11 SCORES/WALKS PRODUCED AT BKN

1

October 24, 2023 

Psychic Broadcast

Group Walking Score

I announced to the group that I would begin broadcasting a walking score to them all psychically as we walked. Here is what I told them psychically:

Pretend this is a planet that you have just landed on. You don’t know when you put your foot down from step to step what the ground’s reaction will be. It might be like quicksand and swallow you up, it might be alive and cry out in pain, it might emit a cloud of spores or a strong smell… As you take these careful steps, ask yourself why you are on the planet. What is the planet’s purpose? Continue moving through space like this until some kind of sound acts as an alarm and wakes you from this dreamy state.

The broadcast ended when Ami’s phone rang.

7

October 27, 2023

BENT

Score Development for Solo Performance on November 5, 2023 at Evaporate Live Art Festival (Boston, USA) 

This is a written transcription of the gestures of Catherine Bent, a water diviner at work, in Cornwall (UK) as captured by British Pathé in 1954.

The full video file is one minute, nineteen seconds long, but only Bent’s gestures while in movement have been transcribed.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fyVOd1pNrk)

The transcription of Bent’s gestures will be used to develop choreography for a future durational performance, probably slowed down and combined in different ways. A small prop has been made to mimic ones used by Bent and the object has been left on BKN campus for the future BKN permanent art collection. [Artist: Hey There Kapplow; Title: Bent’s Tool; Materials: plastic-coated 1.2mm steel wire; found plastic tape; local dirt; Dimensions: approximately 75 x11 cm; Year: 2023.]

Starting with right foot, Bent takes three loose, but high-kneed, marching steps. Her right arm is stretched out but relaxed at shoulder height with the first step, then drops with second step, then raises above shoulder at a relaxed, approximately 70° angle. At end of third step, legs are aligned. Right arm and right side of body stiffen, and arm abruptly shoots back a little (maybe 5°?) behind the head, hand sharply bent at wrist. Whole body arches backwards, while right leg moves forward and then her body twists left, pulling right leg to walk in that direction. Arm jerks back and forth above head pointing to the left. Head tilts towards arm, and then whole body shifts in the direction where the arm is pointing. All movement is tight and jerky, straining diagonally across the left leg and raised right arm. Throughout, left arm is slightly raised above left leg, varying with movement between a 15°-25° angle. Right arm flails five times before this clip ends.

In next clip, which is closer up and from another angle—a front shot—it is clear that her left hand holds a collection of stiff wires with a piece of fabric twisted into the top of each one. Marker flags. It may be the same action as in previous shot, shot by a second camera. From this angle it is easier to see the right arm, shoulder, and right half of upper body swinging and the jerkiness and stumblingness of the steps. Head follows arm, looking at hand, until body reorients. Fingers on right hand don’t stiffen until she turns and starts moving in the direction that the hand points.

In the next clip, she stumbles forward out of the walk and leans over, bends smoothly at the waist, and puts a wire flag in the ground. When she bends, her hands lead. The left hand is in front of the right on the wire and she inserts the wire into the ground with her hands smoothly and quickly, even when her feet stumble. After she places the wire in the ground, she stands up normally, then her right hand reaches forward and out a little (maybe a 30° from leg) and then she jerks slightly again, her whole upper body rippling back and forth, and then leans forward again to place the next flag. Between this one and the next flag, she stands, looks around and lifts her right hand like it’s holding a faucet handle, and then as the hand moves, she follows it, up over her head, and then diving down to the ground like a swim stroke. She touches the ground in a spot and then puts the next flag smoothly in.

In the next clip, she takes a string out of her pocket. Wiggles it over the ground pulling between both hands, with fingers tense, at about nose-level, while lifting her right leg a little bit and then puts it down and looks over at a man who hands her a flag to insert in the ground at that spot.

In the next clip, she does her arm circling/raising thing, and then stops short almost like taking a bow: she stumbles out of her divining state in one step and opens her arms at thigh-waist level as if presenting something or curtseying. In the rest of this clip and the following, she gestures normally to some farmers who put a pipe in the ground in order to access the water she has found.

The score for today is to perform an approximation of Bent’s divining gestures by feel, first at a pace similar to hers, to practice them, and then much slower once I feel I have a grip on them. I’ll practice on BKN campus first and then try to move it to other areas over the next few days. Will add notes as work progress.

***

(Oct 28) Spent an hour+ practicing these movements outside on uneven terrain, trying to inhabit them more physically. Some questions that came up are about details:

Q: What shape exactly does her hand take when it starts pointing? What does her thumb do?

