In a 1934 lecture, Marcel Mauss said: "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema."
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don't walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don't walk normally.
There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.
For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists - Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith - found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on:
prostheses waddling Butoh built-up shoes walking in pain bad legs vertigo falling (and fallen) places hubris bad walks scores for falling down walking carefully disappointment.
This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about srumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.
As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body's natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the 'grounds' that tripped you up."
Alyson, Hallett: - Dr Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet. Her collections include On Ridgegrove Hill (Atlantic Press), Suddenly Everything (Poetry Salzburg), The Stone Library (Peterloo Poets), Towards Intimacy, (Queriendo Press). Co-authored books include 6 Days in Iceland (Dropstone Press) and 365 (Agre Press). Alyson is a Hawthornden Fellow, and she was the UK's first poet to be resident in a geography department at the University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus with an award from the Leverhulme Trust. Alyson has also published a book of short stories, The Heart's Elliptical Orbit (Solidus Press), a play for Radio 4, Dear Gerald, drama for Sky Television, Agony, an audio-diary for Radio 4, Nature: Migrating Stones, and academic research into relationships between poetry, poet and landscape, Geographical Intimacy (Amazon). Collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians, scientists is core to her work: she has a poem carved into a pavement in Bath; text etched into a library window in Bristol; poetry carved into a guide stone in the Peak District; words carved into an installation of boulders at Falmouth University. She has received several awards from Arts Council England, enabling her to create and curate her international poetry-as-public-art project, The Migration Habits of Stones. She has sited five stones with poetry carved into them (by letter carver Alec Peever) in England, Scotland, U.S.A. and Australia. Alyson is an Advisory Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund and a visiting lecturer at Falmouth University and UWE. More details of her work can be found at: www.thestonelibrary.com
Phil, Smith: - Dr Phil Smith is a prolific writer, performer, urban mis-guide, dramaturg [for TNT Munich], artist-researcher and academic. He has written or co-written over 100 professionally produced plays, and created and performed in numerous site-specific theatre projects, often with Exeter-based Wrights & Sites, of which he is a core member. He has collaborated more recently with choreographers Melanie Kloetzel, Siriol Joyner and Jane Mason. He is a site artist for Tracing the Pathway's Groundwork project in Milton Keynes. He is Associate Professor (Reader) in the School of Humanities and Performing Arts at Plymouth University. Phil has published papers in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Performance Research, Cultural Geographies, and New Theatre Quarterly, co-authored a range of Mis-Guides with his fellow members of Wrights & Sites, and written/co-written many other books including: On Walking ...and Stalking Sebald; Walking's New Movement; Enchanted Things; Mythogeography; Counter-Tourism: The Handbook; A Sardine Street Book of Tricks; Walking, Writing and Performance; A Footbook of Zombie Walking and the novel Alice's Dérives in Devonshire. Fuller details of his work can be found at: www.triarchypress.net/smithereens
