Art practice
This article refers to an arts-based research project “Walking as a liquid constant in urban space and landscape” which has an interdisciplinary overlap and relates to the field of theatrology and environmental studies. I organised the project within my doctoral studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and it lasted for sixteen months (September 2022 – December 2023). I explored the process of mutual influence of “inner landscape” (Cílek 2002: 5) and “outer landscape” through the process of walking and singing – specific modes of communication between these two aspects of dwelling. As mentioned above, when abstracting the principles of the mind movement and the changes of the landscape, similar patterns appear (Gregory Bateson’s “pattern that connects”, Bateson 2006). My questioning raised from the mutual changes in our perception (inner landscape) and transformative processes in the outer landscape. I focused to these questions:
1. How is singing connected with experiencing the landscape? What is the quality brought by this experience?
2. What aspects of the folk songs are transferable independently of changes in landscape and lifestyle?
3. What is the shared experience of the landscape with the songs we sing along the walking process?
The project was open for both Academy students and external participants. The group consisting of eight members (including myself) was formed specifically for this project. Some of them were engaged in art, others in environmental studies or just interests in the target field – landscape, theatre, folk and ancient songs.
The practice took several forms: either performative group walks, which lasted about 3 – 4 hours, or weekend-long events, which included, in addition to walks, also theatrical exercises and reflexive work on the theme of the landscape. On average, one of these events took place about once a month, depending on the possibilities of the participants. The practice took place in the landscape of the Prague natural park Prokop Valley as well as in the surrounding urban landscape. We brought songs to the landscape – Czech, Moravian and Slovak songs, ancient canons, but also author songs. Apart from signing, the group also worked with its own texts, inspired by the environment. The practice was also intended to lead to several performances that took place in the landscape. The theatrical excercises and performative walks were prepared by David Zelinka, director, stage manager and performer, who runs the Alternative Centre Chaloupka in Prokop Valley.
In autumn 2022 and 2023 there was a seven-days workshop for both long-term project participants and other candidates lead by Polish theatre group Węgajty, called after a village in northern Poland. Theatre Węgajty is led by Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek from 1982. An important part of their performances and workshop practice are old traditional songs and dances, some of which they learned from the local people from different ethnic groups. They connect the tradition with the contemporary world through a living cultural heritage, which in their conception is not preserved into rigidly kept folklore forms, but on the contrary, they develop the deep essence of folk culture in the existing cultural context. The theatre prepared two workshops for the group which ended up in performative events in Prokop Valley. First of them took place in November 2022, the second in October 2023 and the theme and name of both was Passage – echoes. The Sobaszeks followed up on the idea of the events they practiced during the pandemic in the forest behind their theatre in Węgajty: Listening, and learning about natural phenomena through their own voice, movement and dance. They used various elements to achieve this: traditional and composed music, exercises, and experiments. They transferred their experience from Poland to the environment of the Prokop Valley.
In addition, I made my own exploratory walks where I mapped the changes of the landscape of Prokop Valley and its surroundings and some places I captured in their changes with the help of photographs of project participants and photographer David Bruner.
The methodological frame of the project was multi-sited ethnography according to George Marcus (Marcus 1998; Marcus & Fischer 1999). The methodology allows to abstract from traditional single-site ethnography and put the problem into an interdisciplinary perspective. Here I interpret data collected in the mode “follow the people”, “follow the life or biography” and “the strategically situated (single-site) ethnography”, which determined the spatial aspect of the research. The data was collected by autobiographical fieldnotes and semi-structured interviews with the participants, who were asked to take fieldnotes by drawing mental maps (Lynch 1960) of the environment, reflecting the perception of the space (inner landscape). The participants contributed to the shared scale of feelings, which were expressed by colours in the individual mental maps. The maps could be though compared to find out if the shared experience in a particular place had any commonalities. In this article, however, I will focus on the musical aspect of practice, not on the perception of specific places. The experiences of the participants will be discussed both in the frame of local ethnographical context and in the larger context of the existing phenomenon.
