Surrealist Games and Prepared Piano w/ Roger Clark Miller

Roger Clark Miller (Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra, Anvil Orchestra) hosts an evening of Exquisite Corpse games in our intimate community space. Participants will play riotous mind-bending games that were developed by Andre Breton and his co-conspirators during in the 1920's and '30's, the peak of surrealism. Thematic refreshments will be provided and Surrealistic attire is encouraged!

The consummate master of ceremonies, Miller will explain and lead the games and open the evening with an atmospheric live performance for prepared-piano on our baby grand. 

About the games... "The Exquisite Corpse Shall Drink the New Wine." 

Featured games will include the basic Exquisite Corpse word game, the basic Exquisite Corpse drawing game (advanced drawing skills are not required), the Dream Game, and other varieties of surrealist word games. Says Miller “The wonder of these games is the unexpected juxtapositions that occur, creating amazingly synchronistic sequences and unexpected meanings and connections.”

The games require 3-6 people, there will be a number of tables with different interactions going on simultaneously. After

explaining how the games work, Miller will stroll the tables, making sure the simple but sometimes oddly confusing rules are followed. Says Miller, "A great virtue of these games is that they are not at all competitive. It's all about the collective work."

About the Musical Performance...

The Prepared Piano was invented by John Cage in the mid-1940’s.  He was the first to place objects on and between the piano strings in a controlled fashion to create a unique instrument, liberating music from the confines of just intonation and known scales. His efforts at bypassing the confines of Western music have resulted in new ways of thinking about music. Drawn to these new directions, Roger Clark Miller has been utilizing prepared piano techniques since the early 1980’s. His first recorded use of prepared piano is in the Mission of Burma song TREM II (1982). Miller said, “The idea of modifying the piano to obliterate regular pitches has a charmingly perverse appeal for me. But just as much, it is that the preparations transform the known into an otherworldly instrument, sounding at times like the imagined harmonics of stars or a percussion orchestra of machines.”