‘Walk with me, talk with me’¹

[1] The title is taken from a line from a 1972 song by The Four Tops, later popularised as an American expression of sympathy and trust (Horodner 2002, 10), and is noted here as the heading this discussion will take in an exploration of walking's convivial potentiality.

: the art of conversive wayfinding

Abstract

This article considers three guided walks that conduct participants' attention to landscapes through whispering voices in the ear or through the live voice of the performer: Graeme Miller's guided walk Linked; Platform's ‘operatic audio walk’ And While London Burns; and Tim Brennan's alternative tour of quotations, Luddite Manoeuvre. Each walk employs various strategies to conduct a convivial way of interacting with and knowing place: attunement through kinaesthetic, synesthetic and sonesthetic perception; sharing ‘earpoints’ and ‘viewpoints’ with another through intimate or conversational conviviality; use of present tense and the tension between the real-time present and a past present; and the use of particular rhythmic structures of narrative paces and paths to encourage experiential, creative and critical states of witness appropriate to the content and context of the walks. This form of performance is explored for its convivial potentiality as a way of knowing and expressing people's perceptions and experiences of places through a sociable, conversational or dialogic mode of interaction and a particular mode and methodology of guided walking is defined as conversive wayfinding.

Notes

[1] The title is taken from a line from a 1972 song by The Four Tops, later popularised as an American expression of sympathy and trust (Horodner 2002, 10), and is noted here as the heading this discussion will take in an exploration of walking's convivial potentiality.

[2] Where in its common usage a percipient refers to a person who perceives the world through their senses, elsewhere I have defined a percipient as ‘a particular kind of participant whose active, embodied and sensorial engagement alters and determines [an artistic] process and its outcomes. This mode of participation, which is led by percipients’ worldviews, is distinguished from another mode of participation, which is more passive, pre-determined and/or pre-directed. It is proposed that the percipient … directs the process as they go along perceiving the encompassing environment from their bodily encounter within it; while doing so, they are making place’ (Myers 2008, 172-3).