[Music plays throughout]
Female narrator: Rhetoric is the body.
The body is rhetorical in that it speaks, listens, and
is written on.
Digital voice: Body play body play body play...
Male interviewee: He is thinking about, what does it mean
to be a white heterosexual male who
doesn't really identify? It doesn't feel--
it feels awkward being in that paradigm or
amongst those spaces, and yet when I go
into spaces that are non-white, non-heterosexual, or
non-male spaces, then I also don't
really fit over there because I'm still
in this body. So there's been a lot of
thinking about my literacy of my own body.
Female narrator: From the spatial intermingling of
practices there emerged a specific
centrism between athletics and rhetoric
a particular crossover of pedagogical
practices and learning styles, a crossover
that contributed to the development
of rhetoric as body art, an art learned,
practiced, and performed by and with the
body as well as the mind.
[musical transition]
Female narrator: I think my biggest literacy is being
able to read the body, my main job as a
teacher, choreographer, and dancer is to be able
to read and interpret movement
[musical transition]
There is power, fragility, beauty, and
monstrosity in the rhetorical body.
[musical transition]
There is determination, strength in
the rhetorical body.
There is a peace and a
knowledge in listening to the rhetoric
of one's body.
[musical transition]
There is a violence in having the rhetoric
of our bodies stolen from us, and social,
cultural, and political narratives not
our own are written and re-encoded on our body.
It is through our bodies that violence occurs--yes.
Our bodies are battlegrounds--yes. But it
is also through our bodies that we live,
breathe, and die. It is through our bodies
that we are born and give birth. It is
through our bodies that we feel and express
passion, despair, desire, and devotion, dialectically.
It is our bodies that are
fragmented and whole. It is our bodies
that time stops and continues on.
It is our bodies that speak, it is our bodies
that we listen to
there's our bodies that are written on.
It is our bodies that are rhetorical.
[musical transition]
Singer: what a wicked thing to say,
you never felt that way. What a wicked thing to do, to
make me dream of you
I don't want to fall in love...