ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the two main artistic methods that came out of John Cage’s radicalisation of the musical score: the event-score and task-dance. The early 20th century American pragmatist, philosopher and public intellectual John Dewey and his work around experience and art have had a central role in art, dance and performance theoretical approaches to event-score and task-dance practices. In Dewey’s work, the category of experience has the function to unify and reconcile Cartesian dualistic oppositions between that of subject/object, culture/nature, art/life, science/philosophy and body/mind. In Experience and Nature, the method used is referred to as “denotative”, and Dewey describes it as being both the method and the object of investigation: the metaphysics of experience. Dewey drafted a miniature model of the process of interaction between organism and environment already in 1896 in the article “The Reflect Arc Concept in Psychology”, which outlines the basic premises of interaction at the level of human behaviour.