A: It’s hard to tell from video. Seems like maybe thumb stays straight. Also, it looks like often her hand is bent above the palm, not at the wrist, and sometimes the fingers separate a bit, other times they are together. This changes things some. Her arm is not always over her head either. Often just at shoulder height.

Q: Why is the drop forward to install flag so deep?

A: Because flag wire actually goes fairly deep into the ground. Also, wrist holding flags turns backwards and then inserts flag.

Q: Feels like there are missing gestures.

A: Yes, she does a kind of wave/dip with her arm a bit. She always uses right hand. Also forgot to lift leg with string-wiggle, and the bowing kind of hand gesture…

Trying to perform the actual movements through space either at Bent’s pace, or slowed down, felt too close to imitating some kind of movement shaped by physical disability. I’m concerned about it being misread. So instead, I focused in more on the individual gestures and on the process of feeling my way through and into them as an effort to understand what Bent is experiencing—as an effort to replicate my way into some experience of the kind of embodied knowledge she has. I’m considering changing the title of the piece to “Getting Bent” instead of “BENT” and having it focus on my working my way into these gestures instead of on my re-performing them. The difference being that instead of performing an interpretation of her gestures, I would be performing (or really just showing in public) my own efforts at grasping them—not just physically, but their sources—how they arise in and move through her body. How they resolve, what happens in between them. All (on my part) in the interest of understanding what it is to embody intuition so deeply that it abruptly moves your body out of the ordinary flow of everyday motion…

***

(Oct 29) Practiced on the beach, at Marum, when I went back to re-record audio in the bathhouse, and it turns out sand is the perfect surface for this work. Also started adding the curtsey-like movement, stumbling into it as she does. It feels like a really weird moment in the arc of her gestures. Like it comes from somewhere unrelated to anything else. I wish I could download the video so that I could slow it down and understand this movement better. I also need to learn the gestures she makes at the farmers better. At one point while practicing I looked up and saw three grey swans and a sailboat watching me. I had thought I wasn’t very visible stumbling around on the beach with my arm up in the air, but then realized I was wearing my reflective vest. Maybe I will wear it for the real performance. There are interesting class (not to mention gender!) dynamics at work in the footage, along with the fact that she is kind of selling her capacity to intuit. I keep feeling these kinds of questions rising up in me: if she was living now, would Bent identify as a she? I read her body language (when she is not in the state of divining) and clothing as pretty queer, but that could just be because she is a little bit outside of the norm more generally. Is she working class? Power-dynamic-wise, she seems very authoritative in how she gestures at the farmers, in a way that makes her at least their equal, but maybe that’s because they need her services. She also seems very unfazed by the press. When I can get online, I need to look closely at the background of the image of her at home to see what more I can learn from it.

There are only a few images of Bent available online. I've uploaded one here (stolen from Getty!) It's my favorite because her fingertips line up with the trees. In another image, she chooses to be photographed reading and is described as living with her cat. Her home has books on the shelves and an oriental carpet. A radio. A little bit of art on the walls.

This project is making me want to go to Cornwall to see if I can find more information about her. There is not much accessible online, even in the Cornwall deeds registry.

***

(Oct 30) Practiced in the rain at dusk on the ploughed-up field at Dragsviksstigen. It’s a place I saw, and it intuitively felt like someplace a bit closer to the kind of environment where Bent actually worked: the sense of a just-worked field, cover crop seed scattered in the mucky, wet tractor tracks… Nothing special happened… I worked little bit on facial expression and body jerks and ripples, also at protecting muscles. Next, I will really need to work on duration…

I have been looking at her facial expressions in some of the still images available. With the tension in her hands and body, and twisted up facial expressions, I was assuming she was being pulled, and was in some pain or discomfort until being released from kind of the grip of the thing. But today, back at BKN, for just a few minutes, I tried to practice a kind of jerk-ripple her body makes, and it had kind of an orgasmic twitch vibe to it when I felt like I had gotten it right, which made me wonder: what if her experience of being in the grip of the divining pull is actually something that is pleasurable to her rather than uncomfortable? What happens performatively if you read it that way? How does that change my interpretation of her identity when at rest?

This resonates with something I’ve been thinking about intuition more generally—where in some ways our strongest experiences of the intuitive is in the realm of experiencing sexual tension between ourselves and others (though also aggression tension!) Attraction/repulsion is maybe the most common day-to-day experience of intuition, though obviously full of cultural biases, for me it has always been a pathway towards new knowledge…

Readings:

“Walking Iutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through Moving and Making”

Antonia Aitken

in Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7; pp 133-150, 2023

Editors: A Lascziik et al.

