Wallking more

1|Page Abstract WALLKING - On Sunday 7th March 2010, I led a small guided walk around Exeter following its city walls. Seventy percent of the city’s perimeter still remains and the purpose of this tour was to walk the remaining thirty percent back into existence. Armed with John Hooker’s famous city map from 1587 and a small guide book we circumnavigated the city with the wall acting as an incomplete text. Pedestrian performer and academic Carl Lavery once stated that when drifting through the city his separation from place paradoxically produced an attachment to it (2007:46). How did the presence of the wall affect our ‘separation’ and ‘attachment’ to the city? This paper will examine the performativity of this ‘wallking’ and is part of my ongoing research into the relationship between psychogeography and pedestrian performance. Photographs of the walk taken by Emil Kalimullin. 2|Page WALLKING A film of the wall walk plays in the background in slow motion. To the right of it, on the wall is a copy of a map of Exeter from 1597 by John Hooker. On the table, clearly visible is a book entitled The Great Little EXETER Book by Chips and Sally Barber. In this same interlude it doth befall That I, one Snout by name, present a wall; And such a wall, as I would have you think, That had in it a crannied hole or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby, Did whisper often very secretly. (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene 1) 3|Page On Sunday the 7th March 2010, I led a small guided walk around Exeter’s city walls. Seventy percent of the city walls still remain, and my plan was to see if the remaining thirty percent could be temporarily walked back into existence. In addition to this, I wanted to examine the performativity of the wall within this urban stage. A performing wall, had prominence in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but can it actually ‘perform’ outside of the conventional theatrical environment? This walk was part of my ongoing research into the relationship between psychogeography and pedestrian performance. Pedestrian performance concerns the action of walking as the principle component in a performance, and the study of it examines how this physical action of perambulation prompts the creation and reception of a performance. Each step we take forms a word, a thought, a feeling, a memory that is sewn together through a walk. However with each step we are also reading, scanning our geography as we move through it. In a sense we write the land - as Michel De Certeau viewed it - and read the landscape simultaneously. In recent years academics within pedestrian performance have sought to try and understand this novel form of performing, raising questions as to how a walker ‘performs’, who they perform to and as an inversion of this, how walking enables the landscape to perform. As a means to enhance my understanding of this I am keen to explore how we project our psychologies on to our surrounding geographies and the subsequent exchange that occurs with it. In this brief paper today, I will illustrate some of these ‘exchanges’, together with the varying thoughts and feelings it triggered, and how our perception of the wall altered as we walked with it. I must add that this marks the first tentative steps in a research project in which I have just begun, so any advice that could help point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. 4|Page Before the Wallk My walking group consisted of three students all of which had only lived in Exeter about half a year and were still finding their feet. Therefore it seemed prudent, with the presence of the wall to observe the relationship between being an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ as studied by the anthropologist Howard F. Stein. I had been partly inspired by a drift undertaken by performance studies academic Carl Lavery and poet Lawrence Bradby who drifted through Northampton, trying to find its lost city gates by following a map from 1696 (Bradby and Lavery, 2007:41). Their original purpose was to locate a lost community silenced by banalisation (ipid, 2007:41); however in the letters they sent to each other afterwards they began to make some fascinating observations, examining the performativity of the city itself and how their walking enhanced this. (Exeter Map, John Hooker, 1597, Genmaps, 2010) 5|Page In our walk, I wanted to isolate a specific geography of the city - the wall - in a bid to see if the performativity observed by Lavery and Bradby could be recognised afresh. In a similar vein to them I chose to use an older map of Exeter, drawn by John Hooker in 1587. However, I also chose to use a guide book, The Great Little EXETER Book by Chips and Sally Barber which features a tour of the city walls. My plan was to be selective with the information found here using it to fill the gaps in the walls whilst trying to avoid what Lawrence Bradby refers to as an “interruption of the senses” (Bradby and Lavery, 2007:47). Finding the Wall Approaching from Sidwell Street, our first point of contact with the city was at the East Gate (now filled with shops) at the beginning of the High Street. It was here that I realised that I didn’t know where the wall actually began. In my head I knew exactly what it looked like, having passed in many times, but I couldn’t place it in a specific location. This I suppose 6|Page is what happens sometimes when you try and isolate a piece of