Pedestrian Performance and Geographies of the Stage

I’m currently writing up the second half of my first epic chapter which involves two sections: Site and Non-Site. Within each section I present an array of case studies of Pedestrian Performances that I analyse, focussing specifically on how the action of walking is utilised within them.

With regards to site, I’ve found it pretty simple to both find case studies due to the fact that pedestrian performance as a object of research stems from site-specific performance. However when looking at Non-Site, it becomes a little tricky. On paper, pitting site vs its seeming opposite seems to be an interesting and perhaps logical direction. It allows me to examine walking and where it sits dialectically between these two sites. However, Smithson’s model incurs difficulties when we apply performance to it, and trying to find the right case studies for it becomes difficult. I’ve realised that it is often not possible to place a performance in one camp rather than the other and therefore had to create a set of criteria that can be freely contested in order for me to effectively find an appropriate location for each case study.

The Conventional Stage

• Defined by the principle purpose of the architectural structure it resides in: a theatre, studio, arts centre
• Clear divide between audience and spectator
• Audience’s generally remain stationary within their designated area, whilst actors are able to move in front of them.

The Promenade

• A difficult one, which I have chosen to define as presenting a separated stage. Here the conventional stage is fractured into multiple stages.
• There is still a divide between audience and spectator even if it is an imagined one built on the omniscience of the performer. However there is also a divide between performers, bridged by audience members.
• Audiences are allowed to move between the gaps between performers: audience and performer overlap.

The Site

• Defined generally by an emphasis on place: mostly in places not originally designated as theatres: factories, swimming pools, churches
• The boundaries between performer and audience can be physically/imaginatively illustrated or audiences can themselves choose to perform also.
• Depending on the nature of the performance, audiences have full reign of a site or areas for them are established by the performers.

The Non-Site

• Defined by the site, a fragment of the site brought elsewhere as a signpost to it: pointing to something that cannot be physically reached. While site uses presence to illustrate absence, non-site does the reverse, directing you outwards. However, there is a feedback, a reflection between the fragment in front of you and the place it originated from.
• As in site, the divide between audience and performer can be of varying degrees here. In fact performers do not need to even be present, meaning that an audience member can take on such a responsibility for themselves.
• Generally, the types of pedestrian performance I would place in this category are performative papers or performances that are concerned with a walk that has already taken place or takes place elsewhere.

 

These definitions can be freely contested, as all of the geographies above overlap with site-based promenade performances and non-site performances taking place in the conventional stage. However, what I’ve come to realise in my research is that walking has a real tendency to throw the definitions of types of staging into a state of flux, but also reasserts them.

Digital Wanderlust: The Layers of the Rings: Part 1

“Strider begins his longest journey yet, travelling through a book, two games, three films and around the world to examine the different landscapes of Middle-Earth. Part One of Three.”

The psychogeography of middle-earth. Part 1.

 

Mark Thomas Extreme Rambling: Walking the Wall

Now you should all know the score by now, I go off and have an adventure, come back and tell you about it. (Thomas, 2011:4)

Last night I saw Mark Thomas’ Extreme Rambling: Walking the Wall, a two hour re-telling of a two month walk. I’m probably going to write something on it for the PhD (as I want a mixture of case studies) so I thought I’d jot down some initial ideas.

So tonight’s story is about my attempt to walk the entire length of the Israeli Barrier on the west Bank using the wall as a route map, thus the title: EXTREME RAMBLING. (Thomas, 2011:4)

Outside the stage space was a stall ran by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, behind it featuring a chronological series of maps illustrating a ‘Disappearing Palestine’: a rapidly melting area of land.

The stage itself also featured a large map of Palestine, but one drawn up to appear as if created by Thomas himself. It features the route of the wall, the route of his walk and a few symbols to highlight the significance of certain moments on the walk.

In front of the map on the stage floor were several reproductions of signs found on the border:

MORTAL DANGER – MILITARY ZONE

ANY PERSON WHO PASSES OR DAMAGES THE FENCE

ENDANGERS HIS LIFE

The premise is simple in explanation: in February and March 2010 Thomas attempted to walk the length of the Israeli barrier that separates Israel from Palestine (ibid:4), talking to people on both sides of the wall and gathering their opinions of it. This show acts as a forum for his retelling of the walk, featuring no props or fellow actors, no projections or recordings; just one man and a map. In my research so far, I have seen some quite novel means at trying to depict a walk on stage and the ways in which a landscape can be conjured up into an auditorium, and therefore was particularly intrigued by the way in which Thomas would attempt this.

