Fillip

Reading Four Voices
Karina Irvine

Four women pull up chairs around a table. The year is 1975; it might be the fourth time they have met, it could be fall or winter, but none of that really matters. The table is already covered with papers, books, an ashtray and its contents—all of which have slowly accumulated from days before. One woman presses her finger firmly down on the record button of the reel-to-reel to carry on from where they left off, though where they left off is nowhere in particular. Their work does not exist within a clearly con­structed timeline. They begin again. Their voices lead the way as they set the tone with a series of questions and speculations:

How can we start with caress?

What is it?

Why did she say that?

This could be a pyramid.

It was fifty years ago that they grouped around this table, and their collaborations have since left a paper trail of scripts and working scripts, photographs, and slides. The re-emergence of their work from the archive, and the conversations that have unfolded around it, reveal how it continues to circulate, and with each revolution it changes. Their work has an embodied relationship to time, and it is subject to the ways that memories and materials are kept and preserved.

The name of their collective is Random and Routine, and it includes artists Cheryl Druick (now Sourkes), Carole Itter, Rhoda Rosenfeld, and Trudy Rubenfeld. Their collaborations took place over the course of a year or so, but the iterative nature of their process pushes against a standard chronology; it’s nonlinear and moves in random yet interconnected ways.

I first came to Random and Routine’s work in the form of a script that is also a score. It has five pages, the first showing the graduated effects of prolonged light exposure—yellowed edges frame a central text—and in the upper-left corner is the faint imprint of a rusted paper clip. The title reads: CIRCUM—ACT ONE, A Reading for Four Voices, and it is “arranged by Carole Itter from the scored working script of video tape #7.” The first word, circum, already brings my attention to the nature of time, though not in a cyclical way; in a way that percolates, loops, ebbs, and flows as they work around the direction of their approach. Let’s do it backwards, they proclaim as they begin.

As I flip through the pages of Circum, the script/score gives rise to much speculation.

First: There is no mention of the year it was created, but it is safe to assume that it was written sometime in the mid-70s. It is also possible that accuracy is inconsequential.

Second: The subtext of “act one” is that there are subsequent acts or other scripts, I would think. The script begins with a dialogue about what it is, a dialogue that puzzles over a selection of words and their associations. The subtext of a script is also its performance; it suggests a spoken element. I look here and there, but there is no evidence of a performance or the elusive “video tape #7” referenced in the description.

That’s the script, it’s written out, on the little pad, lost, where, yours?...Glad somebody did it.

Third: Who is—or are—the speaker(s) of each sentence or word? There are no names assigned, with the exception of a dialogue between Ch., R., and C. on the third page. Otherwise, it reads as one collective voice; layered identities, assembled in a collaged conversation, that (again on the third page) merge in “fast, flapping unison.” A polyphonic chorus makes up the score and guides a loose direction for what comes next. Circum forms a compositional map with a network of routes that branch into questions and responses, assurances and provocations.

The script is not a script in the traditional sense—with scenes, slug lines, or character names. It does, however, include parentheticals, written in Carole’s hand, spilling out into the margins, which score the rhythm of their voices:

Whisper; staccato; fast chatter; slowly; angry whisper.

Carole’s arrangement of Circum offers another visual layer. There is a clear attention to shapes and the symbolism that surrounds them—circles: wholeness, unity; squares: structure, balance; triangles: strength, stability—but the dialogue challenges these archetypes. For instance, they begin by discussing the shape of a triangle and position their hands to form its base, and, as the text cascades downward to form an inverted triangle, the shape loses stability as they fumble through moments of humility and doubt:

Embarrassed...I’m getting lost...her face is not central.

The longer I stare, the more I begin to see patterns within patterns. A channel moves through the centre of an irregular circle; a square is nailed into place by punctuation; two columns resemble figures standing. They question the structure and direction of their movements and shift into position. Their words are on the move and fall into formation as the performers announce a new shape.

The typed/written text embodies the liberating material practices of concrete poetry, which works in tandem with the sound of their voice(s). It recalls the framework of a Fluxus event score, that art movement’s intermedial explorations, and its sentiments that the process of making something is more important than the finished work. The script tests the limits and possibilities of form, and I can only imagine (at this point) that their vocalizations do too.

After staring at the script intermittently for days on end, their collective dialogue seeps into my thoughts: Think it through, think it through, think it through, I think. It reads like an incantation, but what does it mean? I push the words, and they do not budge. I shuffle and reshuffle them to find a pattern, to find a message. I turn the page over as if to find answers to my hanging questions on the blank reverse. I peek under words and brush the dust off a sentence. After my unsuccessful attempt to locate evidence in the shape of other supporting media, I turn to the nature of their collaboration.

I write to Carole.

Carole: We were...almost always an oral group. I do recall that typing out [the script was] done much further on in our meetings. It was not at all typical that we got away from the oral stuff. We usually had a tape recorder running all the time.