geography from its surroundings through memory, you then have to be able to relocate it. Although perhaps not the best start to a tour, we eventually found the wall hiding behind Princesshay Shopping Centre. Optic to Haptic The beginning of the wall was in fact the preserved remains of Eastern-Angle Tower sheared in half. Adorning the side of it was a plaque, with the following engraved into it: Our first action was to feel the wall, taking in its history with our fingertips. On closer inspection you can clearly see the parts of it ‘repaired by others’. The purplish-grey volcanic rock laid by the Romans and later the Normans, the local slates and white sandstones of the Saxon period, the red sandstone and Heavitree Breccia added in the Middle Ages, and indeed the modern day brickwork that has been added to help preserve it. Each of these time periods had their own distinct texture, part of the fabric of this geological patchwork quilt. 7|Page Standing here briefly feeling the wall, marked what Performance artist and academic Mike Pearson refers to as a movement from the optic to the haptic (Pearson, 2006: 11), from what is observed to what is felt. Overstepping a Boundary We began to walk staying on the inside of the wall with Princesshay to our right, however without conferring we all made a sudden left, passing through a gap in the wall and outside of this city’s boundaries. One of the group, Lucy decided to organise a photo in which we were to be caught in mid-air jumping off a small wall nearby. This little wall became a microcosm of the larger wall behind, and vaulting over it allowed her and us to physically illustrate the freedom and playfulness of overstepping a boundary. It reminded me of a performance artist called Lottie Child who used to run an event called Climbing Club in London, where her and the public would interact with varying geographies in the city by climbing them. I myself felt compelled to climb this wall, to find new possibilities in the city 8|Page and to read this ‘text’ before us. However, as we walked onwards I found that my horizontal reading became far more interesting than my vertical. Dealing with Lack Our next piece of text was isolated from the wall: IN MEMORY MAY 1942 A memorial to an Exeter bombed by the blitz. It made me realise that, we were not the first to attempt to fill in the gaps of the city’s geography. As Carl Lavery queried in his pedestrian performance Mourning Walk “Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack?” (2009:49) We on this walk were not 9|Page simply filling a vacuum but in reality contributing to a myriad of different stories, memories, actions and events that fill the spaces left by the wall. Walking the wall as we did gave us access to some of these in order to form some sort of performance. Trapped in the Map For one of the group, David, a history student, he said that for him the wall was a ‘temporal anchor’, helping him see the Roman Centurions walking along the top of it. This made me realise the possible limitations of the map I was following. By taking it away from the present date I believed that I would be given more freedom to resist the current arrangement of the city. However this consequently meant that I was locked into a specific time (1597), the time of the map. I had an “appointment to keep in the past” as Carl Lavery puts it (2009:31). Lucy said that it felt like being a ‘tourist’ with these ‘histories juxtaposed on the modern city’. A gap, in the buildings lets us move inwards to locate the wall once more. We are near the Cathedral now and filling this gap between the sections of the wall is a small iron bridge, adorned with the inscription: 10 | P a g e “Burnet Patch Esq. Mayor 1814 R. Trewman Esq. Receiver” According to the guide book “In the past, when the wall was complete, a tour was made each year, along the ramparts, to see where repairs were necessary. This was the muralite walk, ‘mur’ coming from the French word meaning wall” (Barber and Barber, 2000:4) and the bridge made sure that this walk would continue uninterrupted. We were by no means the first to reiterate the wall through walking… Writing on the Wall Heading inwards we manage to cut behind the buildings and alongside the wall down to Trinity Green, where many of the victims of the cholera outbreak in 1832 were buried. The wall has grown since we saw it last and towers high above us. The varying histories of brickwork are more obvious here, and lots have written, edited and erased this boundary. In addition to the different brickwork, sections of the wall have iron straining bars which look like giant letter ‘I’s typed into the wall. 11 | P a g e So how does this idea of the wall as a form of text affect De Certeau’s often used notion of walking as writing? Stretching this metaphor further, I prefer to see our walk alongside the wall as a series of annotations made in its margins, which provide a means in which to engage with the wall afresh. Literal footnotes. Tourist/Witness The wall started to shrink again before it became crumbling stone at the foot of the very busy South Street. This was where the South Gate stood, originally a prison and was torn down in 1819. Here we had a criss-crossing of time periods, the wall, the road and our walk. It reminded me of artist Graeme Miller’s site-specific installation Linked that originated from the completion of the M11 Link Road which carved through a part of his old neighbourhood. Now with the assistance of recorded stories of locals heard through headphones, members of the public can perform the neighbourhood afresh by bringing the 12 | P a g e past into the present through a sort of “pilgrimage” as Miller puts it (2005:162). In an interview afterwards he speaks of this transformation of audience members from “tourists” to “witnesses” (2005:163) and this idea of human beings writing themselves into the landscape of telling stories as a means to own space (2005:161). Our wall walk was in a sense an inversion of Linked. Instead of trying to resurrect an old neighbourhood through recorded stories we were trying to resurrect stories from a very present piece of geography. The transition from tourist to witness involves crossing a boundary not a following of it, and for us, that boundary was here as a physical presence. 