Re: RATS in Iowa

[shadowtackle@att.net]

Dear all-in-all:

     Rat is no longer a scam. In the early days, when we 
didn't know who we were or what we could do, we used the 
language of huckstersism to liberate our sense of 
possibility, and to protect ourselves from a 
responisiblity to the future. Our fellowship in the flesh 
continues to use humor and cunning; we continue to 
recognize that we are not a structure worth saving, an 
esthetic worth defending, we are not a policy, an agenda 
or palpable service. We are simply immanent. Our 
immanence, our fellowiship in the flesh, is real. 
Despite all we are not, in the end we are very real. 

     Personally speaking:

I believe in Big Bill Haywood and the One Big Union.
I believe that our worldwide fellowship of artists can 
ease lonliness and fight dysinformation, for us and for 
our commnities.
I believe that our theater is better than the military's 
theater, better than the theater of coercion.
I believe that our cordon is as strong as their cordon. 
That our cordon may be broken a thousand times, but that 
we are better trained and that our play will outperform 
theirs. And that the enemy is not a matter of us and 
them... that without adequate self-examination we will 
end up serving a power that works against our best 
interests. 
I believe that coercion (against theater, within theater) 
casts us in a role whether we want it or not, that 
coercion gets into our bodies, comes into our faces... 
and that we have more challenging roles to play.
I believe that the glory of art is an artist fully 
prepared, that through clarity, precision and constant 
practice, articulate artists are political by virtue of 
their position. Glory is a threat to insititutions, 
because angelic precision is turned to a higher 
authority.

No money. Every use of money represents a failure of 
hospitality. Sometimes hospitality fails and we need to 
go on; move ahead knowing that we are working outside the 
nature of our art when we accept signs (money being the 
anti-metaphor).
No written contracts.
No law but one and that law is love. The civic enactment 
of love is hospitality and our mission statement is the 
sole word Hospitality. So Rat is not an esthetic 
collective but an ethical one.

I will thwart these principles daily, I know. I will 
remember these daily.

     We should risk utiopianism, with great joy and fear, 
but without cynicism. Artistic fellowship in the flesh is 
leading to more mindful theater and making theater harder 
to kill.

Next meeting: Novi Sad, end June, begining July, in 
tandem with the INFANT Festival.
Then: Honduras, January 2001, w/ Teatro de la fragua
TBA 2001, Talahassee. Focus: Diversity.
Open invitations, meets TBA: Derry N. Ireland, Teatro 
Abierto, Buenos Aires.

Providence, call and we'll respond.


peace, peace, peace,

e