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The Ecstasy of George Ryga
A LITERARY CELEBRATION
» Thursday 5 November 2009 | 5 pm
» The Bohemian Café, 524 Bernard Avenue
An informal afternoon hour showcasing ideas
and people in the Okanagan creative economy. Join us as Peter Hay, Sean Johnston and Jake Kennedy celebrate the powerful legacy of George Ryga's life and work - and the launch of the first issue of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations.
» $2 at the door. Refreshments are available at a modest cost.
» Seating is limited, please reserve yours HERE
Writers Celebrate the Enduring Legacy of a Literary Legend
George Ryga (1931-87) was the author of Canada's best known English-language play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first produced in 1967. He was also one of Canada's most prolific authors - he maintained a taxing work program as a short story writer, novelist, radio and television dramatist, poet and film scenarist, not to mention ventures into the world of ballet and opera. In a period of 14 years he produced 190 plays, two cantatas, five screenplays, two longplaying albums, three novels, and a book of poetry, as well as a considerable body of unpublished and unproduced work. Ryga spent the last - and most productive - years of his life in Summerland, and his house there is preserved as the Ryga Centre.
 On Thursday, November 5th at 5 pm the ongoing weekly Okanagan Institute Express series at the Bohemian Café presents The Ecstasy of George Ryga. Join us as Peter Hay, Sean Johnston and Jake Kennedy celebrate the powerful legacy of George Ryga's life and work - and the launch of the first issue of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations.
George Ryga Week - November 1-7 - has been proclaimed by the Provincial Government and the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. This event is one of a series presented by the Ryga Centre in Summerland, the Ryga Initiative at Okanagan College and the Okanagan Institute to honour the contribution Ryga made to the creative community, to bring his life and work to the attention of the public and to present a series of new publications and projects that are intended to continue and expand his already-considerable literary legacy.
 Peter Hay (pronounced 'high') was born in Budapest during the Holocaust and went to England after the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. He was educated there on scholarships and took his degree at Oxford in classics and English literature. He came to Simon Fraser University in 1967 to direct in the theatre program and teach in the English department. It was there that he became interested in new Canadian plays and started publishing them. In 1969 he joined forces with Talonbooks, then a small poetry press, and during the next dozen years he became the premier publisher of Canadian drama in English. That same year, he was appointed the first dramaturge (literary manager) of the Vancouver Playhouse by artistic director David Gardner, who directed the revival of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga that opened the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The Playhouse had commissioned a new play from Ryga for the 1970/1 season. It was here that Peter Hay met Ryga, working with him on developing the play that would become Captives of the Faceless Drummer, which was later banned by the Playhouse board following the FLQ crisis. In the national controversy that ensued for several months, Hay was chairman of the citizen's committee that was fighting the Playhouse board which owned the script, forced it to release the rights and finally produced the play on a bare floor at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Meanwhile he also published the script, following The Ecstasy of Rita Joe which became the bestselling Canadian play of all time. During the following decade, Hay published several more of Ryga's plays and novels, wrote several articles about him and produced a 90-minute documentary on CBC radio on Ryga's work.
Peter Hay and his Vancouver-born wife, Dorthea Atwater, left Canada in 1980 and spent the following 28 years in Los Angeles. There Hay worked in the theatre, he was professor of Drama at USC and UCLA, and was founding artistic director of First Stage in Hollywood developing new scripts for stage and screen. He was also an advisor to Robert Redford in setting up the Sundance Insitute, where he worked as dramaturge in its early years. He returned briefly to Vancouver to assist director John Juliani in the premiere of Ryga's historical drama, Paracelsus.
From the mid-80s Peter Hay wrote or compiled ten non-fiction books of biography, theatrical and show business history, which were published in several countries. An avid book collector since his teens, Hay and his wife owned several antiquarian and used bookshops in Pasadena, California. Last year they packed up their personal collection of some twenty thousand volumes and retired to Summerland, two blocks from the house where George and Norma Ryga lived.
