Tongues

Year: 1982

Runtime: 20 mins

Language: English

Director: Shirley Clarke

Drama

A performance piece written by Sam Shepard, enacted by Joseph Chaikin and directed by Shirley Clarke, a dying man reflects on his life while delivering his own last rites.

Direct adaptation

Letters and Texts, 1972–1984: The book behind Tongues

Correspondence and Three Collaborative Performance Works Document Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin's Search for a Language of Voice, Memory, and the Body · by Joseph Chaikin, Sam Shepard, Barry Daniels

Why this book?

The filmed Tongues preserves Joseph Chaikin's solo performance of the vocal text and the live percussion developed with Sam Shepard and musician Skip La Plante. Rather than adapting a conventional plot, it records and reframes a sequence of voices, gestures, rhythms, and identities created for performance. This volume supplies the complete text together with the collaborators' notes and correspondence, making the relation between written score and embodied realization unusually visible.

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