By having the ‘route map’, Thomas was able to string his anecdotes and observations into a coherent order without having to take us through the journey day by day, flitting from present tense to past tense playing with the mobile nature of the word ‘walk’ as being something we are doing and have been on. In the show Thomas walked out on to the stage moments of tragedy, harrowing facts, observational humour, a host of extraordinary characters and an instance of surprising patriotism; all of this woven through a walk.

My interest in this show obviously stems from psychogeographical motives, how Thomas staged his walk but at the same time how he presents the feeling of walking between two deeply politicised landscapes.

Thomas explained that the reason he chose to refer to his walk as ‘EXTREME RAMBLING’ was due to the fact that he admires the ideology behind ramblers who are willing to contest their right of way and “pick fights with farmers” (2011:n.p.). In their book Theatre/Archaeology, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks define rambling as:

…guided by disciplinary interest and expertise (as archaeologists we look at the vernacular, in detail), by the directions and instructions of informers (‘Where is the nearest shoe repairer?’ ‘Take the first left and it’s on the right …”) and by the need to avoid certain, potentially dangerous or confrontational encounters. (Pearson and Shanks, 2001:147)

Thomas was guided by his own interest, and the help of individuals who would help him complete his journey. With regards to directions, he merely had to follow a wall (which in part is due to the fact that “he can’t read maps” (Thomas,2011:4). However he did need to avoid ‘potentially dangerous or confrontational encounters’, but these were not with farmers but Israeli soldiers: hence the ‘EXTREME’. Rambling, although seemingly chosen for comic effect combines the sheer enjoyment of walking with an exercised right to walk the land.

The Ramblers is Britain’s walking charity, working to safeguard the footpaths, the countryside and other places we go walking, and to encourage more people to take up walking. With 125,000 members in England, Scotland and Wales, we’ve been working for walkers for 75 years.

Thomas’ walk wasn’t along an existing footpath, rather one that existed and his ‘safeguarding’ was under constant threat as he weaved back and forth across the border. I have always had a strange relationship with ramblers, observing them walking often in large groups partly marching, partly enjoying the land; both a procession and a military formation. However, Thomas’ on average numbered that of three, further highlighting the overwhelming nature of the task he had set himself.

Despite being a ‘stand up’ show, walking managed to creep its way into Thomas’ delivery. At instances, he would pause trying to remember his next part of the story, walk on the spot before committing himself to walk a few steps, remembering and then carrying on with the show. Walking became his mnemonic, a notion that has been frequently used for site-based performances but not here within the confines of the auditorium.

Other moments of his walk were illustrated by the slow and repeated clicking of fingers, which conveyed the sinister synchronicity of their walking as they sneaked illegally through a hole in the fence; and the speed in which it takes to cross the border from Israel into Palestine in opposite to the reverse journey.

Thomas’ observations concerning the land of Israel and Palestine were fascinating. He described the colour coding of each nation; how he tactically became Scottish in order to conceal his English heritage; the harrowing Israeli property developed who pointed out to him the proposed locations of each of his future properties dictated solely by race; the surprisingly beautiful meadows of flowers and fauna; his description of the hills as being “a voice to be walked” (Thomas, 2011:n.p.); and the horrifying journey made by children under an Israeli road. Familiar locations for the audience were brought to the middle-east with places such as Luton and Glastonbury comically used to aid descriptions.

However, it was the wall itself that obviously overshadowed all of this: a tactical ‘land grab’ advancing and retreating like a tide. You realise that this wall represents the dividing of two psychogeographies, each of which have become fractured into the groups and individuals that Thomas met on his walk. This divide was made all the more pronounced when Thomas used the width of the stage to walk through a cross-section of the ‘fence’ or indeed fences that separate Israel and Palestine.

A pedestrian performance of a walk through a divided landscape, brought to an empty space in Exeter Phoenix.

 

Performative Walking or Pedestrian Performance?

I went along to take part in a forum for Phil Smith’s Mythogeographic research on Saturday. It was an interesting day spent discussing his works so far  - some of which I’ve been fortunate to walk.

The major question for me though in relation to my own research is the difference between ‘performative’ and ‘performance’. For the last year and a half I have been using them interchangeably when actually they have different meanings. I panicked slightly when I realised as my writing so far has been clear as to which of these I am focusing on.

