CLICK HERE to hear Multiverse – the sounds we made for a happening in 1964 (patience – it’s slow to load)

excerpt from William Pryor’s memoir

The Survival of the Coolest

But the drive and passion saw us beginning to practice what we preached, we were beginning to happen (verb: to put on a happening). Nigel and I had forgotten the worst ravages of being heckled at Roodmoodments. Happenings were what we did: we happened, we evolved, we improvised from scripts, we encouraged our spectators to influence what we did next. More live, indeterminate art than theatre, but a performance where anything could happen. The purpose a purely Dadaistic one: to disrupt and discombobulate, to carry the audience to another discontinuous understanding. Yes, that messianic tendency to change people, to wake them up.

John Cage had done one in 1952 at Black Mountain College, with paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, a ballet by Merce Cunningham, a poem by Charles Olsen and the music of David Tudor in a single space. Allan Kaprow took the idea to new places in New York in 1959 with 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in the Reuben Gallery. And in 1960 Jean-Jacques Lebel, disciple of Antonin Artaud, presented the Enterrement d’une Chose (Burial of a Thing) in Venice.

I don’t know how much of this we knew then – probably most of it, but ill-digested. The idea fitted perfectly with our wish to be revolting in public, to hit the bourgeoisie where it hurt, to undermine the comfortable Cambridge view of art.

William Pryor, Andrew Rawlinson & Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon happening circa 1964

When William Pryor was asked to talk at the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas, a penny dropped: maybe he could bring together his friends from the sixties to somehow or other re-invent one of the happenings they put on back then. Escape Artists embraced and supported the idea. And lo it came to pass! On the evening of Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 it happened all at once.

All at Once: the Happening is art for art’s sake: creativity placed uncompromisingly in its participants’ faces – there can be no audience at a happening, just people who find themselves in a situation, an experience of art. We will go beyond recycling (as befits the times) by breathing an ardently relevant radicalism into the drama, poems, music, improvisations, light shows, writings, wit and exegesis we will be employing to forge a truly situationist situation.

Describing in advance what will happen at a happening is like describing a free jazz improvisation before it emerges spontaneously from its players – we know what instruments will be played and who will be playing, but cannot predict the sound or route of the extemporisation. Just as with free jazz, the happening is unstructured; simultaneity, dissonance, interference, harmony, spontaneity and John Cage’s notions of applying chance to performance will dominate.

The whole will be lit or obscured by a light show from Peter Wynne Willson. Poems will be written on digital screens and deleted before they can be read. DJ hip-hop sound manipulation will loop other poems into yesterday. The audience will be performed until they realise they cannot just stand and watch. Always there will be more happening than can be understood – just like life. Voices singing with electronic trumpet, wandering accordion and church organ. Back-projected screens showing films by Anthony Stern and Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. Occasional lapses into uniform sanity before disruption sets in again. A one-off resurrection.

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Jack Kerouac tells it how it beats from On the Road

For Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and myself (William Pryor) it all started when the bourgeois curtains of Cambridge started twitching in the sixties: bohemianism was afoot. Again. In the war and its aftermath, parents knew where they were with their values and morals, until a new creature, never seen before, the teenager, emerged, blinking and often angry into the grey light. Some gathered in El Patio, the first coffee bar in Cambridge, others in Millers Jazz Club, the Criterion pub and on the Lammas Land by the Old Mill. Searching for some meaning, some light, some groove, something else man.

Some of us, like Fred Frith and Syd, formed rock and roll bands with strange names like Henry Cow and Pink Floyd, others put on happenings and read their own beat poems at events in the Guildhall and elsewhere, others still painted pictures, wrote plays, acted and made films. Some went on to the University, some didn’t; some were kicked out, some weren’t; some have since died, most have survived.

We were a meeting of town and gown, a flowering of radical creativity, a legacy by which the participants continue to be nourished.  Forty years after it all happened, we are gathering to happen, All at Once, improvising on the skeleton of things we did back then in the Cambridge Guildhall, the Union Cellars and the Red Cow.

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The first was a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage. He stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played scratched phonograph records, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced. Allan Kaprow developed the idea in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York with his 18 Happenings in 6 parts. Although tightly scripted and planned, Kaprow’s early happenings maintained an air of unstructured spontaneity. This was because they had none of the usual trappings of theatre – plot, dialogue, character, or professional performers – and no resemblance to the traditional visual arts. His concern, like that of such early Pop artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg and Red Grooms, with whom he originated this all-encompassing form of environmental theatre, was to break down the traditional distinctions between life and the categories of art.

Poet and painter Adrian Henri claimed to have organized the first happenings in England in Liverpool in 1962. Nigel Lesmoir Gordon, Andrew Rawlinson and William Pryor put on their first happening in the cellars of the Cambridge Union Society in 1964. Some have said that Wholly Communion in 1965 was a happening. This was the Albert Hall poetry event at which most of the Roodmoodment Too participants were present, as the audience of 7,000 witnessed and participated in performances by some of the leading avant-garde poets of the day.

a William Burroughs cutup film

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