9 Evenings: The Tennis Match That Turned Out the Lights

From October 13 to 23, 1966, the 69th Regiment Armory in New York hosted 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. It was conceived by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and first planned for a festival of art and technology in Stockholm. When that program fell through, Klüver moved it to the Armory. 10 artists, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman, were paired with some 30 engineers from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and spent 10 months building the systems their performances needed.

The list of firsts reads like a preview of media art. Closed-circuit television and television projection were used on stage for the first time. A fiber optics camera picked up objects in a performer's pocket, an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness, a Doppler sonar device turned movement into sound, and portable wireless FM transmitters carried speech and body sounds to the Armory's loudspeakers. Cage's Variations VII drew on chance to select its materials and used no recorded tracks, and Tudor's Bandoneon! put a traditional instrument on a circuit with an array of new components.

The best known piece began as a game of tennis. In Rauschenberg's Open Score, Mimi Kanarek and the painter Frank Stella played with racquets fitted with contact microphones and a tiny FM transmitter in the handle, designed by Bill Kaminski at Bell Labs. Every hit rang through the hall as a loud "BONG" and switched off a light over the court, until the Armory was dark. Then a crowd of 300 to 500 people walked in, seen by the audience only through infrared cameras projected on large screens. "The conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action," Rauschenberg wrote. "A screen of light and a screen of darkness."

9 Evenings became the first in a series of projects known as E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology, and set a model for artists and engineers working side by side that runs straight to code art today. Klüver and Julie Martin kept most of the material until it went to the Getty Research Institute in 1994 and the Daniel Langlois Foundation in 2001, whose fonds holds 24 film reels, 71 videocassettes and props from the 10 performances, including footage shot by Alfons Schilling.

Sources

• 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering fonds, Daniel Langlois Foundation
• The 10 performances (October 13 to 23, 1966), Daniel Langlois Foundation
• Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score, Clarisse Bardiot, Daniel Langlois Foundation
• Robert Rauschenberg: Open Score, Experiments in Art and Technology
• Factual footage and sound recordings, Daniel Langlois Foundation
• 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, Wikipedia
• Thumbnail: Open Score, 1966, Experiments in Art and Technology