Excitable Speech: All About Cinderella (2008)

• 76%
• 2008
• Linda Chiu-han Lai

The myth of Cinderella undergoes a series of generative twist to illumine the inventive power of speech. 11 children and 3 educated women engaged in a game of improvisation via their talking-head camera presence. Tale-telling to some children is the realization of creative instincts, to others the performance of self, or it's simply a tedious pedagogic vessel. My research-creation completes with adult women transforming the usage of Cinderella-objects into agents of their own stories, however fragmentary or elliptical. The event of tale-telling woke up the child in them; children language was appropriated to perform unarticulated subjectivities. Gender is a complex system, most revealing in language-in-action. The coda is a grand finale celebrating the magical power of objects and their own unlimited lives. Story-telling is the most primitive form of play. Harmless it may look, it is also the most sophisticated embodiment of ideological workings.