Silent Prayer (after John Cage), 2007 Bregenz

One of the main issues informing the 2007 re-staging was the conflicting possibility of being able & attempting to perform what was a notoriously chaotic & spontaneous anti-performance via the necessarily choreographed conventions that constitutes a re-enactment. The anti-performance of the original & its inevitable premature curtailment by the very establishment that had commissioned it played a key part in the dynamics of its successor as the legitimising limits of the ICA as commissioning body were once again tested through a performance that was referring to and ultimately about the possibility of the destruction of the "institutional stage" - literally & metaphorically.
However the institution possibly had a helping-hand and the performance, an obstacle in the guise of another societal convention & restraint that did not feature in 1984, that of the omnipresent Health & Safety.
Similar paradoxes and contradictions could also be seen to be at play in the performance of Silent Prayer at Magazin 4 which was about working & collaborating with a local heavy-metal band in an attempt to enact silence whilst having the absolute (technological) potential for noise. As much equipment was used live & wired-up as to be appropriate for a full outdoors concert on that scale, however the conceptual constraints & framework being a 3-part performance of indeterminate duration with no deliberate playing only incidental noises/sounds allowed.
The silence of course being a direct reference to Cage's 4'33" but also being, on another level - a practical solution to an outdoor performance for which the noise-level restrictions were strongly implemented by the local mayor in his overseeing of the activities of the Magazin 4 as a local cultural institution.