Notes on "Marvelous Discourse"
I have been developing a form of completely improvised verbal performance since 1993. I first used this technique to make theater pieces. (Ian invited me to perform this work at the Nada theater in 2000.) Since 2000, I have been using my technique to make videos. A complete description of this technique would be extremely long, but, in essence, it enables actors to harness their intuition in order to create coherent verbal performances at a high artistic level, without specifying ahead of time what the form or content of the piece will be like. You can read a great deal of detailed information about the technique here:
http://www.lakeivan.org/wwwboard/wwwboard.shtml
Beginning in January 2009, I taught Ian the basics of the technique and we eventually progressed to videotaping our improvisations. One of these tapes became the basis for my video, "Marvelous Discourse." A transcription of the improvised text from this same footage became the script for Ian's play, "Sacrificial Offerings."
I generally construct my improvisation-based videos in a series of layered steps. After choosing a particular videotaped improvisation to use, I first create the soundtrack. I listen to the text repeatedly, and compose music in order to express the rhythms, emotions, and energy patterns I hear in the text. I generally add in sections of additional music between many of the lines of text, and I will occasionally edit out lines of text I don't like. I always leave all of the lines of text in the original order in which they were improvised, and I don't mix in lines from other improvs. I believe each improv has its own organic form and logic, and I don't want to interfere with the integrity of the original.
After completing the soundtrack to "Marvelous Discourse," I realized that this particular film had a strong female character, the "priestess" who is repeatedly referred to in the text, and I asked long time collaborator Agnes de Garron to come in and improvise this role, while listening to the completed soundtrack. This particular process, of adding in a third improvised performance to an already recorded piece, is one I had never tried using before this piece.
When I finish composing the music and mixing the voices, I create the images. This process consists again of listening repeatedly to the original improvisation. I invariably discover that, beneath the seemingly drifting and undisciplined surface of the improvisation, there is a strong conceptual and emotional structure which ties together and unifies the text. I gradually create images intended to clarify this structure, to help the viewer to listen "underneath" the text, and to feel the underlying coherence of the work.
This entire process generally takes me 6 or 7 months, but in the case of this particular film it was faster, and took me 4 months.
Naturally, with such a deliberately open-ended form, I intend for every viewer to have her own associations with the imagery in the video and her own ideas of its possible meanings. The excitement of working with improvisation, for me, is the opportunity to discover the meaning of the piece along the way, since the text of the piece is created through a completely intuitive process.
For me, "Marvelous Discourse" is concerned with the meaty, corporeal, bodily experience of language. (By a not-so-funny coincidence, the main interest in comparing Ian's play and my film based on the same text, is in seeing the difference between my process, where I worked from a video of the bodily, physical presence of the actors, and Ian's play, in which he worked from the language alone.) The film contrasts a "male" view of language, in which you verbally stab and joust with your partner, trying to skewer him and score verbal "points," and a more "feminine" approach, in which, like to Oracle of Delphi, you open up your body to allow a mysterious voice to speak through you (which is also what an improvising actor does.) Discourse, then, is revealed as a complex process, in which the masculine and feminine approaches are just two of the layers.