9.1 Dramatic Representations

Rampike, Volume 9/#1, 1997 Index Peter Jaeger p. 2 Editorial p. 3 Betty Radin p. 3 Marie-Claire Blais p. 4 Nicole Brossard p. 9 Pete Spence p. 13 Ron Baird & Lynda Baird p. 14 Julia Hoerner p. 22 David Fennario p. 24 Gary Barwin p. 28 Dick Higgins p. 30 Karen Mac Cormack p. 31 Jane Rohrschneider p. 31 Natalee Caple p. 32 Frank Davey p. 33 Victor Coleman p. 34 Stuart Ross p. 37 Russell Harrison p. 38 Laurie Kruk p. 39 Sheila Murphy p. 40 Robert Priest p. 42 Gordon Michael Allen p. 43 Henry Ferris p. 44 Stephen Cain p. 45 Pete Spence p. 46 Alexandra Leggat p. 47 Stephen Cain p. 48 Kathleen Yearwood p. 49 Pete Spence p. 51 David Groulx p. 52 Rolland Nadjiwon p. 53 Armand Garnet-Ruffo p. 58 Judy MacDonald p. 62 Steven Whittaker p. 63 John Barlow p. 66 Eckhard Gerdes p. 67 Mark Kerwin p. 68 Jill Battson p. 69 Karl Jirgens p. 70 Mini-Reviews p. 80 1 Editorial The next issue of Rampike (Volume 9, # 2), will investigate encounters with environments and anti-environments. Submissions dealing with interactions with a range of various environments are invited. Emphasis will be given to works that address environments-as-media (including social, natural, mechanical, liquid, gaseous, mineral, conceptual, tactile, acoustic, olfactory, visual, and so on. These also include the printed page, electronic circuitry, the human body and the mind, both consciousness and unconsciousness, as well as anti-environments such as vacuums, etc). The issue will question how inter actions with different environments-as-media, serve to develop or generate modes of creative expression. Deadline: November 1st, 1997. We welcome writing as well as documentations of visual and performative arts. Works are welcome in either French or English. Please see our submission guidelines in the masthead. The following issue of Rampike (Volume 10, #1), will explore electronic and anti-electronic venues. Works are invited that explore the earliest to the most contemporary forms of electric and electronic cultures (static electricity, morse code, radio, television, computer culture, electronic music, electronically assisted visual art, performance, hypertext, star-wars, bio-electrics, cyber-space, McLuhan, etc). We also welcome works that adopt a counter-electronic posture (including pre-electronic conditions, cider-space rather than cyber-space, telepathy rather than telegraph, fire rather than light-bulb, abacus rather than computer, and/or the position of the luddite). Emphasis will be given to works that investigate how creative expression has reacted to, or has been affected by the advent of electronics. We welcome writing as well as documentations of visual and performative arts. Deadline: February 1st, 1998. Works are welcome in either French or English. Please see our submission guidelines in the masthead. With this issue of Rampike (Volume 9/#1), we participate in the drama of the human condition. Human inter-relationships have been depicted for centuries using a variety of genres and here we offer a humble few including theatre, fiction, poetry, performance art, sculpture, and graphic art. Such expressions can be aloof or engaging, detached or inter-active. A spectrum of possibilities rises up to meet both artist and audience. And, it is the expression itself which serves as the medium between creator and receiver, between conception and reception, bridging the gap, or wmetimes, offering only a thread, a thin trace of a distant, nearly forgotten thought. In this issue, we feature artists and writers from around the world who have chosen the arena of human inter action as the subject for a drama sometimes meant for a broad audience and the main stage, and other times reserved for an audience of one; for your mind only. Sliding from action to thought, the theatrical and other modes herein, stage a range of approaches, from the openly social, to the purely formal, from the provocative to the evocative. In so many places around the world, the social fabric is unravelling revealing the warp and woof, loosening the threads. Gather up your vestments. If life is but a stage, and we, but actors, then by taking a step, or turning the page, you engage in the action of this human drama. We are our own fictions encountering our own depictions. If this is the medium, then you are both message and messenger. The curtains rise, you are an actor on stage about to move, the end of a long thread rests in your hand... Text/Images from: A Geomantic Cartography of London Ontario by Peter Jaeger (London, Canada) Text/image: (Untitled) by Betty Radin (London, England) 2 3 (These voices, resembling a choir, convey a religious seriousness -- rather like Gregorian chant. It may include women's or children's voices, but it should be very EXILE austere.) SHE: What courage it must take to love God when you are forbidden to! If I were A Play by Marie-Claire Blais them, I would not even feel like praying. HE: When you walk across the bridge at dawn, are you quite sure it isn't to get nearer to that little church buried in the snow, so you can listen to the voices? Translated by Nigel Spencer SHE: I don't know. I go walking on the bridge out of boredom. rm at a loss in this city. Who do you suppose they are, these people who still want to pray? HE: Perhaps they feel they are in danger -- men and women who have lost everything. CHARACTERS SHE: But why do they insist on expressing their faith when there is no god to listen to them? Isn't it strange to think that in this world secret battles are still being fought for SHE a right we thought everyone had a birth, the right to think, to believe, to hope ... even HE in a vengeful and cruel god who allows humans to crush one another? HE: They sing and pray with simplicity. They don't torment themselves needlessly ORLIEF with the concerns that we have. They have chosen a god in their own image. SHE: What wasted hopes! It tears me apart to hear their lamentations up to an absent Voices of a man and woman, hushed. The tone of this dialogue is at times rather god or, if he even exists, a ruthless dictator of a god, just like the people who rule neutral and detached or distant; it is intercut with silences, hesitations and over them. It hurts me because I am, first an foremost, and egotist Yes, that is right, whisperings. and you had better believe it! After all, in real life it is this little, ignoble fault that saves us. And I still have the will to save all that I am and all that I was yesterday. SHE: You have to tell me how long ... how much longer we have to live in this This must be how it starts, this disease of oppression. First, one does rrot really feel country? Fifteen years is such a long time to be away from our people... so far away anything, all sealed up in a beautiful house in a lovely city: a gorgeous place ... where and among strangers, fifteen! (Then, as if her husband had slammed his spoon on the only strangers visit. One eats, drinks all one could possibly want, lacking nothing. It is table to impose silence, or perhaps share a secret code:) Alright, I know ... I'll try to almost possible to be fooled into feeling at home, into continuing one's fashionable, put up with them, just as you have, but you have got to understand I have not got the phoney life, into believing ... No, now listen. Don't try to muzzle me. This disease of same patience or selflessness. And above all, I certainly do not want to die here. You oppression suddenly starts to spread, and the oppressor, who before seemed only to know. You know perfectly well, a simple slip of the tongue, a flash of rebelliousness, watch from far off, very far in fact, is all at once there ... right inside you, never to be anything, and it's all over to-morrow ... or tonight, whenever. forgotten. He eats with you, sleeps with you, betrays you in every smile from a loved HE: Patience is a strength that brings its own rewards. one. One can never be cured of it. It's already too late. SHE: Patience cannot comfort you if you feel alone and desolate. (The religious chant fades.) HE: Surely you don't feel alone with so many friends from all over the world HE: (Repeats several times:) The Prince comes forward to meet and embrace his dropping in non-stop? enemy, but finds only death. (The repetitions of this sentence gradually fade under, as SHE: Oh, yes, they come and tell us about a joy of living we no longer know the woman continues:) anything about. Then they leave, often for good. SHE: He is right... I could leave. The border is not very far away. A world I still HE: But we do have each other, all these treasures, all these books ... and hopes ... that belong to continues to bustle and thrive on the other side. All these years of silence we can share between us. Of course, you are bored. I know that. I really do. Why not and fear ... perhaps they were no more than a bad dream. This strange life of ours has take a trip if you feel like it? You could go and see the girls in Italy. I am an old man. completely changed my husband.

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