Tracktivism: Eco-activist walking art as expanded choreography in rural landscape. Issue 2 (1st December 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Allen, Jess
• Is Part Of: Choreographic practices. Volume 10:Issue 2(2019)
• Page Start: 175
• Page End: 195
• Publication Date: 2019-12-01
• Subjects: Dance -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Dance -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Choreography -- Periodicals; 792.82
• DOI: 10.1386/chor_00002_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-5669

Abstract

AbstractThis article offers a reflexive account of my journey from dance into walking art through a methodological examination of tracktivism: the rural, eco-activist, pedestrian performance practice I have developed over the past eight years. My dancer's perception of walking art in the sculptural tradition had always been as choreography on an expanded scale: bringing attention to spatial patterns in landscape through the 'stylus' of the walking body. Here I examine the ways in which the growing oeuvre of tracktivist works have employed this choreographic device to (re)frame walking art as eco-activist performance. I consider how an art walk may be shaped in such a way as to foreground the spatial nature of ecological dis/connection in working agricultural landscapes, giving examples from my practice. I also propose that as patterns or routes expressly designed to be walked, the performer's material body becomes a 'measurant' to calibrate human scale against planetary scale. Thus the practice might be perceived to function as emancipated eco-activist choreography that offers a means of revealing and embracing our ecological enmeshment with/in complex more-than-human flows.