9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater, and Engineering, 1966

In 1966, a Bell Laboratories physicist brought a group of avant-garde artists together with 10 open-minded members of the science and technology fields for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of investigatory Happenings which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory and were duly noted by critics Lucy Lippard and Brian O'Doherty. The resulting seminal performances included John Cage's Variations VII, in which 30 photocells were mounted around the performance space, activating a variety of sound sources--including a blender, 20 radio channels and two Geiger counters--as the performers moved around. Other contributors included Lucinda Childs, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. The events were photographed by Peter Moore, whose pictures, many never before been published, are featured here. Also included are Lippard and O'Doherty's original reviews; new scholarship by Clarisse Bardiot, Michelle Kuo and Catherine Morris; and an interview with one of the engineers.