About this Event
Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him.
—Gertrude Stein
A special event, just in time for Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce! . . .
Since 2023, ”Toronto’s enterprising One Little Goat Theatre Company" (The New York Times) has been filming all 17 chapters (30 Hours) of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various cities and locations, screening and releasing each chapter as completed, marking this as the first "audio-video book" of Joyce’s extraordinary novel. They will complete the film project in time for the 90th anniversary of the book’s publication, May 4, 2029.
John Cage loved Finnegans Wake and created multiple works engaging with it, from what became a beloved staple of the Cunningham Dance Company, Roaratorio, to his several “writings through” of Finnegans Wake performance texts, to individual songs.
The invites you to an evening at featuring excerpts from the first five filmed chapters of One Little Goat Theatre’s monumental Finnegans Wake project, presented by Director Adam Seelig and featuring virtuousic peformances by Irish-Canadian actor Richard Harte. Intended to be heard as much as read, Joyce’s 628-page novel is essentially impossible to read, and yet Dublin-born actor Richard Harte has a remarkable knack for it. The evening will also include a performance of a set of John Cage songs related to Finnegans Wake, performed by soprano Jaclyn Hopping, accompanied by John Cage Trust Executive Director Jeffrey Lependorf, who will also join Adam Seelig in conversation.
Finnegans Wake (1939) is that very incomprehensibility that anyone can understand because Joyce’s notoriously gnarly dream-novel is oddly, absurdly, obsessively funny. It is, in short, a comedy, a comedy that, in Joyce’s words, “is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all [they] need do is read it aloud.
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Adam Seelig is a poet, playwright, director, and the founder of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto, through which he has premiered works by Yehuda Amichai, Thomas Bernhard, Claude Gauvreau and others. His books include Every Day in the Morning (slow) (New Star Books, shortlisted for the ReLit Award in Poetry) and a number of plays and plays-with-music, including Talking Masks and Ubu Mayor (Book*hug). His work has been covered by the The New York Times, Globe and Mail, Poetry Magazine, as well as by CBC Radio Canada and other media. He is the recipient of a Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship, as well as a Stanford University Golden Award for his study of Samuel Beckett’s original manuscripts, published in Modern Drama. Born and raised in Vancouver, Seelig has also lived in northern California, New York, England and Israel.
Founded in New York in 2002, and based in Toronto since 2005, One Little Goat Theatre is acclaimed for its highly interpretive, provocative approach to international plays, including the Canadian and World Premieres of dramatic works by Yehuda Amichai, Thomas Bernhard, Jon Fosse, Claude Gauvreau, Luigi Pirandello, and Artistic Director Adam Seelig. One Little Goat's productions have been covered and acclaimed in an array of media including the Globe and Mail, Canadian Theatre Review, New York Review of Books, and The Economist, and have staged works in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York, where the company opened La MaMa's 49th season in 2010—the final season led by the legendary Ellen Stewart.
Soprano Jaclyn Hopping is an avid performer of American song and a cofounder of What’s Left Unsaid, a recital series on forgotten letters, diary entries, and poems. She recently performed as the soprano soloist in Vivaldi’s Gloria with Broad Street Orchestra, and as the soprano soloist in Mendelssohn’s “Psalm 42” with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra. Jaclyn enjoys collaborating with her colleagues in many forms, and was seen as Diana in Bach’s “Hunting Cantata” with the BaBaroque Ensemble, and as the soprano soloist in Schütz’ “Kleine geistliche Konzerte,” part of their annual Kurtág Festival. She made her professional debut with Opera Columbus as Phyllis in Matt Recio’s new opera “The Puppy Episode,” and premiered the leading role of Amelia in “My Wife is a Ghost,” an opera by Bard students led by Missy Mazzoli. She earned degrees in Vocal Performance and German from Oberlin Conservatory, and is a recent graduate of the Vocal Arts Program at Bard Conservatory.
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The John Cage Trust furthers the legacy of late American composer John Cage by gathering together, organizing, preserving, and disseminating his work. The John Cage Trust ensures that Cage’s voice remains vibrant, and toward that provides access to our archives, gives information about his life, guides how his works might best be performed or exhibited, and presents, organizes, and collaborates on programs, performances, exhibitions, and scholarship.
We are guided not so much by what Cage has done but, rather, by what Cage’s legacy is doing now.
John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature. We believe that Cage’s life and work continue to expand how we might experience and think about music, art, poetry, performance, philosophy, and the ways we live our lives.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street, Hudson, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 17.85
