Out of the Body Travel

1976, 42 min, b&w, sound

In this translation of Foreman's theatrical sensibility to video, the artist's own voice propels the interaction of elaborate wordplay and stylized tableaux of people and objects. A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the starting point for Foreman's loosely constructed narrative. The coupling of language and image, male and female, the self and the other results in an evocative and often erotic series of tensions. Disruptive devices — loud buzzers, disjunctive images — repeatedly interrupt the tape's ordered compositions and linguistic structure. In Foreman's world, representation is symbolic, language qualifies the image, and the body is distanced from the self.

Writer/Director/Narrator: Richard Foreman. Photographer: Babette Mangolte. Performers: Students of the American Dance Festival. Produced for the American Dance Festival.