This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate
autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts
and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes
of development, writing and performance.The Crab Walks and Crab Steps
Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial
exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for
childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both
shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke
the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a
performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the
anniversary of his father's death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both
shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores "an
ethics of autobiographical performance". In Tree, the result of a
multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single
square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and
looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making
unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical
practice.The work of all three artists, taken together and separately,
raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality,
subjectivity, and site in performance.
