November 20, 2011 at 5pm
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco
multiauthored performance of THE GRAND PIANO
preceded by group discussion on collective art practice
A scripted, multivocal performance based on excerpts from the ten-volume THE GRAND PIANO will be delivered by eight of the project’s authors: Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten. The performance will be preceded by a 45-minute group discussion including the audience, moderated by David Buuck, on the values of collective art practice from the 70s to the present.
THE GRAND PIANO is an experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco—Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. THE GRAND PIANO takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco where a weekly reading and performance series took place beginning in 1976. The ten-volume project was completed in 2010. It not only addresses literature and the arts in the 1970s, when the authors first met and collaborated, but also aesthetic and political issues in the time in which it was written.THE GRAND PIANO is an experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco—Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. The eleventh pianist, Alan Bernheimer, takes the lead in organizing documentation for the books. THE GRAND PIANO takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco where from 1976 to 1979 several of writers programmed and coordinated—and all of them participated in a weekly reading and performance series. The project focuses on the 1970s when they first met and collaborated. Yet the volumes engage issues beyond that time, and the project adheres to no prescribed set of themes.
