Why Walk?

Over the duration of a day we intend to walk the route of the Tokyo marathon, which starts at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and finishes at Tokyo Big Sight, and covers 26 miles and 385 yards (42.195 km). Before the event we will invite people to join us for all, or for parts, of the walk, as well as inviting people we meet during the walk to join us.

Our intention is to facilitate a dialogue between each other and between us and other walkers through the act of walking. We hope to chart the transformation of our body and our perception of ourselves, the ‘other’, time, space and the city of Tokyo.

We will walk the ‘official’ marathon route, carefully selected by the organisers to present Tokyo’s key tourist sites and its sites of power. Through focusing on the small details – such as the fleeting moments of human contact or dialogues we might have - whilst moving at our own walking pace, we will experience the route in a different way to the marathon runner speeding through the city.

We are interested in questions such as: what does it mean for a body to exist in the city and in its visible and invisible structures? What happens to the experiential consciousness of the walker moving through the city? If a marathon is an event that ‘recalls the glory of ancient Greece’, what can we say about the contemporary (‘globalised’) body running through the cities’ architectural monuments of power? What drives such an act of endurance in someone? How can we facilitate genuine dialogue and exchange with strangers? Can we feel at ‘home’ somewhere – such as Tokyo – where we are constantly experiencing the sense of being a foreigner-tourist or a sense of isolation?

We are interested in memory and the body in relation to space and time, and in seeing what the action of walking allows in terms of what stories, experiences or confessions we tell, and what others tell us. Is it possible for us to subvert or make an intervention into space and place through small actions and gestures? Viewing the body as a tiny part of the complex city environment, we will ask how we can map a space that is alien to us.

We will research the marathon route before the event in order to allow the site to speak to us and to gather traces, histories, and ghosts, and perform small actions and gestures in the site. We will then attempt to recall the traces, histories, and gestures that we found in the site during the marathon-walk itself. During the walk we will leave traces behind – such as rice for the birds, or simply by greeting those we meet along the way. We will document the walk, our encounters and the dialogue, and develop an ongoing work that maps the memory of the site and the body in the site.

Rebecca Woodford-Smith (performer/writer) often explores notions of history and finding ways of using the body to give form to memory in her work. She collaborates with Gekidan Kaitaisha (Tokyo) (2004 – present), and she co-founded Memopia Theatre (2007). She is pursuing a practice-based doctoral enquiry into contemporary performance making and composition (Middlesex University). http://rebeccawoodfordsmith.weebly.com/index.html

Visual/performance artist Mikyoung Jun Pearce has collaborated with Gekidan Kaitaisha since 2004, and currently lectures at Kaywon School of Art, South Korea. Her work progresses from a seemingly random collection of thoughts, images and footage taken from everyday life, from which she builds connections and associations, bridging the cracks that litter contemporary living.