Walk/count/follow/lost - a study in patch dynamics

A live performance commissioned for Fringe Arts Bath 2017 Arts Festival, as part of 'Embodied cartographies' curated by Fay Stevens of University College London. "Walk/count/follow/lost- A study in patch dynamics" took place at Walcott Chapel and grounds of cemetery, Bath, 26 May - 11 June 2017. It is a live (walking) performance that embraces the experience and implications of limits that walking both confronts and seeks liberation from. Walk/Count/Follow/Lost seeks to elevate the concept of patch dynamics, which is the idea of pockets of heterogeneity existing in the midst of homogeneity. Walk/count/follow/lost extends in scale and scope spaces limits, colliding with both an incidental and targeted audience. Counting ones footsteps aloud while walking a given space in four orientations. Recorded simultaneously and then played back and followed. In doing so the space measured through walking becomes instructions to reiterate that space. The logic of the walking act and space instead see that logic unravel as new orientations and re-navigations evolve that will both displace logic and reconfigure that meeting of site, its audience and performer. The absurd sense of being led astray (by oneself), ‘off grid' looks to debate the organised gesture that is walking, where those leading becoming led perhaps in search of what De Certeau called the elsewhere. This is the place beyond the homogenous, ordered, and commoditised albeit paradoxically taking the form of someone appearing to be led by his or her mobile phone. The resulting performance will be to bring about a ripple-like shift beyond the generic; an emergent patch dynamic from within the norm