I wish I had been there 50 years ago when Robert Rauschenberg’s teenage son was a ball boy in a very strange game of tennis.
Every time a racket struck a ball, it sent two signals, one triggering a gonging sound and the other turning off an overhead light. When total darkness arrived, the players stopped. A crowd took their place and began shuffling around. It was still dark. The shufflers appeared only as ghosts in a red sea on an infrared closed-circuit television monitor above the audience.
“You could hear and you could sense their presence,” the former ball boy, Christopher Rauschenberg, told me in a phone conversation recently. “That was very powerful somehow. It was also this notion of rearranging the hierarchy of your senses.”
This was art, not tennis. It was one of the performances in a nine-evening series aptly titled Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, created by 10 artists and 30 engineers from Bell Labs. It drew 11,000 people to the 69th Regiment Armory building—where the 1913 Armory Show had introduced Americans to modern art—as well as, seemingly, just about as many reviewers. Critics had a field day hating it.
But this year, Nine Evenings tributes are happening in multiple cities. Seattle has one of the biggest. It’s called 9e2.
