In this first and several subsequent performances, Ono herself sat kneeling on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing, with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her. Members of the audience were invited to approach the stage, one at a time, and cut a bit of her clothes off which they were allowed to keep. The script for Cut Piece appears, along with those for several other works, in a document from the spring of 1966, called Strip Tease Show. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage one at a time to cut a small piece of the performer's clothing to take with them. Performer remains motionless throughout the piece.
Piece ends at the performer's option.
In 1992, artist Lynn Hershman was commissioned to re-document Cut Piece for European television. Her attempts to interview Ono for the project were unsuccessful. If I may call your attention to the monitor at this point, I'll show two brief clips from that tape back to back. One of the most obvious ways in which the video seems to deviate from the original performance score is in it's splicing together of three performances by three different women. Hershman saw Cut Piece in terms of feminism, violence, and risk and recreated it with the idea of video cutting as a type of violence as well.