In 1959 the avant garde American composer John Cage won a sizable cash prize when he appeared on an Italian TV quiz show called Double or Nothing. Cage’s chosen category of expertise was not music, but mycology—the study of fungi, a lifelong fascination for Cage.
With his prize money, Cage purchased a piano and shared the rest with his partner, modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham, who bought a Volkswagen bus to transport the members of his fledgling dance company.
This quirky episode in Cage’s life spurred John Heginbotham, founder of the New York-based company Dance Heginbotham and director since 2012 of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble, to create You Look Like A Fun Guy, a site-specific piece that comes to the former golf course in the North End of campus next week.
The score is by violinist Colin Jacobsen, a founding member of the lauded string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and the sound design is by Omar Zubair. Violinist Anne Mills ’26 plays two solos in the production, and alum Mykel Marai Nairne ’17 is a member of Dance Heginbotham.
That Cage, one of the great innovators in American culture, with a reputation for music and sonic soundscapes that were “difficult” for the general public to understand, would appear on an Italian gameshow struck Heginbotham as a “great story. What I took away was the fun and playfulness and generosity that artists can sometimes share.”
The question was how to shape it into dance. Would Heginbotham, a resident artist at the Hop, do a literal realization of the quiz show? Or would he honor Cage’s essence as a composer, as well as transforming his deep study of mushrooms into a broader meditation on nature?
Ultimately, Heginbotham used Cage’s mycophilia as a portal into the mysterious world of mycelia, widespread underground fungal networks that, by sharing nutrients and water, are integral to forest health. The symbiotic, thriving relationship between mycelia and trees parallels the connections between different art forms, Heginbotham says.
Once Heginbotham had arrived at that interpretation, he thought about staging You Look Like a Fun Guy outside. It had its premiere in New York City this summer at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Heginbotham says it was natural to then think about staging it at Dartmouth because “there is so much beauty around.” He also workshopped a short portion of the piece with the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble.
“Performances don’t have to happen in a dark theater. Let’s get people outside and have fun,” says Samantha Lazar, curator of academic programming at the Hop. A central aspect of the performance, she adds, is encouraging people to enjoy “the confluence of art and nature and ecology out in this beautiful place that we live, and to bring all those threads together.”
You Look Like a Fun Guy has been programmed in conjunction with the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, an initiative launched by President Sian Leah Beilock to invest more than $500 million to reduce carbon emissions on campus by 100% by 2050.
The collaborative works to bring climate-related experiences to students, staff, faculty, and the wider community, says Marcus Welker, the assistant director of the Sustainability Office. Part of that teaching and scholarship, he says, “falls to the arts.”
“The arts help us understand our environment. They help us feel, they offer us new perspectives, they bring us together as a community to tackle the critical issues facing us,” says Josh Keniston, senior vice president for capital planning and campus operations and a member of the Climate Collaborative Advisory Council.
Cage’s ethos and persona will hover over the performance but it’s unnecessary to know anything about him or mushrooms to get something out of the piece, Heginbotham says.
“There’s room for everyone to enjoy the piece, and interpret it. It really is about connecting with what’s around us and what’s happening right now. (Cage) philosophically changed what many of us think about what constitutes music or sound. Part of this piece is to have a conversation with John Cage,” Heginbotham says.
The Hop and Sustainability Office have planned an array of mushroom-related engagements surrounding You Look Like a Fun Guy, which will include a free-of-charge HopStop dance workshop for children on Sept. 14; a screening on Sept. 15 of the documentary Fantastic Fungi at Loew Auditorium; and two free-of-charge mushroom walks led by the Sustainability Office through Pine Park on Sept. 17 and 19.
Tickets to You Look Like a Fun Guy from Sept 17 to 19 are available through the Hop.