[The tapes] had got lost somehow & no one could find them for years. We recorded on quarter-inch [reel-to-reel] tape, quality stuff. We made a video, but maybe not all that many of them, and found them sort of awkward. I recall how carefully we were listening to one another, and I saw us as a quartet, or maybe better still, a choir.1

They were called Random and Routine, or at least their work is called Random and Routine, and by ease of reference, they too became Random and Routine. At first, this confused me. I ask Trudy and Rhoda, when I meet them in a coffee shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown, if they can explain it.

Trudy grins, Random and Routine became more...routine. (Laughs) We didn’t consider ourselves a “band” or anything like that.

Rhoda adds, The name was specific to this project only.

It’s not like we ever went on tour, says Trudy. This was the only work we did together.

When did “Formations” get added to Random and Routine? I ask.

“Formations” came later, Rhoda tells me. It was tacked on the end. The script is one of the “formations.”

Cheryl forewarns me that, not unlike the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950), I will likely hear four different stories of the circumstances around the creation of their work together.

Cheryl: Everyone’s reality of it is different. We were fairly anarchic, and we each came with our own, you know, attitude. Some people are more written, some people are more oral, so we each came with who we were. And I think the work came out of a kind of lifestyle, that kind of moment of cohesion and difference, and so it was improvisational.

They would meet around a table in each other’s kitchens or living rooms. A typewriter would pass between their hands and a spliff between their lips. A mix of keys would clack, form words, a sentence, or nonsense. It was an exercise in shaping a collective voice: a multi­vocal being with competing and agreeing thoughts, a Janus figure whose words would fall somewhere between internal and external dialogue, of something or something.

Cheryl: Someone would start a text, or write down a sentence or some words, and then somebody else would continue it. That might’ve been part of what we used to bounce off. But it might not have been. But it might’ve been something else we did.

I don’t believe that we started with, uh, any organized...anything. There were certain phrases that recur and certain concepts that [reflect] how we were living at the time: the experimental, the layering of identities, the resistance to taking instruction or direction.

Have you heard the recordings? Cheryl asks.

I have not, yet, I say.

On separate occasions, I ask each of them about what their collaborations around the table would have looked like.

Carole: Passing a typewriter around us is something I don’t recall whatsoever. If you look at the table, you can see that we could fill it up with all sorts of things very easily, but not a typewriter. There was certainly a black dictionary on the table [The Concise Oxford Dictionary] and we used it frequently. We used to play “Throw the Dictionary” a lot. We studied words that way.

Rhoda: We worked from...scripts and yes, probably [by] throwing the dictionary and possibly passing the typewriter around. It’s hard to remember exactly how all the improvising happened.

Cheryl: Passing the typewriter is a clear memory. I couldn’t have made up a thing like that.

In a black-and-white photograph of the four women, they sit in stick chairs around a table strewn with things. The photograph, yellow with age, is marked by flecks and threads of dust. The photograph’s high contrast hinders the readability of the objects on the table, though in front of each of them, sheets of paper clearly blanket its surface. Like Circum, the photograph is, as Susan Sontag has written, “plagued by the usual ills of paper objects.”2 More importantly, it captures “a neat slice of time” giving “inconvertible proof that a given thing happened.”3 It is also staged and—as is innate to all photographs—shapes perceptions of how, in this case, this particular moment in time appeared.

On the right is Carole with a cigarette between her fingers, gazing toward the camera. Trudy, also with her eyes on the lens, compresses the shutter release beneath the table. Rhoda—who sits opposite Carole—and Cheryl are in dialogue, as if there were no interruption. The image was taken in Trudy’s apartment in Kitsilano, Vancouver, within a room that’s nearly empty apart from the central table: their set and stage.

Then the photograph’s negative was scanned, and suddenly the atmosphere is pulled together. The contents of the table are clearly visible: sheets of paper (likely scripts), an ashtray, a ceramic bowl, tape, markers, a bag of tobacco, and rolling papers. There is also a dictionary and, at the centre of the table, a typewriter.

Carole: Oh my gosh, I now recall that typewriter....Interesting how things drop completely out of one’s mind & then a photo is presented as reality, so [the typewriter] does/did exist all along.

The table setting brings to mind the desk of Émile Zola in Édouard Manet’s Portrait d’Émile Zola (1868), Manet’s painting of his friend in a study. Every conceivable space on Zola’s desk is filled with objects: books, papers, a pipe, writing tools, a paper cutter. The desk in itself offers both a portrait of the writer and a document of his working habits and interests. Random and Routine’s table played a similar role as materials shifted and accumulated, were activated or filed, depending on the circumstance. The photograph also reveals more than just a portrait: it documents visible proof, by the display of objects, of what their collaboration looked like.

Circum begins with eight words and a phrase: caress, aggress, stare, avoid looking at, glance, stance, circum, square, triangle. Rhoda was the one who brought them to the table. They are just words, she tells me, but they provide a structure of sorts. They are a starting point to experiment with thought and association, rhythm and repetition. It’s an example of how the group would set limitations to work within, a strategy they often employed. They provided parameters by which unfettered improvisation could happen.

