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Craftin'
 (a proemdramatic, for the Soyuz spaceship and its mission of 2002)

Cast

NDRAMAS
BENDE
MASSGRAVEDIGGER
A DANCER
A DRUMMER
THE POET
MUSICIANS
THE VOICE THAT WE NEVER SEE

The Introduction

The world ended just yesterday. Only one person survived the catastrophe. She is an old, frail woman, and all that is known of her is that she worked as a mass gravedigger all her life. This story chronicles her rummage through the chaos and the carnage. Two timeless and almost omniscient, very aloof narrators, with the help of dancers, musicians and drummers tell us this foundationless gist of the story of the dead world they never even knew.

The narrators give us of glimpses of the world that has been lost and ask us to join them as they try to seek out why that world might have had to die. This piece is called a "proemdramatic", after a form developed by the likes of Ingoapele Modingaone and the Medupe Players in the 1970'S - i.e. it is a form that forces prose, poem and drama to talk together as one genre.

The Proemdramatic

(The STAGE IS EMPTY and dim, in the light of an incomplete blue moon. We see the presence of a fresh open grave, dominant in the middle. Ndramas and Bende, dressed in the most colourful of attires, emerge from a dark womb, stroll in, look up and then look through us)

Ndramas ( through goggled eyes): Night
                    waits for daylight to flatten out and go, velvet moths velvet moths
                    but look i am flying wide above melting trees, above stinking seas,
                    i'm hauling stars into my
                    rounding heart

(silence)
                    and now you with a fruit-basket-full imagination...

Bende:         But I will be brave
                    for you

Ndramas:     There's one ocean of pleasure in giving in
                    to each other, i am bubbling compulsion, just
                    in case my echoing visions cause unrest
                    where your nerve motors most digest...

Bende:         No I will be brave....

Ndramas:     You have that
                    bowl only to consume vapour from this, a wounded dry pool, bleak
                    like eternity on all ends, ah the distant stars
                    we see twitter to and fro tonight , writhing full of blinking
                    hands of songs about us and the many far away roads with cracks
                    to travel, roads to which we must look
                    directly then.....

(They both turn and fix their look to the far way roads ahead of them. Ndramas strains his vision through the goggled eyes. They see dance and music wrestle, each seeming to be struggling to follow what the other is saying.

The poet tumbles as she flows upon the stage, coming in)

fragment/peril

1
Histories, pro
verbs pieces
words of parting that end
near a tranquil
silent effervescence, remain
stagn
ant waters

buzzing
with inside life,