13 | P a g e Out of the City’s Grasp Across the road we can see the next piece of wall, floating between South Street and Magdalene Street like a loose page. Although we had to dodge traffic to cross the first road, a pedestrian suspension bridge allowed us to walk above the traffic to get to the next section of the wall. This is the Exeter-Yaroslavl Bridge, our second bridge of the walk, built in 1994 as part of the twinned relationship between both cities. What it gives us for the first time is the opportunity to walk along the top of the wall, dissolving the distinction between outsider and insider. However paradoxically, although able to see both sides of the wall, I feel distanced. We see more but reach less, outside of the “city’s grasp” as De Certeau refers to it (1984:92). 14 | P a g e Improvising As we headed downhill towards the quay, to the site of the Water Gate, I realised that I had lost the wall again. So far, the route had been familiar for me, but now I was walking new ground. My role as ‘guide’ of this walk was based on the guidance of a book, a map and a wall; all three of which were currently not helping. I jogged ahead slightly trying to lay the foundations of the walk ahead of the rest of the group. It reminded me of a comparison Carl Lavery made between drifting and that of an actor “improvising through structure” (2007:59), how without the familiar to read, we are encouraged to write, to fill in the gaps. The cobbled path sloped upwards and I realised that we had inadvertently walked on top of the wall. Below us was Criclkepit Mill which we wanted to visit, but I initially felt reluctant to part with the wall once again having only just found it. As we headed down the steps to the water wheel I kept looking behind me, playing grandma’s footsteps with an 1800 year old wall. 15 | P a g e Walking Abroad Having visited the mill, we approached the city again, via the now absent West Gate, and tried to catch up with the wall once more. Taking a right up Bart Street West and heading past the Picture House, we were back on track, now on top of the wall looking in a North-Westerly direction. Below us the River Exe and in the distance the area of St. Davids. This was for all of us one our favourite parts of the walk. Lucy told me afterwards that she liked it because it felt like she was abroad, and Exeter here felt unrecognisable, with this terrace of houses seemingly suspended. If we as walkers on the wall, were outside of the ‘city’s grasp’ then at that moment, Exeter itself became an outsider to everything surrounding it. The wall as well as fortifying it, dislocated it, and therefore one could propose that the areas in which it had gaps were where it felt located. 16 | P a g e Writing in the Wall Following this cliff top path round past Snayle tower we finally reached the North Western corner of the wall. The first thing we saw on the northern side of Exeter was the church yard of Allhallows-on-the-Walls and the catacombs, which leaned up the outside of the wall below us. 11-15 people are effectively buried in the wall here, with some of their names barely legible, eroding away into memory. The wall now towered over us once more. Chasing the Wall To get back to the wall we chose to go via the old North Gate, which involves crossing an iron bridge which spans the valley of the Longbrook. Having crossed the bridge we ducked out of the city again, following the wall uphill, trying to catch its eye as it peeked out at us from behind the houses on Northernhay Street. 17 | P a g e This cat and mouse game ended with the appearance of the familiar Queen Street which ploughed across our path, and we headed across as a group for the final push of the wall walk. We hadn’t seen the wall this clearly in a while and as we walked the little garden paths, the wall began to grow in our presence and at the perimeter of Rougemont Castle it was tallest it had ever been. As we left the gardens behind us and began to hear the sound of the High Street, we realised that the wall had suddenly stopped. It had stayed behind. This suddenness brought the walk to an abrupt end, as we realised that we were back where we started, back on the familiar High Street and back to ‘civilisation’. 