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Out of the Body Travel

Richard Foreman

1976 00:42:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video
Tags:
Body , Dance , Documentation , Feminism , Gender , Language , Mental Landscape , Performance

Description

A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation between her body and her self as mediated by language. The text is a poetry of formal relations that carries personal and historical implications, including the desires of the woman paradoxically voiced by a male narrator. The title suggests the vivid virtuality of dreaming; scenes repeatedly refer to both reading and sleeping.

Richard Foreman, founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York, produced this first videotape project with students from the American Dance Festival and cinematographer Babette Mangolte.

The original total running time for this piece is 42:00.  An excerpt of this title (23:50) is only available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

About Richard Foreman

Born in 1937, Richard Foreman studied at Brown University and Yale University before founding the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968. Since then he has written, directed, and designed over 20 major productions, including Rhoda in Potatoland, and Vertical Mobility. Foreman's productions are characterized by complex interplays between spoken language and visual tableaux. His videotapes represent the crossover between video and theatrical traditions, and were accomplished during a period when video dance and video theater emerged as more than mere documentation of performance. Artists like Foreman conceptually reinvented theater as a video experience, exploring the properties of the new medium. Employing disruptive devices that puncture theatrical illusions and audience assumptions, Foreman’s works are distinctive in their rigorously controlled compositions, complex linguistic structures, and intricate collusions of language and image, and as such are considered mainstays of the American avant-garde. Foreman's plays and essays have been collected in the publications "Plays and Manifestos" (1976), and "Reverberation Machines, the Later Plays and Essays" (1985).