The elements of chance and improvisation mean that no two performances of Indeterminacy will ever be the same – each time we are witnessing something perfectly unique and strange. Featuring a variety of unusual instruments, and a highly unorthodox use of children’s toys, Alan Tomlinson, Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford experiment with the elements of chance in performance, and they blur the lines between contemporary concert and art – as well as between absurdity and high seriousness.

Contemporary pianists Chen and Beresford opened the evening with dual piano improvisations, laying the groundwork for John Cage with their freeform, playful experiments. Chen plucked at the strings of the open piano; Beresford knocked on silenced keys and clicked the music stand; at times tentatively leaving each other space, and at others more aggressively assaulting the audience with tumultuous amelodic storms.

Next, Alan Tomlinson introduced his interpretation of Cage’s Solo for Sliding Trombone with a brief explanation of some of the score’s playful-yet-inevitably-frustrating difficulties. Cage’s instructions are vague enough to allow the piece to be mostly improvised – the score is provided in “small, medium and large” notes, the dynamics and durations of which are left up to the performer. The piece consists of a range of short, mostly one-note bursts of sound – Tomlinson described this as “a series of small events” – none of which are of the same quality.
What Tomlinson clearly relishes in this piece is the chance to seriously explore the range of the trombone’s sound, and indeed he does just about everything you can imagine with a plastic cup and two or three mutes.
He picks up a tin-foil pie pan; he teases us a bit by reaching for a plastic cup – but no, he replaces it once again; he leaves achingly long pauses between notes; he spins in a circle; and finishes the whole thing by gurgling into his instrument before defiantly releasing the spit valve on the floor. It’s cheeky, it’s avant-garde, and it sounds like a seriously odd jumble of noise-events, but Tomlinson’s skill and confidence in presenting such a difficult piece to us shone through.

John Cage’s Indeterminacy – the evening’s main event – plays with similar themes of chance and improvisation. The piece was originally comprised of 90 cards on which 90 short stories or anecdotes were written. In this performance, comedian Stewart Lee (giving a rather sober, straight-faced reading) has shuffled through the deck and selected 40 of these cards. The stories he tells – another “series of small events” – range from trivial accounts of Cage’s acquaintances to very funny memories of mushroom exhibitions and strange parables about monks. Some are more serious – discussing freedom, modern music, the meaning of life – but by contrast anecdotes on the homely pigeon and grandmothers are all the more funny and absurd.
These stories are also of wildly varying length – and Lee deftly manages to adjust his reading speed (with hilarious results) to fit each card into the space of one minute, while maintaining a discomforting monotone voice devoid of dynamic variation or expression. The whole performance is totally absurd and disorienting – and the seriousness with which Lee reads, with which Chen and Beresford carefully pick up a child’s noisemaker, comes across as extremely comical on more than one occasion.

Sound and text are in tension throughout – Chen and Beresford perform improvisations on a truly unusual range of instruments and non-instruments, occasionally completely overpowering Lee’s reading. We are told that these sounds are meant to bear no relation to the meaning of the text – which partially explains the incredibly incongruous set of soundmakers, including toy pianos, flashing guns, rubber balls in a barrel, graters, and a music box playing the Pink Panther theme – yet Cage’s text does give us little knowing winks of meaning now and then, commenting on sound drowning out speech, on the nature of understanding, and recalling moments of incongruity in which he played two different pieces at once, by accident, with his friend David Tudor.

So – what was Indeterminacy after all? Was it a piece of theatre, or was it just a very avant-garde concert? Was it a rare window on the inner lives of artists engaged in a strange, private ritual of creativity? And, most importantly, can you ever really take such avant-garde performance seriously? Cage, and the evening’s performers, give us no determinate answers – but they poke at us, playfully, with strange new sounds that left me with the undefined buzz of experiment.