Graphis

Extract

The Graphis series is the result of a feeling that conventional theatre notation in which one action follows another leaves untried an enormous variety of techniques that could enrich our experience. This feeling was of course one of the causes of my “millieu play” form of which The Tart is an example. With the Graphises I was trying to set up a form that was unsemantic, even choreographic, in conception if not in execution.

Experimental music has frequently used extraordinary notations. Stockhausen, Graettinger, and Cage have found notations which expand musical vocabularies. So I started out with drawn notations such as, “The higher up on this page this line goes, reading from left to right, the louder you speak. Where there are two lines to be read vertically you choose.” What I did not specify was what was to be said. I thought people would quote the newspapers.