Theater Piece No. 1 by John Cage

Kicking off the Neo-Dada movement and critical to the development of performance art, Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 paved the way for the movement’s collaborative, multimedia and chance-based nature. The piece included several simultaneous, improvized performance elements including a poetry reading, music, dance, photography, film and plastic work (four panels of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings hung from the ceiling). Other than assigning the mediums, Cage “let each individual artist determine the specifics of their role within the performance, emphasizing the function of chance in determining the course of the event.”