Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton

Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton


Sara Wookey’s walking performances prompt encounters with the city as a form of memory. For two days she invites people to enact a walk through the city. However, it is not necessarily the walk that is the arena of this “performance”. It is in the informal conversations with walkers after their trip that facilitate a performance in and through retrospect. The remembering and telling of events becomes exaggerated and personalized through informal exchange of memoirs. The city, in this case becomes one of memory constructed through future recollections of past experiences.

I start at the gallery. On the reception desk there is a sign that gives me an option to choose one of two papers that are folded and stapled. I choose the one that says “Directed Tour”. It invites me to take a 45 minute walk through the city. The directions tell me to walk continuously and if I reach a red crosswalk light, to cross the other side. So I leave the gallery and the tour begins.

I wander out of the gallery and walk towards Jasper Street. I relax. I have time. I give myself over to the directive constraints of walking for 45 minutes. This is strangely comforting. For the last week I haven’t had the time to wander the city. Now I relax and feel the sun on my skin and hear the conversations from people I pass by. I find myself stumbling upon the river shortly after walking through the downtown core. I walk up and down a steep set of stairs and feel my heart rate race. My mind wanders and I forget that I partaking in “a performance”. When I get back to the gallery, I realize that I have not followed the directions since I often stopped at stoplights. I think about it some more and realize that standing still is to be in motion, so perhaps I haven’t unwittingly corrupted the directions.


Walking Edmonton, Sara Wookey
Video by Tagny Duff

During the walk I hold my video camera and put it on 6 second interval record. I am not sure if I will even use the footage. I forget about the camera. When I look at it later I find it amusing that it evidences my stillness while waiting for the street lights to turn green. The pixellated quicktime video creates a different sense of rhythm than the one I experienced on the walk.

When I return, I enter back through the gallery. Sara has set up a map of Edmonton with an index of different coloured pins, each corresponding to particular signification. An orange pin connotes when something memorable occurred. A red one is noted as referencing “where you felt desire”, and a white one marks when you stopped performing the walk. People have indexed their experiences according to these markers and pinned them on the map to correlate where “it” happended. Participants have also hand written thoughts, drawings and notes based on their responses to walks onto the wall of the gallery.

My immediate response was to resist the placing of my experiences on the map. Why qualify, archive and index my sensations on a grid? For some time, that I cannot fully remember, I was off the grid. Drifting. I wandered. I was walking in the city following constraints facilitated by the artist. However, other events and sensations occurred outside of those parameters. I thought about my mother, wondered if my visa payment had gone through yet, enjoyed the sunny warm weather, watched as two people walked slowly down the long steps to the river while complaining about low back pain, and noticed a man sleeping on the bench at the river lookout point.

I meet with Sara at a coffee shop and we continue to talk about my experiences and thoughts about the walk. She tells me that she has been conducting informal follow up discussions with most of the walkers/participants. Similar to our talk, the other conversations she has had tend to be casual and informal. Stories are told and exchanged. This is as much a part of the walk, it seems, as the walk itself. The remembering of the walk becomes the dislocated site of “the performance”. The ritualistic exchange of conversation between strangers and acquaintances becomes, not only the performance, but also the performance of art histories. Oral tradition and the telling of events as one remembers them is often a means of reproducing and creating memory of performance. The construction of personal histories becomes another critical dimension of this work. The impossibility of recording events as we might think they happened and to qualify them as facts is exposed in these dialogues. This oral memory is a kind of nomadic archive that cannot be inserted into horizontal and vertical measurements outlined on a predetermined grid.

Opening night at Latitude 53

From left to right, Juliana Babaras, Todd Janes, Irene Loughlin and Tagny Duff

Last night was my first opportunity to meet and greet all the artists and local folks at the very stylish artist-run centre, Latitude 53.

Local Edmonton-based artists Tanya Lukin-Linklater, T.L. Cowan & Mickey Valley, and Lance Mclean open the festival with a diverse series of performances. The artists provide a local context- a necessary component for the theme of the city.

















