Experience walking exercise. Three of us had an hour and a half outside to collect five experiences, we had to do it without speaking. Listening to the instructions (?) immediately reminded me of previous performance projects – specifically the one that became Frozen Progress (2001). It was both comfortingly familiar and a reminder of how distant such projects and ways of working have become. It awakened something in me about physicality, or perhaps the absence of physicality in my current practice … something to note.
We climbed, walked, jumped, and danced through a rambling abandoned building almost immediately next to the one in which we are staying. It was playful – like being a child again – there were lots of tests. Testing how we communicated and checked in with each other – more eye contact than usual. Testing the ground – keeping my weight on my back foot and testing the burnt, charred, uncertain ground ahead with my front foot. Testing materials, dropping debris into dark holes that evidently had water at the bottom, whirling plastic tubes around above our heads, touching the velvety dampness of fungi. A large room, the only room where the ceiling was intact, and which was almost entirely dark – the windows had been bricked up, became a nightclub when Fenu shone his torch up through the perforated tile that Aina had found. We danced on the broken glass and I was transported back to nights out in Edinburgh and London … the lyric “stilettos on broken bottles” going through my head. How many times have I found myself becoming emotional and teary on dance-floors ’dancing on my own’ since John died?
Reflecting on the five experiences that we had collected we were unanimous that the most intense was the three of us jumping in synch forward and back on the fire damaged roof … jump forward with both feet and jump back as soon as you feel the roof beneath your feet, did we feel the roof move? Jump again. It moved. Did we hear something? Jump again. And again … again … we definitely heard something and felt something that time. We acknowledge with danger of what we are doing with spontaneous laughter. We stand where we are on the roof directly above a wall – safe ground. The laughter subsides, we turn to the left and in single file walk to the left where we one up one clamber down burnt roofing into the body of the building.
Earlier and in a few sentences about our motivations for being on the residency I had said that I want to re-connect with my artist’s soul – to ’let the crazy out’. The afternoon’s exercise was a very good way to start to doing just that. To pay attention to the people and materials around me, to be in the moment, to test, and to play, to do things for the sake of doing them, to learn and experience by doing. To be present.