For example, a Pedestrian Performance contains conventions of a performance event which is walked through. For example Mike Pearson’s Bubbling Tom features a guided walk in which an invited audience is given a guidebook (or program) and witnesses a learnt speech recounted by a performer (even if here the performer is playing a younger version of themselves).

A performative walk however, is generally of a more subtle orientation in which any walk can be deemed performative or interpreted as a performance. The example Phil used was of the Mis-Guide books, themselves not a performance, but a means in which to create performative walks.

My PhD as it stands, seems to incorporate both these strands, even though in some instances I state I’m researching performative walking and in others, pedestrian performance. One chapter, examines the different geographies of the stage and the Pedestrian Performances within them, whilst one looks at my own practice and the psychogeography of simple walks (a walk around Exeter’s City walls), personal ones (My 25) and those which sit between performative walking and live art (the white carpet in Torbay).

I think it may be too late to focus on one rather than the other as I’m interested in both, nevertheless this journey within my thesis from the performance to the performative is a walk in itself that cannot be ignored.

Digital Wanderlust: Spyro the Luddite Dragon

“This month Strider dusts off an old Christmas present, using Spyro the Dragon as a means to illustrate Neo-Luddism in gaming. Featuring extracts from the documentary ‘New Technology: Whose Progress?’”

My 9th Podcast for InRetroSpect Podcast can be found here.

My Twenty-Five

I turned twenty-five the other day and to commemorate it I decided to do a walk.

Ten years ago, Mike Pearson did when back to the landscape of his childhood to do a performance walk. Within his ‘square mile’ he took a group of people, comprising of locals, family and friends on a guided tour to various sites of personal significance. This piece became Bubbling Tom that for me has become a landmark in itself for walking as performance.

Therefore as Pearson’s piece also commemorated his fiftieth birthday, I thought I would do something in a similar vein. If Pearson did his square mile when he was fifty, I would do a half square mile at twenty-five. However there would be other significant differences. Firstly, having lived in different places throughout my life, my square mile is scattered across varying geographies. My major challenge therefore would be to compress these geographies into moments, a long a tightly bound route. I would decide the sights in advance, but I would not learn a large script, but instead remember on-the-spot, using the current geography to create a past one: A site for every year since my birth. In the planning stages, I wrote hundreds of words for each year, trying desperately to fit my life into my walk. However, it soon became apparent that twenty-five years of life cannot be so easily squashed into two hours, and not all the geographies would be mentioned. I decided therefore to not present a history, but a series of moments triggered by the geographies they were situated in: to fold in city streets, welsh mountains and school classrooms into a collage of tectonic movement in which Oldbury, Abersywtyth, Worcester and Exeter were temporarily brought side by side and layered with time.

So on Monday 22^nd November 2010 I waited outside my house for my guests to arrive. There were five of us in total on that cold and slightly overcast day. The postman arrives with a package for me, it is a birthday present. I open it in front of the group. It’s a ‘Gromit’s Smashing Pizza Kit’ and it’s from my nextdoor neighbour Mrs S. (she knows that I liked them as a child).

‘Baby Darby’

In which, I am brought to my first house a newborn baby. I’m a month premature and very tiny.

I show the birthday card I received this morning from my parents. I leave this photo on the wall. A small child toddles past with her mother.

Forest

I unlock the door and show the group my first house. I take them to the kitchen and make them tea and we eat a packet of Party Rings, the biscuits I had at birthdays when I was a child.

I couldn’t walk yet and sat surrounded by toys, a big television, some horrible brown sofas and some tall house plants.

I leave this photo on the television.

5G

We go out the backdoor into the garden.

I can walk, my first shoes are size 5G. The garden is long and green, with a grape vine in the corner and a christmas tree that has grown up with me.

I peg this photo to the clothesline.

Holly

We go out the back gate and walk behind the houses.

In Savacentre with Daddy choosing a toy for my new baby sister. I choose a pink dog.

I phone Holly and put her on loud speaker. She remembers the big garden, running in the living room and her bright bedroom. I show the group the card I received from Holly that morning.

Train

Still behind the houses, walking downhill, leaves and concrete.

On Aberdyfi Beach watching a red steam engine coming towards me. I love trains.

Laurence

Alongside the train track now.

I’m in Sorento Materniry ward. I have a new brother, but I’m playing with the new toy I’ve got, a Ghostbuster trap.

Walking for Money

The other side of the road, moving into the suburbs.