Tanya Lukin-Linklater, photo Jessica Tse

Tanya Lukin-Linklater, a local performance artist featured in last year’s festival who incorporates Alutiq dance, performance and installation, starts the evening with a performance that touchs upon the current issue of homelessness in Edmonton. Given the current boom in Alberta’s economy and the mass migration of people across the country moving to find employment, the reality of rising rental costs, and reduced funding for missions and shelters, (issues often underreported in the media) the performance is quite pertinent. Her performance takes place on the outdoor patio of Latitude 53. Carrying garbage bags and blankets, she walks to a water faucet and sits down next to it. Taking a handkerchief, she turns on the water and dips it in before wiping her body with the damp cloth repetitively. This, she later told me, referenced an article she recently read in the paper about a women living in Edmonton who has been sharing her outdoor faucet with people who do not have access to clean water. Soon, she turns the water off and stands up, grabs the garbage bags and walks to the other side of the patio. Laying down a tarp, she then proceeds to take out “Five Alive” 2 litre juice boxes from the garbage bags to build a wall around her in the shape of an igloo. Lying down in this makeshift shelter, she moves in such a way to break the wall, sitting up stiffly and issuing low, truncated throat singing.

T.L.Cowan, photo Jessica Tse

T. L. Cowan expands on the spoken (and unspeakable) rituals expressed in the minefield of personal relationships enacted in urban centres. A staple of the spoken word festival circuit, Cowan presents a provocative three-piece monologue with soundscapes by Mickey Valley. Cowan smashes through sexual stereotypes and embraces the subtle and vast modes of sexual behaviour, intimate relations founded on fear, obsession and mania. Cowan delivers three separate, yet interrelated, carefully crafted monologues. They intertwine humour with explicit observations about the struggles embedded in maintaining and developing relationships with friends, families and lovers in various urban contexts. She later tells me that such risky content is not welcome in other spoken word festivals where audiences expect artists to follow conventions of entertainment culture. Cowan notes that audiences at performance festivals are open to experiencing discomfort and fear and are willing to subvert expected conventions of audience behaviour- such as mandatory clapping at “the end” of a performance. (Before she started the performance, Cowan asked the audience to refrain from clapping in between the three sets of monologues).

Lance McLean, photo Jessica Tse

Also exploring rhythms of fear and provocation, Lance Mclean places the audience in the role of participant. As we walk into the gallery, we see a body with its head encased by a white plinth. The audience is invited to use a large handsaw to cut through the plinth on a line located (dangerously) near the covered head. The first cut takes time. Audience members take turns sawing. The relations among the participants shift as the energy levels ebb and flow. Some choose to help hold the plinth to aid the process of sawing. Others egg people on to share the labour. Most stand by and watch closely. Once the first half of the plinth is sawed, the cell phone in the bodys’ (Lance’s) back pocket rings. Todd Janes grabs it and answers. A voice tells him to ask people to cut on the second line marked on the plinth. Some members of the audience take action and grab additional plinths and set up a makeshift sawhorse to help speed the process of cutting through the second line. When that is done, people clap, somewhat grateful that the process is over. Then a planted participant proceeds to direct the body (with the head still in the plinth) to lie on the floor, as he continues to cut very dangerously close to the head. So close, in fact, that I am seriously concerned that my first aid classes are going to come in handy. There is a moment when I think that it is my responsibility to stop the process for the sake of Lance’s safety—yet, I do nothing. I watch as Lance’s head is freed from the plinth, and he walks out of the gallery.

The sense of suspension, impending accident and of a lag in time proliferates all the events. A fitting prelude for the rest of the festival perhaps. As an audience member I experience and feel the affects of the performances. I hold my breath. I shift the weight of my body while sitting, standing and leaning. I strain to watch. I am uncomfortable- in a productive sense. When Tanya sings, the hair on my arms stands up. I feel sick. When T.L. talks about being obsessed with pain and trauma, I uncomfortably shift my sitting position. When Lance puts himself in such danger, I experience back pains. At this point, time takes on a different kind of duration. It speeds up and slow down. My concentration shifts from intellectual focus to abstract sensations.

My memory of conversations and details that occurred from last night are not so clear. In retrospect, the evening is becoming something else. I know I have forgotten details and reconstructed events according to my faulty and fragile memory. (In fact, my short term memory is notoriously bad—but thankfully I have a vivid long term memory. Not a useful quality for immediate blogging, though). This lag in memory plays a major role in documentation and writing on performance in general. Things get omitted, forgotten, overlooked and, ultimately, recreated. This fact, I am sure, will be ever present in upcoming posts through the next nine days of the festival.