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9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering | 9 Evenings Opening
«9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering», 1966
9 Evenings Opening | Photography | Photograph: Robert L. McElroy
9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering opened on October 13, 1966, at the 69th Regiment Armory, a huge space on Lexington Avenue at 25th Street in New York City. The art community in New York became involved in helping us with 9 Evenings, as fellow artists, dancers, musicians, and performers volunteered their time for setting up and trouble shooting, and then appeared in the performances. A high-powered, but slightly distorted publicity campaign resulted in more than 1500 people each night attended the performances, many of them unprepared for the avant-garde performances they saw. In this photograph the crowd is entering the Armory on opening night. The 9 EVENINGS poster, designed by Rauschenberg, hangs on either side of the entrance, and an Army transport truck sits on the street, displaced from its usual parking place on the Armory floor.


 
 | Flyer (front side) | Flyer (front side) | 9 Evenings Opening | 9 Evenings Opening | Physical Things within the huge Armory hall | Physical Things within the huge Armory hall | Alex Hay and Robert Rauschenberg | Alex Hay and Robert Rauschenberg | Bandoneón ! | Bandoneón ! | Carriage Discreteness | Carriage Discreteness | Kisses Sweeter than Wine | Kisses Sweeter than Wine | Open Score | Open Score | Wired Tennis Racket | Wired Tennis Racket | Solo | Solo | Two Holes of Water - 3 | Two Holes of Water - 3 | Variations VII | Variations VII | Vehicle | Vehicle | Legend of the group photo | Legend of the group photo | Carriage Discreteness | Carriage Discreteness | Grass Field | Grass Field | Kisses Sweeter than Wine | Kisses Sweeter than Wine | Kisses sweeter than Wine | Kisses sweeter than Wine | Open Score | Open Score | Physical Things | Physical Things | Physical Things | Physical Things | Robert Whitman «Two Holes of Water», 1966 | Robert Whitman «Two Holes of Water», 1966 | Robert Whitman »Two Holes of Water - 3« | Robert Whitman »Two Holes of Water - 3« | Solo | Solo | Variations VII | Variations VII | Vehicle | Vehicle | Vehicle | Vehicle

Categories: Theatre

Keywords: Festival | Intermedia

Check as well:

Some More Beginnings


Curator: E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology
 

 9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering

Theater-Festival, Armory Hall, New York: In the 1960s, what would later lead to the founding of the organization Experiments in Art and Technology, was first put into practice on a large scale by ten New York artists as a unique festival for electronic as well as interactive performances and demonstrations. The idea of collaborating with technicians, not only initiated by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver but also organized and largely promoted by them, lead to the performances suggested by the festival title: Nine Evenings with performances by John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman. Billy Klüver was again the driving force. The main technical element of the performances was the electronic modulation system TEEM, composed of portable, electronic units which functioned without cables by remote control. Cage used this system to activate and deactivate loud speakers that consistently reacted to movement by way of photo-cells. For not always being technically and artistically successful, these performances exhausted for the first time the full range of the live-aspect of electronics, taking advantage of its artistic potential in all of its diversity. Seen in that light, the «9 Evenings» rank among the milestones of media art, even though today only a few filmed documents bear witness to the event.