I’m in the Beavers, doing a sponsored walk: 4 laps of the same beat of my neighbourhood. I enjoy looking for the same landmarks again and again.

Fields of Maize

Quiet suburban road.

A gite in Questembert with a field of maize as far as the eye can see. My first trip abroad.

The Narrator

Walking atop a wall, above the group.

On stage at Primary School Narrating a dramatisation of Beowulf.

Cardboard City

Outside the graveyard.

Moving into our second house, with boxes in the living room piled from floor to ceiling. A cardboard cityscape in our living room.

Leaving Oldbury and crossing the border into Worcester.

Swinging Rocks

Between two electrical boxes.

I’m in Geneva swinging on some branches between rocks outside the apartment block my auntie Nettie lives in.

Being Sociable

Entrance to the park.

In Scotland. My brother, sister and I are unusually being sociable with other children.

The Watkin Path

The park.

Climbing up Mount Snowdon as a family. The first of many walks.

Naveta de Tudon

A small painted roundabout.

The temple of Naveta de Tudon, built by two brothers who became enemies.

11 minutes

Outside a Scout Hut.

Brixham cliffs, watching the sun disappear for 11 minutes in an eclipse.

Framed

Outside a Primary School.

On stage at school in a production of Tom Sawyer. I’m Muff Potter and I’m being arrested for a crime I didn’t commit. Grandad Plester shouts for them to get their hands off his grandson.

Giant Steps

Wall next to the primary school. I feel the textures of the new bricks that have just been delivered.

A vast cliff of Basalt columnar jointing, akin to that of Giant’s Causeway. I thought they were linked under the sea. I’ve always been interested in Geology.

The Bravest Thing

Outside a corner shop.

In Graphics, and ask the prettiest girl in school to go with me to the End of Year Ball. She says yes.

Lines?

A dead end.

On stage in a college production entitled S.W.A.L.K. I forget all my lines.

Seeing in the Dark

A small park.

Still at College. Playing Dysart in Equus. I decide I want to stick with Drama.

Leaving Worcester and crossing the border into Aberystwyth.

My Heart

A shortcut through the backstreets.

Walking to my first drama meeting at Aberystwyth University. Its raining. I fall in love with this place. I found love here and lost someone very dear to me.

The Composer

Opposite another school.

I am Amadeus, telling the members of the royal court in Salzburg about the importance of opera. My girlfriend is in the audience. I can see the light reflecting off her glasses.

Castell-Y-Bere

Outside a factory.

Castell-Y-Bere a castle in Wales. We’re here to soak up some atmosphere for our production of Macbeth.

Leaving Abersytwyth, stopping briefly in Worcester before crossing over the border into Exeter.

Somewhere I Want to Live

Outside a graveyard.

Hiking in Tongariro National Park on the North Island of New Zealand. In the distance is Mount Ngauruhoe.

Shortcut

The side of a busy road.

Shortcut to the Drama Department of Exeter. A cycle path that is beautifully lit at night.

Now

My Exeter home. An empty picture frame that is held up in front of me.

I don’t know how I feel yet about this one. I felt quite distanced. Ironically I think half a square mile was too big for this. I kept trying to fill the gaps between sites. The notion of ‘gaps’ has cropped up a lot in my research with regards to site-based work, particularly through the writings of Fiona Wilkie, Cathy Turner and James Meyer. Particularly with the guided tour physical gaps between sites are often interpreted by audience members as intervals or indeed gaps between performances. Stopping indicates a performance will begin and walking signals that it is over. To counter this I would often talk while walking, however my audience of walkers were well-behaved anyway.

At times, I was worried that a particular site wouldn’t be interesting, and I felt tempted to over dramatise, to embellish and to fabricate my stories. However, memory I feel has an ability to do this anyway and for this particular walk, it wasn’t about making the story interesting but indeed the juxtaposition of a remembered landscape with the present one. To find similarities, tensions and contradictions. To create a hand-in-glove relationship in which gloves of different sizes and types are tried on by the same hand. But also to embrace coincidence and use the performativity of everyday.

I spoke to the people who walked with me, and they said that they found the experience effective, mapping their own route in parralell to mine.

Personally though, I like the leaving behind of photos. I like the feeling that even just for today, my twenty-five years of existence are out there held together by a walk.

To see a photo from each year of your life next to each other is an interesting experience, and transferring that life journey to an actual one is an interesting experience. I urge you to do it, to map your twenty-five.

