ARCHIVE

Ekphrasis and persuading communication—voices bouncing around a room, voices bouncing around in history, 16th century forms of “truth telling” and recounting triumphal processions, “take a deep breath down,” triumphal arches and illustrations of triumphal carts, overworking and pumping the diaphragm, impersonating absence, the details of something that didn’t happen, Barbara Tennenbaum’s Persuasive Communication, embodying a room in the rhythms of one’s voice, “hu hu hey” and directing the voice, historians’ ekphrasis and verisimilitude, listening while speaking, Piffiaro’s “Trionfo di Bacco” and Stadtpfeiffer: Music of Renaissance Germany.

Dan J. Ruppel is a writer and performer teaching art history and oratory at Roger Williams and Brown Universities. His academic research traces the lineages of the “Roman” triumph and the early modern “entry” ceremony as they appear in francophone festival books throughout the long sixteenth century, exploring how these ceremonies and their documents influence claims to truthful representation and political sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic. His theatrical creations perform translations across time, media and language, exploring themes of passing and surrogation. These adventures have taken him from Pennsylvania to Transylvania, and from the forests of Quebec to community centers in Palestine.

(Ventriloquize)

First broadcast on Montez Press Radio as Tongue and Cheek- Ep21: Borrowing Tellings - Saturday, Feb 29th, 2020, 11AM-12PM

A radio series of proprioceptive exercises, interviews about practices of communication, and archival sound. A routine for warming up our means of communication. Presented monthly as a combination of live and prerecorded sessions.

Lend me your ears!
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works… Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here we are' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' "
-- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”

To reach an arm out of one’s mouth, peek through one’s ear, and speak out of one’s eye. Communication happens by any means possible. It is the different ways bodies extend themselves, as limbs that bridge things—reaching out, stretching and sometimes touching, with a light tap, “Marco!”

How we voice, how we gesture, how we manner, how we empathize.
Exercises to find all ways of thinking of language, and to exercise them as their own paths of communication.

To empathize over radio. Invite to do the same—feel, mimic, echo. “Polo”
The sound of leading, of following, of teaching speaking.
And learning to make a body of a limb.

Tongue and Cheek was first developed and aired on Montez Press Radio beginning in the summer of 2018. Montez Press Radio is an experimental radio station and commissioning platform for unexpected works from artists and other creative voices. MPR continues to air new episodes of Tongue and Cheek during its monthly live broadcast at 46 Canal St in Chinatown, New York.