“A View of the Woods”

Flannery O’Connor

in Everything That Rises Must Converge, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1965

“Suriashi as a ceremonial, subversive act”

Ami Skanberg Dahlstedt

in Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking’s New Movements, the Conference, Triarchy Press UK, 2020

Editors: Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind & Phil Smith

“Lacan’s Concept of Mirror Stage”

Nasrullah Mambrol, on https://literariness.org/2016/04/22/lacans-concept-of-mirror-stage/

Retrieved October 29, 2023

2

October 24, 2023

The Half-Narcissus

Group Walking Score

This walk was site responsive. It was initiated on a stone outcropping where the waves from the sea crashed against, up, and onto the rocks. There were small and medium sized pools of seawater in natural concave indentations in the rock. The pools reflected the sky, and when we leaned over them, our own reflections. I offered these instructions for moving around the landscape of the rocks, which were sometimes slippery:

Find yourself in every pool, but don’t fall in the sea.

3

October 24, 2023

I Have Always Been Good at Untangling Knots

Solo Walk, Audio Recorded

This piece was site specific. The performance involved walking backwards around a picnic table on a coastline, whispering about 'time-knots' (Dipesh Chakrabarty) to the place where my father's father is from on the other side of the sea. The audio from this will be played backwards in a future performance.

4

October 24, 2023

Gendered Pacing

Solo Walk, Audio Recorded*

This walk was site responsive. It consists of two audio recordings of me pacing first in the men's and then in women's changing rooms at Marum beach. The two tracks were assembled together to offer a binaurally non-binary pacing experience for others to use in the same or other gender-divided spaces where they want to ruminate by foot.

*But I’m not fully happy with audio. My pants made a sound that I do not like, so I felt I needed to re-record this but I have not processed the audio yet, so this is the version with pants-noise.

6

October 26, 2023

Not Walking

Group Walking Score

This score was context specific. On “Sharing Night,” instead of giving a digital presentation about my art practice, I invited the group to Do Nothing Together with me for 15 minutes. During that time, we did not walk.

Since we were doing nothing, it was not possible to take pictures. Instead, please enjoy this image of some lichen and moss that has more or less erased the text on a gravestone. It seems a good illustration of what the long term impact of doing nothing might look like.

9

October 29, 2023

Experiment #34

Group Walking Score

This is a score that I wrote as a visiting artist at Massachusetts College of Art, in 2015 or 2016 and I have guided experiences using it with many groups since then. I am not comfortable publishing it to be used by groups without my presence because some very intense things have happened to members of groups I’ve led through it, and I’m superstitious that something bad could happen to someone because of the score if it gets too far from my direct guidance, but if you are interested in following it alone or with a friend (it’s best done with more than one person) you can contact me through this platform or my website (www.heatherkapplow.com) and I will share it with you. I have written my report on my experience of it this time below, and you should be able to find reports on the experience from other participants in BKN Walking as Practice on the following related pages. Photo here is taken by Jordan Rowe, documenting a moment of his experience of the walk.

Ami: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454859 

Aurike: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454863

Dianne: https://hipsync.com.au/diannereid/experiment-34/?mibextid=Zxz2cZ

Gerthard: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454861 

Jordan: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454862

11

October 30, 2023

Dump Walk

 Group Walking Score

This was a context-specific, house-group walk.

Put on a reflective vest. Grab a bag from the kitchen or outside. Or just be a companion. Walk 600 meters along the road past the church to the dumpsters. Talk and laugh a lot on the way. Empty bags into the correct dumpsters. Don’t worry if milk gets on the dumpster. The rain, the rain, will wash it away. Walk back, imitating the things along the side of the road, laughing and talking.

5

October 26, 2023

Getting Cardboard at the Liquor Store

Solo Walking Score

1)    Walk one minute to the bus stop.

2)    Take the bus seventy minutes to the nearest town big enough to have a walk-in liquor store.

3)    Have a conversation with one person on the bus, until they say something that makes it make sense to stop talking.

4)    Stop talking.

5)    Look out of the bus window.

6)    Think about windows and how they act as liminal space between contained things and uncontained things, reminding us of how there is both very little difference and a lot of difference between contained and uncontained things. Think about how bodies are and are not like windows.

7)    On arrival in the town, set phone timer for sixty-five minutes.

8)    Find and use a public toilet. If possible, wait in line to use it. If possible, pet a dog while waiting in line.

9)    Find a group of teenagers that is in motion. Try to discover where they are going. Follow them until it is no longer possible to follow them.