Digital Wanderlust: Parkour Painting

“Do certain words trigger a colour for you? Do some sounds make you taste? When you think of the numbers one to ten, do you visualise them forming a particular shape? This month Strider puts Mirror’s Edge through its paces to see how synaesthesia can change our perception of psychogeography in videogames. Featuring extracts from the BBC Horizon documentary Derek Tastes of Earwax.”

My 8th Podcast for InRetroSpect Podcast can be found here.

Wonders of Weston: Playground of the Future

Got back from the Wonders of Weston.

It was the first time I had been to Weston-super-Mare since 2004 on a Drama trip to watch a production of The Cenci in the Playhouse Theatre. We basically spent the day playing on the beach and visiting the pier.

Emerging from the station in 2010, into an overcast Weston-super-Mare, my first port of call was the Information Hall. This as it happens was in the Quaker friends meeting room, which created a bizarre juxtaposition with the subversive machinations of Wrights & Sites. Here were artefacts, photographs and information from and for each of the works dotted throughout the town. A model of Tania Kovats’ sculpture Holm, a model of Ruth Claxton’s scultpture And My Eyes Danced, textual fragments from Tim Etchells, visual fragments from Wrights & Sites and a video featuring interviews with the artists involved.

With time to kill, I left the warmth of the Information Hall and headed southwards along the Marine Parade. Eventually, I found Ruth Claxton’s sculpture And My Eyes Danced, a fascinating piece that looks like it is fact emerging from the former Model Yacht Pond. The odd yet beautiful colours that appeared in the sky that day were redoubled in this sculpture, through their reflections on to the shimmering water.

Nearby and further along the parade was Tim Etchells’ Shelter Piece a welcome place to shelter from the wind and the drizzle. The clear glass on three sides provides a wonderful Weston vista, a watchtower to observe the world. The masterstroke of the piece though comes in the form of textual fragments engraved into the panes of glass themselves. Barely perceptible from a distance, these fragments are scenes witnessed by Etchells over a twenty-four hour period in Weston. They give the viewer the opportunity to in a sense, annotate the landscape in front of them, manoeuvring themselves in different ways to locate the same text in different places. These scenes do not become then bound to a specific location but become part of the vast sea of memories. Photographing them was a lot of fun.

Leaving Shelter Piece and heading northwards back to the Information Hall, I saw some local youths taking part in some free-running, running and somersaulting over the wall onto the beach. I had to resist the urge not to join them as it looked like a lot of fun. I’ve actually been researching Parkour and Free-Running recently in fact, and am keen to do a bit of it around Exeter (as there are a lot of structures I’d like to climb there).

At the Information Hall, I downed a cup of tea and waited for the next piece to begin, a brief drift with Wrights & Sites on their project Everything you need to build a town is here.  As Stephen Hodge highlighted in his opening speech, although this walk would adopt the format of the tour, there is no specific trail that has to be followed for this piece. The artist/writer collective have affixed a small sign post in over forty locations dotted throughout the town. Each one designed to change your perception of the Weston that exists, existed and could exist. Each sign is also a part of the eight themes or layers that have been chosen by Wrights & Sites: The Panoptic, Foundations, The Great Architect, The Amateur Builder, The Botanical, Light, Time, and Ands. Cathy Turner compared these layers to stratas of rock, which reminded me of the Extended Cloister project I worked on in Torbay during the summer and the geological mapping of that area. Cathy also illustrated why they decided to not create a series of trails threaded throughout the town, as the signposts would have to be closer together in a bid for a route to be easily followed, which would consequently limit the scope of the project. Simon Persighetti added that these signs are not Wrights & Sites vision of Weston, but are there as a means to encourage a change in perception of our vision of this place. We were then given our own blank signs in which to write our own ideas about future architectures.

And so we began our walk, our first port of call being that of the Atlantic Toilets on the seafront. Phil Smith stood outside and referred us to the signpost (in the layer of ‘Ands’) which concerned the undersea telegraph cable which began here and ended in Newfoundland. Since then, he has realised that the sign is inaccurate, and his speech concerned him ‘making the best of a bad job’ highlighting the ever changing nature of signs (He highlighted an example of a sign for a nearby B&B in which the decimal point has fallen off, meaning that it costs £2250 to spend a night there) and how in the art world we attempt to establish a line of connection, but it may end up elsewhere. Blank postcards of Weston were then handed out for us to write on our ‘ideal utopia’, to keep safe, to stumble upon one day and post if such a utopia is achieved.

