CBYE Media Releases - June 7, 2003

Giller prize-winning author Austin Clarke is guest of honour at The Canadian Ballet Youth Ensemble fundraiser

by Jeff Mahoney, The Hamilton Spectator

Winning is good, writing is better - Austin Clarke surrendered reluctantly to the rigours of celebrity after the Polished Hoe won three major prizes. Now he will help a Hamilton arts group meld ballet and prose.

Right: Austin Clarke

In the legend of the tribe, The Giller Prize, once you win it, turns immediately into a team of wild horses to which you are tehered. And they drag you every which way, wherever there is a guest speech to be given, a fund to be raised or an honourary degree to be conferred.

In time the demands become so great that the different horses fly off in different directions at the same time. And, as you are tied to all of them, you are torn to pieces.

But that`s OK, as long as some part of you can sit at a head table and eat yet another chicken florentine dinner in the company of mostly strangers who say nice things about your work.

Austin Clarke, a trim, youthful 67 in mid-length handsomely greying dreadlocks, is a most congenial man who early on made a deal with the horses. They could have him for a few weeks, during which time he gave himself over entirely to the strange machinery of winning.

... the Polished Hoe... or perhaps it would be truer to say the spirit and mood of the book - is being set to music by Doug Richardson, a Toronto sax player and friend of Clarke. Richardson is also connected with the Canadian Ballet Youth Ensemble in Hamilton. And one of the big initiatives of the ensemble is to link up music, dance and the written word.

Toward that end, the ensemble is raising funds for the $50,000 Book Project and other programs. The idea of the book project is to present ballets with pages of the books on which they`re based, projected onto the stage when the curtain opens.

`The classical ballets begin with books, the word. I want the students (of the emsemble) to make the connection between the written word before anything else, to make a positive connection with reading.`says Belma Diamante, president of the ensemble.

When Richardson mentioned to her his friendship with Clarke, the wheels started turning. Why not create music and possibly dance around a work of contemporary canadian fiction? ...