PROJECTS
Mushrooms EAT variationes
the world is your oyster mushroom
Bret Easterling | Julia Eichten | Emi Ferguson
create a new work spored from John Cage's Mushrooms et variationes
Mushrooms EAT variationes is a new interdisciplinary work by EICHTERLING and Exquisite Corpse, led by Bret Easterling, Julia Eichten, and Emi Ferguson. The project begins with the spores of John Cage – composer, poet, and devoted mycologist – whose belief that “much can be learned by devoting oneself to the mushroom” guides both the spirit and structure of the work.
Cage’s spoken-word piece Mushrooms et variationes (1974) offers a 360-degree portrait of a life shaped by sound, silence, and fungi. In dialogue with this legacy, Mushrooms EAT variationes mirrors the mushroom itself: a model of multiplicity, transformation, and underground connectivity.
The work honors past artistic lineages – decaying matter – while cultivating new growth toward an expanded, playful future. Like a fungal network, the piece is adaptive and porous, an evolving ecosystem of performance that invites curiosity, collaboration, and whimsical freedom as it forages across disciplines, growing from discarded materials, sporing off ideas that move between sound, gesture, theater, and visual form.
Mushrooms EAT variationes investigates mushrooms and the act of sporing as both subject matter and organizing principle, foregrounding them as agents of transformation, collaboration, decay, and renewal. Inspired by John Cage’s lifelong devotion to fungi, the project explores how non-hierarchical systems, chance operations, and deep listening can generate new artistic forms and modes of connectivity.
Mushrooms embody multiplicity and interdependence, a metaphor we love for interdisciplinary creation and collective authorship, and one ever present in John Cage’s work.
Cage once remarked, “I compose music, but mostly I’m a mushroom identifier,” summing up how deeply fungi shaped his life. While Cage’s musical innovations are widely studied, his performance texts, particularly Mushrooms et variationes, remain largely unexplored. Cage was the only person to ever perform this 75-minute spoken work and we are really honored to have the blessing of the John Cage Trust to use the piece as the foundation for a new theatrical work.
Built from mesostics formed around the Latin names of mushrooms, the text uses scientific taxonomy as connective tissue. These mushroom names become the visual and literary anchors through which Cage folds in elements of everyday life: people he loved, places he visited, memories, tastes, and observations.
At the same time, contemporary research continues to reveal the extraordinary capacities of fungal networks…their communication, cooperation, resilience, and decentralized intelligence.
We are so excited by how these scientific insights might be applied to artistic collaboration and creation.
Collaborators
Bret Easterling // Artist
BRET EASTERLING is a multidisciplinary artist, director, and educator creating performance, film, and community-based projects that use movement as a tool for connection, inquiry, and collective experience. He received his BFA and the Hector Zaraspe Prize for Choreography from The Juilliard School, and became a formative member of Gallim Dance and a prominent performer and creative contributor with Ohad Naharin’s internationally renowned Batsheva Dance Company.
Easterling has created and presented work across live performance, film, and interdisciplinary platforms at institutions including Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, REDCAT, 92NY, Opera Philadelphia, LA Dance Project, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Whim W’Him, Backhausdance, b12, Dance on Camera Festival, and Hauser & Wirth. His collaborative practice includes projects with Anthony Roth Costanzo, Kesha, Ai Bendr, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and Jurassic Spine. He also maintains an artistic partnership with Julia Eichten as EICHTERLING, spanning choreography, curation, film, and fashion.
As Founder and Artistic Director of the LGBTQ+ nonprofit BEMOVING, Easterling builds infrastructure supporting the creation, presentation, and sustainability of dance. He is on faculty at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, co-director of Ghost Light Residency, co-founder of PAY DANCERS, and an Ilan Lev Method practitioner, grounding his work in care for artists.