10)  Stop following them.

11)  Go to the grocery store. Buy one-third more food than you need, out of an irrational fear of scarcity rooted in early childhood malnourishment. Recognize the behavior as irrational but do not correct it. Accept that there is irrationality in your being.

12)  Try to find a liquor store without asking anyone for help.

13)  Give up.

14)  Ask someone for help. Follow their instructions. If they don’t work, ask someone else.

15)  Find the liquor store.

16)  See that you have four minutes left on your timer. Choose wine in under three minutes based on lowness of price, place of origin, year, and the depth of the divot in the bottom of bottle.

17)  Take at least two minutes to check out so that your alarm goes off while you are making your purchase.

18)  Tell the person at the register that the alarm is to remind you to ask for a piece of cardboard.

19)  Ask for a piece of cardboard.

20)  Walk slowly out of the store.

21)  When you are out of sight of the store window, run to catch the bus home.

8

October 28, 2023

Torch Walk

Group Walking Score

This was not my score. It was the score of the neighborhood.

Obtain an extremely well-made torch, that is a thick wooden dowel, wrapped (maybe?) in sheets of paraffin. Light it from a candle on the ground, then line up three-abreast and walk about 20-30 minutes as a group of at least 44 people with torches burning, through a path in the forest to the quarry. At the quarry, cook sausages over open fires. Notice how large and bright the full moon is over the sea. After the crowd dies down, drink hot tea from a thermos and add whiskey to it. Walk back home by just the moonlight. Take a shortcut through the forest.

10

October 29, 2023

Mirror Stage

Group/Solo Walking Score

Ever since the earlier Narcissus score, I have been thinking about the phrase and then the notion of a ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan.) As I understand it, which is very little, it is the idea that at a certain early childhood phase of development, when we are able to recognize ourselves as distinct beings in mirrors, we begin to see the world in terms of us-ness and other-ness for the first time. For my version of Experiment #34, I decided to imagine that I was on the cusp of the mirror stage, hovering in a state of not quite having yet encountered a mirror. Imagining that this stage is not a sudden instant thing, but something that happens in small bursts, slowly adding up to some kind of awareness. I tried to occupy this pre-through-nascent mirror stage.

1)    Sew a paper bag with everything that you have collected from the environment to the back of your vest so that it falls off or apart and returns to the environment where it came from.

2)    Install a speaker and an audio player in your vest pocket so that you can be surrounded by/emit the audio recordings you have made earlier in the week while you walk.

3)    Leave the building with the group.

4)    Immerse yourself in the colors and falling leaves and the breeze as you walk, the sounds of children playing outside of the pre-school coming from your pocket…

5)    Forget about public and private property because you are currently not aware enough of self-ness/other-ness for there to be any distinction.

6)    As you walk peacefully through the woods and across someone’s backyard, note that your path is about to cross a stream. Find the narrowest place to cross and test the heavy grass with your feet to see if it will hold you or if you will sink into the water.

7)    Decide that you can put your weight on it and step onto it.

8)    As you step, hear the sound of water rushing up around you.

9)    Pull your foot back quickly and then notice that it isn’t wet at all.

10) Realize that the sound is from your soundtrack, not from your foot splashing into the water. It is waves from the sea. Let the sensation of shock, of disorientation, flood you. At a more meta-level, recognize this as your first awakening from the experience of complete oneness with everything. It is a jarring bodily sensation to have cause and effect detach momentarily, and then reattach to one another so seamlessly.

11) Keep walking.

12) Become hill, become stone, become barking dog, become field, become leaves, become the white lines on the road.

13) Become the sun: Close your eyes as you walk towards the sun, come to understand that the warmth of its light is some of the sun itself, coating the exterior of your body so that the outer layer of you is also sun, and who knows, maybe the sun is the same way—just the outer layer is warm light.

14) Become the sun so fully that you forget that you are walking with your eyes closed on a road that cars are driving on. Stop being the sun when you hear a car coming. But when you open your eyes, discover there is no car. It is your soundtrack again, but this time the realization doesn’t shock you, you just want to be the sun again.

15) Close your eyes again for one more moment of being the sun walking, and then hear a real car coming.

16) Find a unique architectural feature as instructed by Experiment #34. It is a bullet-shaped gate top. Go close to photograph it and hear someone coming out of their home. Feel fear ripple through your body. They are different than me: I would never glorify a bullet like this. Maybe they will harm me. Shock again that there is harm, and fear, and that it is such starkly different stuff than being one with the warmth of the sun.

17) Hear your alarm go off.

18) Rush back to find that everyone else is already there.