"Collage With Jackhammer": James Reaney, the Art of Noises, and the Paraphonic Sound Collage

"Collage With Jackhammer":James Reaney, the Art of Noises, and the Paraphonic Sound Collage Michael O'Driscoll (bio) Wherever we are, what we hear is moﬆly noise. When we ignore it, it diﬆurbs us. When we liﬆen to it, we find it fascinating. John Cage, "The Future of Music: Credo" (1937) On 16 january 1969, Canadian poet and playwright James Reaney paid a visit to a classroom of students where he performed excerpts from, and discussed the aesthetic sensibility of, his celebrated 1967 play Colours in the Dark. Reaney's classroom visit was recorded on reel-to-reel tape and has been digitized and preserved as part of the collection maintained by the University of Alberta (ua) partners in the SpokenWeb research network.1 The location of the recorded event is not indicated on the audio object. The spine on the original reel-to-reel tape box indicates "POETRY READING: James Reaney" in type with a corresponding ua Department of English media catalogue number; the back of the box includes a handwritten note "DEPT OF ENGLISH POETRY READING" in block capitals, and "James Reaney Jan 16, 1969" in a scripted, different hand; a third set of box [End Page 63] notes, again in a different hand, offers some broad topic areas indexed by tape counter numbers; a fourth hand, also in block letters, warns "NOISY TAPE. VOICE KEEPS LOSING MIKE." The recording itself also offers no clues as to the precise location or host instructor—Reaney acknowledges his host at the outset, but his articulation of the name is muffled. Nonetheless, the style and mode of delivery clearly suggests a guest classroom lecture in a university. Because two of the four forms of handwriting can be matched with other recordings known to be made at the University of Alberta, our presumption is that the recording was, indeed, conducted somewhere on campus, although it is possible the event was recorded elsewhere and this singular, master tape entered into the local collection by other, unknown means. A landmark achievement by one of Canada's premier playwrights, Reaney's Colours in the Dark is a brilliant and unconventional play consisting of two acts, each containing twenty-one vignettes, that describe in shifting temporalities the progress of one man's life from birth to middle-age in rural southern Ontario, the geological time of central North America since the last ice age, and the narrative arc of the Bible. The play is cast with six actors that each fulfill more than a half-dozen roles alongside a four-person chorus and a cluster of children. Set on a minimalist stage backed by five projection screens displaying colours and images, the play was performed under the direction of John Hirsch first at the Stratford Festival and then, two years later, at Vancouver's Playhouse Theatre, directed by Timothy Bond. Colours hovers between the banality of its storyline (Reaney's 1969 published introductory note describes it as "a person growing up, leaving home, going to big cities, getting rather mixed up and then not coming home again, but making home and identity come to him wherever he is" [7]), a powerful mystical or fantastical quality that governs the mood and resolution of the performance, and a carefully executed visual and aural documentary method that draws from the archival records, landscapes, and soundscapes of southern Ontario communities and institutions. Interspersed throughout the lines of dialogue that animate the playful and ritualistic activity of the characters are a number of evocative poems performed variously by the actors in their multiple roles. In his retrospective assessment of the play, Alvin Lee summarizes its reception: "the public response to Colours in the Dark was very enthusiastic. The standing ovation for the author on opening night was followed by at least nine strongly favourable reviews, contrasted with one splenetic one in the usual Toronto column" (146). Whatever negative response it drew was no doubt partly motivated by its dynamic structure [End Page 64] and playful irreverence—the same qualities that made Colours such a compelling experience for its audience. The play's formal design draws on a long history of artistic practices of collage, montage, or bricolage...