 Sean Johnston is the author of A Day Does Not Go By (Nightwood, 2002), which won the 2003 ReLit Award for short fiction, and the novel All This Town Remembers (Gaspereau, 2006). He's also published two chapbooks: A Long Day Inside the Buildings (with Drew Kennickel; JackPine Press, 2004) and Bull Island (Gaspereau, 2004). Sean teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Okanagan College, and is the Editor of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations.
Of the Ryga Journal, he writes, "We take our name from Ryga, a political writer, to honour his commitment to his art and to his world. His legacy is this: he was a human living in a community and that community was living in a nation, that nation in a world. He wrote without nostalgia about the world that lived around him. He believed the artist had a responsibility to write counter-narratives, to treat the marginalized among us fairly, to challenge the formal boundaries of his art without losing the humanity of the characters that drive it. These characters live and move according to a complex, tentative political agreement that must not be taken as natural, but must be interrogated in every way."
 Jake Kennedy is a professor of English at Okanagan College, specialising in modernism and the avant-garde. His poems, prose pieces, and visuals/videos have appeared in over twenty Canadian, American and British journals. His chapbook, Hazard (BookThug, 2006) won the bp Nichol award. He is also on the board of the Alternator Gallery, Kelowna.
Of Kennedy's contribution to the Ryga Journal, Sean Johnston writes, "Jake Kennedy's poems are informed by an impulse toward truth, despite the erudition and education of the postmodern artist and reader, despite the fact we are told there is no such thing. Kennedy begins in the world with meditations on material objects - grass, trees, bullets, the screen of a drive-in - and moves outward from them into a world that is wild and domestic at the same time, a world that is inclusive enough to include the heart in its intellectual investigation of life. The tiger, to paraphrase one poem, is not concerned if its stalking measures up to other performances of stalking - it's out for blood. It hunts to survive."
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER ONLINE CLICK HERE
Copies of the Ryga Journal and Chapbooks will be for sale at the event.
» Ryga: A Journal of Provocations - in perfectbound paperback format, 272 pages with full-colour french-fold cover (shown above) - is $20. Annual subscriptions are $70 for 4 issues.
» Ryga Chapbooks - in saddlestitched paperback format, with specially-designed full colour covers and coloured endpapers, in limited editions of 100 numbered copies, signed by the author - are $5 each, $15 for a set of 4.
» They also can be ordered HERE.
 
 GEORGE RYGA WEEK
NOVEMBER 1-7 2009
George Ryga Week has been proclaimed by the Provincial Government and the Office
of the Lieutenant Governor to honour the contribution Ryga made to the creative
community.
A gala celebration will be held Saturday
November 7 at 7pm in the Okanagan College Theatre in Vernon.
Ken Smedley of the George Ryga Centre in Summerland will present the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Sponsored by The George Ryga Society, BC Bookworld, CBC Radio (Kelowna) and Okanagan College, this annual literary prize is awarded to a BC writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book. Excerpts are aired on CBC Radio One's Daybreak Program.
» More information is available HERE.
The Ecstasy of George Ryga takes place at the Bohemian Café. This marks the 114th event the Okanagan Institute has held since the Express series got underway in July 2007.
Express has played host to many Okanagan luminaries, including former deputy secretary general of Amnesty International Derek Evans, artists Lee Claremont and Gary Pearson, BC Book Award nominee Don Gayton, CBC Literary prize winner poet Harold Rhenisch, distinguished editor and author Jim Taylor, poet and professor John Lent, animator and filmmaker Jim Cliffe, community activist Don Elzer, dancer David LaHay, architect Jim Meiklejohn, culinary artist and writer Heidi Noble, broadcaster Marion Barschel and others from a wide range of creative fields.
The Okanagan Institute is a group of creative professionals that has gathered around the goal of providing events, publications and services of interest to enquiring minds in the Okanagan. We partner with individuals, organizations, institutions and businesses to achieve optimal creative and social impact.
Our mission is to ignite cultural transformation, catalyze collaborative action, build networks and foster sustainable creative enterprises. We invite the participation by all members of the creative community.
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