Spanish Card Piece

2 June 2006

Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center, Los Angeles

The LA Art Girls perform Spanish Card Piece for Objects, (1963) This piece from George Brecht's Water Yam. Fluxus C from the Jean Brown Papers in the collections of the Getty Research Institute uses Spanish cards and stopwatches to create a symphony of noise.

Other Performances that evening included Martin Kersels "Hack", Sally Silvers Little Lieutenant and Along the Skidmark of Recorded History, The John Jasperse Dance Company Scavenger (work-in-progress) and Duet from "Madison as I imagine it", and Yvonne Rainer AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M.

Spanish Card Piece Score by George Brecht

From one to twenty-four performers are arranged within view of each other. Each has before him a stopwatch and a set of objects of four types, corresponding to the four suits of Spanish cards: swords, clubs, cups, and coins / One performer, as dealer, shuffles a deck of Spanish cards (which are numbered 1-12 in each suit), and deals them in pairs to all performers, each performer arranging his pairs, face up, in front of him / At a sign from the dealer, each performer starts his stopwatch, and, interpreting the rank of the first card in each pair as the number of sounds to be made, and the rank of the second card in each pair as the number of consecutive five-second intervals within which that number of sounds is to be freely arranged, acts with an object corresponding to the suit of the first card in each pair upon an object corresponding to the suit of the second card in that pair / When every performer has used all his pairs of cards, the piece ends.