A group of roughly thirty people came together on May 11, 2016 to walk the Weitz Center for Creativity as an improv performance. Once everyone wiggled into their WALK! t-shirts, any distinction between dancer and audience melted away.
Carleton dance professor Jane Shockley introduced and led the night’s exploration of the hills and dales of the Weitz using a vocabulary of movement based on walking and everyday movement.
The first project of the evening was offered by Visiting Walking Artist-in-Residence Phil Smith. Phil invited everyone to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with faces pressed to a uniform blue corridor wall. For fifteen minutes the group stared intently at the surface while moving slowly to the right. At will, each person could step back several paces for a new perspective. The goal?: to slow down the pace of movement and perception, to observe something below the threshold of normal perception, to move with a group as one, and, perhaps, to endure. To a person: “This was hard!”
For the central work, Jane Shockley invited the group to “walk in a flock,” which meant maintaining shoulder-to-shoulder contact—or as close an approximation as possible—while moving through a tangle of rooms, corridors and stairs of the Weitz. Before starting, Jane distributed notecards containing directions for an activity—not unlike a Fluxus “script”—to be performed along the way. Once completed, participants could hand them off to others to perform. As an example:
- Lift someone
- Stand for 10 seconds
- Melt slowly to the ground
- Go under something
Near the end of this event, when the flock found itself against a wall in the courtyard of the Weitz, John Schott invited the group to a third and final part. “Walk toward me slowly like zombies,” he said as he flopped belly-up onto the grass, “the dance is completed when you have devoured my flesh.” And so it was: the evening was completed when his bones had been licked white.