares the same initials but was also nicknamed after the biblical figure – behind his back – simultaneously adoring and questioning his position as a cult figure. Yoko Ono, a colleague and friend, is here declaring a separation from him and his “religion,” so to speak: “As Nam June Paik had done five years earlier, by cutting off Cage’s necktie before pouring shaving cream onto his face, when he performed “Étude for Piano Forte,” Ono’s work was a public declaration of independence,” Jon Hendricks told Blouin Artinfo.The evolving process of wrapping and silencing the musicians stands for both their connectedness and separation; the collective attempt to produce a harmonious sound in unison struggles against the currents of John Cage’s notion of silence. Like a ritual of mummification, it also stands for healing, preservation and afterlife of one’s past. “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ” represents the changes undertaken during one’s life on earth, permanently overlooked by the sky above. In a recent interview, Yoko Ono said: “[It] is like a process; when you start to wrap it and when they are totally still, is like a sculpture, and then the sculpture starts to move. These incredible changes that go through is life, and the sky is very permanent, not changing, and we change, and that relationship is very interesting. Life is too complex, you know, and I try it to clear it.”Yoko Ono’s “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ” will be performed on April 6, 2016 at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse de Lyon, France. In addition, the CNSMD Improvisation collective, in situ at macLyon, will give two performances on April 28 and 29, in response to the exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Light of Dawn.” The exhibition “Yoko Ono: Light of Dawn” (“Lumière de L’aube”) runs until July 10, 2016 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France.
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