Influential to their work was the work of Gertrude Stein, a pioneer of écriture féminine, or “women’s writing”—a term coined by Hélène Cixous in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)—who emphasized writing and reading as a “continuous present.” Stein stresses the enunciation of speech and the importance of “using everything by beginning again and again.”4 Her work provided an invaluable framework for Random and Routine, and her influence carries through to the way they use language to blur or question identity as being externally realized rather than innately fixed. Together, Random and Routine’s multiplicity forms a singular subject, but a singular subject with overlapping voices. It is an identity that unhinges the structures of patriarchal language, that is less rigid and instead more dynamic, ever-shifting.

The Working Scripts

The coffee shop where I meet with Rhoda and Trudy is dark, and the sounds of early-afternoon chatter ricochet off the walls of the concrete interior. Rhoda places a tattered manila envelope on the table and slides it toward me. This is a working script, she says. It might be the only one left. I check my fingers and scan the table before I drag it closer, adopting the fastidious attitude of a conservator before I unpack its contents.

This working script is a collection of sheets of paper of varying sizes: some in strips, others a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven size; typewritten, handwritten, and accompanied by doodles. One of their names is scrawled in red at the bottom right of each sheet, indicating their personal script.

On one page, in the upper-right corner, there is a drawing of a chicken labelled “a chicken with an inverted beak interviewing,” which makes me question how the past may have scribbled a portrait of the role I have taken on as I pace erratically, pecking at clues in my search for answers.

Like the chicken and egg conundrum, I puzzle over what came first: was it the performance or the script? And is there any sense in making sense of it?

Then came an answer, in the form of a typewritten message wedged in the fold of the envelope:

We had a score of ten words. We improvised and then we transcribed the improvisations and then improvised again using the transcriptions and then made new scores and structures and then taped again and did more and then some more.

Added just below, in Rhoda’s handwriting:

And we’re not kidding.

The Recordings

Their audiotapes were broadcast in 1976 on Vancouver Co-op Radio, CFRO 102.7 FM, on Howard Broomfield’s show The Listener and Ingrid Klassen’s The Book Show, which aired on Sunday nights, following Random and Routine’s recurrent but irregular recording sessions. The same year, Random and Routine had also presented a recording at PUMPS Gallery in Vancouver.

Following the digitization of some of these recordings, I was delighted to tune in. There is an embodied curiosity in the momentum behind Random and Routine, an expression not unlike free jazz that plays with voice, its timbres and textures, whispers and repetitions.

Their dialogue is peopled with playful disavowals and an infinite layering of voice. Viewpoints, stances, and internal thoughts intermingle in a musicality of speech and rhythm. The effect is kaleidoscopic, where language is fragmented and comes to life as the words are lifted from the page.

Cheryl: They’re quite rhythmic. [They set] up a musical dynamic. The musicality of it is as important as the language, or the language creates the musicality and the musicality creates repetitions and variations. The musicality is an equal player.

Words disintegrate into syllables that lead to other words, strung together by sonic patterns and word associations. There is a staccato sense of linearity. It stops and starts, interrupts and layers, disrupting grammatical conventions.

Trudy: The words begin to fracture and break apart.

Was that intentional? I ask.

No, it just happened that way, Trudy replies.

They build a collage of sound using voice and language. They move freely between media, experimenting with vocal resonances and word associations while developing a loose structure for their improvisations in writing, sound, and image. Marshall McLuhan’s infamous statement, “the medium is the message,” had a significant influence on the zeitgeist of the Vancouver literary and artistic scene at the time.5 All media informed Random and Routine’s collective practice, and every medium was a conduit for improvisation. McLuhan’s phrase was first spoken in 1958 at a conference of broadcasters held in the library of the University of British Columbia.6 This segment had a rippling effect across Vancouver’s poets and artists, who established the city as a hub for intermedia, encouraging experimentation across artistic boundaries. During the 1960s and ’70s, there was a spirit of experimentation, of collectivism and self-organization, and it was during this time that a foundation for an artists’ association was formed, aptly named Intermedia Society (1967–72).

Cheryl: There was a lot of experimental music going on at Western Front [artist-run centre] at that time, and all the scenes were close to each other. We didn’t make distinctions between types of practice. The po­etry scene, the performance art scene, the experimental music scene, the visual art scene—they all influenced each other. It was really important. And publishing too, since there was the Intermedia Press.

In Random and Routine’s recordings, there are fragments from Circum that emerge throughout, but to Rhoda’s recollection, an oral performance that stems from this script never happened. In one recording, they play another recording that they had made earlier and layer their voices overtop; the resulting new recording influences yet another script that they then act out and record again. Anything made could become material for something else.

As I return to the script and watch the words fall in and out of formation, they begin to retreat and ask: Why try to find meaning in any of it, anyway? You’ll just end up not making sense. After all, the meaning of the words might be less important than the sounds they make.

This search unfolded with the discovery of more materials—from the Circum script/score to the working scripts, recording, and photograph—leading to a string of conversations and stories, both concurring and contradicting, not unlike the collaborative nature of Random and Routine’s work. The archival materials that hold their practice have come to assume a different character, fifty years later—one that changes shape depending on who is following along.