As a facilitator who has a practice of walking as a means of reflecting on the self within context, I have recently created a lab at Dartington Hall Estate; soft edges. (soft edges; Nov 2014). This seven-day workshop was about experiencing space, as a group; the estate was an excellent venue for working on a collaborative project as we used the gounds/outdoors as experiential spaces within which to collect material to take back to the studio. Archiving drawings, poems, objects, movement phrases, lists and maps, we generated this material in order to ask the question:
How can we find soft edges?
Between audience and performer,
between ground and air and body,
between mediums or disciplines,
between you and I.
As an extension of the work I did during the lab, I have continued to research into the experience of passing through space, walking, by myself; as a basic, personal means of traveling from A to B. With reference to the ‘Flaneur’: the idea of travelling hopefully, and the writing of Henry David Thoreau, who speaks of his life of humble explorations into the understanding of self-sufficient living, in relation to journeying through time and space (in the book ‘Where I lived and What I Lived For’), I have generated a means of walking to reflect and equally, to progress (physically and creatively).