18 | P a g e After the Wallk Since our circumnavigation of Exeter, I have come to realise several things. Firstly it has made me reconsider the whole nature of the guided walk, and how it is impossible to lead without following. I had made myself the guide, I organised the group and made the decision to walk the wall, but as soon as we actually began to walk, this role quickly dissipated into that of being a figure slightly more familiar with the area than everyone else. I had the map, but as I’ve illustrated today, this didn’t help me. In fact it lessened the objective of needing to walk the wall back into existence, because it was already here on paper. I also had the guidebook, but it ‘interrupted my senses’ as Lawrence Bradby said it would. I was originally not confident in being able to fill the walls myself, but of course there is plenty of material to be found on this wall firsthand. Whether put their clearly on plaques or on council notice boards, in the histories of the people who were imprisoned within it and those who were buried next to it, in the geology of its construction, our conversations and indeed the thoughts and feelings it aroused within us. As Howard F. Stein put it: “What geography fails to provide, the human imagination fills in” (1987:68). After all the entomology of the word ‘geography’ means ‘earth writing’, and a walking performance is just one way to interpret this script. We followed this wall, but in a sense we tried to encourage it to follow us when we walked between its gaps. So in addition to this synthesis of writing and reading when walking, we have this notion of leading and following. We oscillate between them in a pendulum motion akin to the action of walking itself. I also became aware of the significance of boundaries in site based performances, how like the city wall they can be viewed as a restriction, a container for a performance or as a means in which we feel confident to move beyond them, to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. The wall represents a symbolic territory made concrete, maintained by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ both protecting and restricting ‘us’ from ‘them’. 19 | P a g e “Good fences make good neighbours” (1998:9) as Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall tells us, but why is this? Howard F. Stein proposes a reason as to why human beings feel comfortable in ‘walling themselves’ off, suggesting that when all obstacles are removed the boundaries of the possible expand and imagination becomes reality (1987:55). One could argue then that subconsciously we were not walking in the wall but in fact attempting to map out a territory of imagination, establishing the boundaries of a site that we wanted to become more familiar with, that we would later ‘perform’ through our everyday walking through it. This brings me to a difficult question. Was the wall a fellow performer anthropomorphised by me and the company of walkers or was it –as mentioned frequently throughout this paper- a form of ‘text’ that encouraged us to perform? Either way, there was an exchange here. We gave the wall human qualities, and left our mark (albeit small) on its surface. The wall in turn gave us an objective, a through-line if you will, that allowed us to chart a performance around the city. Its appearances and disappearances from behind buildings were entrances and exits on to this urban stage, the short gaps in its construction were pauses its large ones silences, intervals in which we occupied ourselves, and the moments in which it towered above us illustrated its ability to project. At times we shared a stage, but at others we were kept at a distance, as promenade performers or audience members. This walk for me illustrated the myriad of possibilities the city wall and indeed geography can create for performers. To make PLACE speak louder as performance artist and academic Simon Persighetti once stated (2000:9), but also to find ways to listen to it. To have a dialogue with it, not without it. To conclude, this walk hinted at the performance texts that litter our geographies. The ones we walk over, skim through or miss entirely on our daily navigation through the city. As the ever elusive Ivern Ball once said “Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.” (in Kleiser, 2005:135) 20 | P a g e Bibliography Barber, C. and Barber, S. (2000) The Great Little EXETER Book, Exeter: Obelisk Publications. Bradby, L. and Lavery, C. (2007) ‘Moving Through Place: Itinerant Performance and the Search for a Community of Reverie’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp.41-54. Certeau, M. de. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. Frost, R. (1998) ‘Mending Wall’, in Barlow, A. (ed.) Robert Frost Selected Poems, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Genmaps, (2010) [photograph] Exeter Map, John Hooker, 1597, [Online] http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~genmaps/genfiles/COU_files/ENG/DEV/hooker _exe_1587.htm [16 May 2010] Kleiser, G. (2005) Dictionary of Proverbs, APH Publishing. Lavery, C (2009) ‘Mourning Walk and Pedestrian Performance: History, Aesthetics and Ethics’, in Mock, R. (ed.) Walking, Writing & Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books. Miller, G. (2005) ‘Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk: Re-imagining the Urban Landscape’, NTQ, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 161-165. Persighetti, S. (2000) ‘Wrights & Sites & Other Regions’, in Wrights & Sites (ed.), SiteSpecific: The Quay Documented, Wiltshire: Antony Rowe. Shakespeare, W. (2005) ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, The Library Shakespeare, London: Midpoint Press. Stein, H. F. (1987) Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography, University of Oklahoma Press. Thank you to David, Lucy, Emil and Angela for walking through this with me. 21 | P a g e