Walking the Walking Performances
PAST EVENTS
28 Sep 2023
City Hall
FreeWalking through the city and questioning the meaning, purpose and role of walking as an artistic practice. When Honoré de Balzac published his extraordinary study The Theory of Walking in 1833, he wondered why no one before him had seriously examined the phenomenon of human walking. “Isn’t it curious,” he wrote, “that ever since humans have walked, no one has thought to ask how they walk, whether they walk at all, whether they could walk better, what they do while walking, or whether there might be a better way to reorganize, modify or analyse walking.”
These questions will guide the walk, which focuses on walking as a bodily technique and on walking performances – performative events conceived as walks by performers or audiences who thus become co-performers and participants. Borrowing from the ancient Greek Peripatetic philosophers the idea of developing thought in motion, the project centers on walking as an artistic and critical practice.
Matej Tomažin
Walking through the city and questioning the meaning, purpose and role of walking as an artistic practice. When Honoré de Balzac published his extraordinary study The Theory of Walking in 1833, he wondered why no one before him had seriously examined the phenomenon of human walking. “Isn’t it curious,” he wrote, “that ever since humans have walked, no one has thought to ask how they walk, whether they walk at all, whether they could walk better, what they do while walking, or whether there might be a better way to reorganize, modify or analyse walking.”
These questions will guide the walk, which focuses on walking as a bodily technique and on walking performances – performative events conceived as walks by performers or audiences who thus become co-performers and participants. Borrowing from the ancient Greek Peripatetic philosophers the idea of developing thought in motion, the project centers on walking as an artistic and critical practice.
Professor at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television at the University of Ljubljana, where he teaches theatre history. He is the author of Theories of Contemporary Theatre and Performance (2009), Art in the Time of the Rule of Law and Capital (2016), Theatre of Resistance (2021) and 40 Years I Have Worked: Adaptations of Cankar’s The Bailiff Yerney (2022).
Photo: Matej Tomažin