Julia Eichten // Artist
JULIA EICHTEN works between Opera, Theater and Dance as a Director, Choreographer, Educator and Performer. They received their BFA and the Hector Zaraspe Prize for Choreography from The Juilliard School, were a founding member of L.A. Dance Project and are a current member of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company.) Their work has been shown at the Joyce Theater, Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC), L.A. Dance Project, The Gardens of Versailles and LUMA in Arles, FR. Last year, Eichten performed in Joan Jonas’ iconic Mirror Piece I & II at The Getty Museum, which inspired hat company, PAY DANCERS. Most Recently, Eichten had their Lincoln Center premiere, with a duet by EICHTERLING (Bret Easterling + Eichten) Dance in the Park. Rome is Falling, a new opera composed by Doug Balliet with Direction by Eichten also premiered at RUN AMOC* Festival as a part of Summer in the City at Lincoln Center.
Emi Ferguson // Artist
Eichterling // Co-Producer
EICHTERLING is the decades-long creative partnership of Julia Eichten and Bret Easterling. Rooted in movement as a site of joy, connection, and collective experience, their collaborative practice spans choreography, direction, performance, curation, film, and fashion, often blurring institutional, social, and aesthetic boundaries.
Exquisite Corpse // Co-Producer
The John Cage Trust furthers the legacy of late American composer John Cage by gathering together, organizing, preserving, and disseminating his work. The John Cage Trust ensures that Cage’s voice remains vibrant, and toward that provides access to our archives, gives information about his life and guides how his works might best be performed or exhibited, and presents, organizes, and collaborates on programs, performances, exhibitions, and scholarship.
John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature. We believe that Cage’s life and work continue to expand how we might experience and think about music, art, poetry, performance, philosophy, and the ways we live our lives.
Guided not so much by what Cage has done but, rather, by what Cage’s legacy is doing now.
Baryshnikov Arts, founded in 2005 by Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov and celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is rooted in the belief that artists hold irreplaceable roles in our world by shaping perspectives, offering new approaches, and initiating crucial conversations in complex social, political, and cultural environments. Our mission supports artistic freedom, providing multidisciplinary artists with opportunities for creative exploration and unique artistic expression, and allowing audiences to view the world in new ways. We offer performance and commissioning opportunities, artist residencies, rentals, and more.
Fun stuff
EICHTERLING presents TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END
EICHTERLING presents DANCE IN THE PARK
Emi Ferguson presents AQUALUNG
ATELIER ÉDITIONS
John Cage: A Mycological Foray
the most beautiful printing of John Cage's Mushrooms et variationes as well as his stories on mushrooms and a re-production of Cage's Mushroom Book
ATELIER ÉDITIONS
Every Mushroom is a Good Mushroom
postcards of mushrooms loved by John Cage
BURNING BOOKS
The original printing of Mushrooms et variationes, as part of the collection of work by John Cage, Robert Ashley, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Charles Amirkhanian, Michael Peppe, Kenneth Atchley after their work sharing dinner party where Mushrooms et variationes was first publicly shared
BEMOVING
must have limited edition merch sporting an important message - PAY DANCERS!
Bard College Montgomery Place Campus Collection
Mushroom Drawings of Violetta White Delafield
all of the mushroom drawings on this site are the work of Violetta White Delafield, painted near the campus of Bard College which houses the John Cage Trust
John Cage's Best Quotes About Mushrooms
"every mushroom is a good mushroom"
“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,” from “Music Lovers’ Field Companion” (1954)
“Often I go into the woods thinking, after all these years, I ought finally to be bored with fungi, but coming upon just any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again.”
"Ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking. Instead of having them come at you clearly, they come to you as things hidden, like an Easter egg.”
‘Dear John look out: yet another poisonous mushroom.’ - Marcel Duchamp
I discovered, while simply walking in the forests lool<ing for mushrooms, that it's easy to see a structure in certain species of mushrooms. A particular structure - or a particular art! And from there you go on to value structure and organization as very important. But if you observe everything, all day long, all the experiences you have, you can't talk about organization any more! So art or structure get blurred ...
After twenty years of pieking mushrooms, I tell myself that I'll probably get bored looking for others. But each year, when I go back into the woods in the Spring or in the Summer, I find new ones. It's as exciting as the first time! Well, it's the same thing with Satie. ln fact, there isn't anything that Satie could have written, or that he could have said, that wouldn't make me absolutely enthusiastic. Even today, I never come to the end of Satie. Just like the mushrooms.
from - For The Birds