Marvelous Discourse

Uses improvisation, music and images to explore the gendered, bodily experience of language.

Marvelous Discourse — Plot

Language passes through the body, meaty, corporeal, and breathing. Do you adopt the stereotypically "male" strategy of verbally lunging at your opponent, trying to skewer him rhetorically, or do you adopt the "feminine" approach, like the Oracle of Delphi, and open your body to allow voices from the beyond to speak through you? "Marvelous Discourse" uses cave art, shadow puppets, and a visit to a caf? in the Israeli town of Endor, among many other images, to explore the gendered experience of language-in-the-body. The text for the video is completely improvised by the actors, as a spectacular example of language unfolding from an intuitive physicality.

• Release date
• August 8, 2009
• Runtime
• 21 min
• Director
• David Finkelstein