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Ottawa Citizen August 2012
A different kind of rock festival on the Ottawa River
What: International Stone Balance Festival
When: Aug. 18 – 19
Where: Near Remic Rapids on the Ottawa River
More: www.bawiint.com
The healthy life, it’s often said, is about balance, which must make John Felice Ceprano the healthiest person in Ottawa. The 65-year-old man spends his days balancing work and art, balancing rocks and, lately, balancing the demands of organizing a unique festival on the shores of the Ottawa River.
Ceprano works as a nurse but is known as an artist. You’ve likely seen his art on the river, near the Remic Rapids, where his distinctive and precipitously balanced rock sculptures stand sentinel over the flowing waters. This weekend there’ll be many more balanced sculptures created by rock artists from around the world, all summoned by Ceprano to the shores of our river.
The inaugural International Stone Balance Festival will be held Saturday and Sunday (Aug. 18 and 19), just off the Ottawa River Parkway — or, as it was renamed by the Harper government this week, the John A. Macdonald Parkway, after our first prime minister, who led this country’s greatest balancing act, Confederation. The Remic Rapids are near Tunney’s Pasture, so there’s plenty of parking about.
Ceprano decided to organize something for Ottawa after he went to a symposium of rock artists in Ancona, Italy, earlier this year. That gathering, hosted by Italian “stone balance artists,” led to the establishment of BAWI, or Balanced Art World International, with 600 members worldwide. Ceprano is bringing 10 of those artists to Ottawa, most of them from Italy but also from the United States and Canada, including two others from Ottawa, Nancy Grace and Karl Ciesluk.
“When I went to Italy back in April, it was the first time I was aware of the fact that there was an international group of artists doing stone balanced art,” Ceprano says.
The revelation inspired him to see what he could organize for Ottawa, and he’s thrilled with the results. “It’s been a huge, huge surprise for me how this thing has just blossomed. I wasn’t prepared for this,” he says. “I didn’t do that much. I kind of made a few steps, and then everybody just came in.”
The festival will include performances by Ottawa artists of other kinds, including the Ottawa Stilt Union, slam poets, percussionists and dancers. (See the full schedule on the event web page.) There has also been tremendous support from sponsors, Ceprano says, especially from the Italian community. The support has pushed Ceprano closer to his goal of having all food and accommodations provided to the visiting artists, just as it was all provided to him in Italy. He’s not quite there yet, and is still soliciting donations on his web page to help cover expenses.
What you’ll see at the festival is a wide array of sculptures that while distinct from each other — “Each one of us has a completely different style, and we all learn from each other,” Ceprano says — are all based on the same, simple principle of gathering stones and balancing them atop one another. It may initially remind you of northern Canadian inuksuks, though those are fundamentally different from what Ceprano and his fellow stone artists are doing. Inuksuks are meant to represent a person in some way. Balanced stone works are more wide-ranging and often abstract, and, in my limited experience, tend to be more narrowly vertical, whereas an inuksuk is more likely to be broad by comparison, and squat.
My descriptions may change after the weekend, once Ottawa has had the opportunity to see a world of stone art, all of it delicately balanced on the shores of our mighty river.
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