The sense of community
The project participants have referred, that one of the most important benefits of the project walking practice is the shared experience of the landscape one of which aspects was the collective singing, walking and other group exercises. One of the participants believes that the creative process accelerates one's acceptance of the places one goes through. She adds
When you're walking and singing together, it's really strong experience in a way. I don't really think it matters what's being sung and it doesn't really matter what group it's in, but it's very “prehistoric” and very strong.
As another participant mentioned, the shared experience in the group creates a “new layer” to the perception of the landscape. The shared experience and synchronized locomotion in a group is one of the adaptation mechanisms in the natural world - for example, coordinating movements of fish may be more efficient in capturing prays and positive social interactions due to synchronization have been observed among macaques (Larsson, Richter, Ravignani 2019). In the human world, this can be experienced in shared singing.
Theatre Węgajty who took part on the project finds the aspect of shared experience and meeting as one of the key points of their work. According to them it is beneficial when the group is diverse and both people who are able to interpret classical compositions and those who have experience with folklore and archaic vocal techniques, amateurs and professionals come together. Therefore, they taught the group the old canons, whose repetitive character, according to them, brings the community together – for example canons of Matthew Locke, Joseph Haydn, Augustin Kubizek or traditional sutartinės from Lithuania. “The canon is something on the borderline between classical compositional music and traditional song associated with oral tradition and anonymous production. This convention has often been adopted by great, ‘non-anonymous’ composers. It can be said that the canon composed as a short, easy-to-remember form, which makes it possible to move away from the score, moves into the realm of oral tradition” (Wacław Sobaszek 2023: 42, author’s translation). This convention of the canon is regarded by the Sobaszeks as a kind of unifying element.
Before the workshop, Wacław Sobaszek invited the participants to bring to the workshop “a text, a poem, prose, a recording of a dream, a sentence they had heard somewhere, a message from the media, an idea they had written down, or a reflection of someone they had met on the street.” They were to “try through traditional and composite music, exercises, and experiments how they would resonate in Prokop Valley, and how the echoes of the valley and the stream, the rocks or the sky would resonate in each of us” (from the correspondence with Wacław Sobaszek, author’s translation). Wacław calls these fragments pebbles, composing a mosaic in which he searches for interconnections and connections with the landscape of the Prokop Valley. Among the themes came reflections of nature, social events, dreams, personal memories – some of which appear in the above video essay.
Being absorbed into the place
The space where our work together takes place is free. It's there for everyone, it doesn't have an owner to deal with, pay and schedule dates with. It means that other partners come into play – the weather, the trees, the sounds of nature and civilisation, the animals, the casual passers-by. We can perceive them distractedly, but they can also come into play and inspire us to take other actions. When I am supposed to come up with a sentence in a certain rhythm, I come out of the birdsong I hear around me.
David Zelinka urges us to perceive the sounds around us as the continuous music that is always there. We enter this stream and flow through the valley as the stream that had deepened it. Passers-by hear our songs and verses or observe our unusual activity. They cannot be identified as our spectators – that would separate their presence from ours. We are here together and each one of us follows his own purpose. The songs inspired by the place and nature are perceived by some as expressing thanks:
Being in the landscape, evocation through space and the desire to sing in the sense that the space will appeal to me and I can give something by singing the song, celebrating its presence, that is something that has a meaning for me. (...) I feel (the experience from the project) is some extension – when I was walking through the landscape and I saw something that drew my attention, I stayed with it and I thanked for the experience, and I found it was possible to thank through the song that could be deeply experienced with the place.
In the warm months we made an improvisation on one of the plains, where the blocks of flats on the horizon remind us of the presence of civilization and we draw on the experience of working together. It can be described as a “performance” in which we do not invite the spectators and therefore we do not have to think about whether our artistic language is readable to anyone. It makes sense to ourselves – and those who observe it can guess its meaning, as they guess the meaning of the movement of animals or the flow of a river.
When we had performances with the Węgajty Theatre in the autumn of 2022 and 2023, the surrounding space came into play in a similar way to performative walks, but it was obvious there were both actors and spectators in the shared place. However, the space between them was not separated between the stage and auditorium, as in the case of theatre inside buildings. Jana Pilátová, an expert in theatre anthropology, considers it a great success in the case of such theatres if the audience manages not to applaud. In the spirit of the Jerzy Grotowski Theatre, she observes that applause deepens the gap between actors and the audience: “We should not want the audience to accept us, we should accept them” (Pilátová 2009: 368). The performance with the Węgajty Theatre, which was influenced by Grotowski’s approach, also does not end with applause –the final performance song takes place in front of the Chaloupka Centre, a little historical cottage in the valley, where spectators are invited for refreshments and an open jam session.