From the public toilets we moved to a Carlton Street Car park, where a sign (in the layer of ‘Time’) encouraged us to envision the houses that were here previously. Here, Cathy asked Phil to get a parking ticket, which was then affixed to the arm of one of the group, a reminder of the fact that the occupation of space here has a cost. Cathy then produced various homely objects for us to hold, and we all grouped together closely, to sustain the impression of rebuilding a house, within a rainy car park.

Monsoon season kicked in as we reached our next stop, Dolphin Square Car Park (in the layer of ‘The Great Architect’). Here Simon, brought our attention to the Great Architect of Weston, and what they had envisioned for this particular place. A cardboard model of a building featuring a small picture of the architect was produced with a small peephole, and we were encouraged to look through and see what the Great Architect saw. Stephen then gave us each a blob of plasticine, and we braved the downpour to the last sign on our journey.

Walliscote Primary School (‘The Great Architect’), the sign influenced by the Dada musician Erik Satie who once wondered what sort of music the four year olds now will make in the future. Here Wrights & Sites have taken that notion and applied it instead to architecture, with Stephen producing a architect’s model of a future school designed and created by his four year old daughter, complete with a commentary as to how all of its varying facets worked with one another. He then produced a map of Weston converted into a chessboard and asked each of us to create a building of the future out of our plasticine and to place it on a square.

Due to overrunning slightly, I only caught the tail end of Tim Etchells’ reading and therefore unfortunately, I cannot comment on it.

With dusk setting in I grabbed some tea and cake from the conveniently placed VW vans (which were dotted throughout Weston as part of the event) and walked northwards, bumping into two locals who had a background in site-specific art. It was really interesting getting their perspective of it, having outside artists working on their own turf.

Walking up to Madeira Cove, we happened upon Tania Kovat’s sculpture, Holm, a wonderful hulk of white polished concrete modelled on the island of Steep Holm which can be seen in the distance. The first thing everyone did when seeing it was to touch it, to read it with their fingertips. It makes quite a striking image, placed in this small garden like a lone iceberg, a piece of icecream or clotted cream, an island that has become an inland. Entertaining the group of people circling this sculpture were a local orchestra, who played an eclectic mix of music (ranging from Bryan Adams to Glen Miller).

Afterwards, I walked across Lara Favaretto’s Without earth under foot, a causeway flecked with shards of phosphorescent material. Obviously its effect became more pronounced, the darker it became, revealing what I can only describe as a cosmic path of stars and wisps of galaxies, that create a strange sensation that is only realised when you leave the path behind and return to earth.

Leaving the path behind, I had some time to kill before my train, so I decided to re-evoke some of the memories I had of Weston-super-mare. I walked to the section of the beach where six years previously I and my college mates had crafted sandcastles out of sand and mud. I then ventured over the new pier, recently opened, a whirl of arcades, screaming children and bright colours. Purchasing the obligatory seaside fish and chips I waited for my train to arrive.

So ended an afternoon and evening of sculptures, sign posts, etchings and childhood imaginings.

I’m yet to write my postcard. My sign post reads: The architecture of the future shall be my playground.

Coincidently on the train to Exeter I actually bumped into one of my college mates who was on that trip six years ago, she enjoyed it as well.

An interesting blog chronicling reactions to public art in Weston can be found here.

Who Haunts Who?

I just got lost in my own town.

I love it when that happens. Its such a rare occurrence for me these days, and when I find myself in the situation I make the most of it, picking all the unfamiliar routes I can find.

This drift had a dual purpose though, as for the last few week I have been working on a ghost drift with some friends. Unhappy with the current ghost tours that occur once a year around this year, I became interested in observing whether the city itself could become spooky with as little effort as possible. We therefore began exploring the parts of Exeter that didn’t necessarily have a ghost story attached to them, but looked as if they should. The route has been walked out, we just need to gauge how much we need to add to it ourselves. As Cathy Turner queries: ‘who haunts who?’

So therefore my drift home was dictated entirely by trying to find the creepiest, darkest places to explore, all lit by the light of the full moon. I cut through a park, climbed into a locked graveyard and ducked round the backs of houses, haunting the space as well as being haunted by it.

As it turns out, you need very little to feel unnerved by the city, and keep walking to try and evade it, whilst still retreating into it.

Curiously, there were moments where I stopped and sat on a bench briefly to bask in the light of the full moon, enjoying the feeling of not knowing where I am.

Walk in a Box #5

Six in the morning walking through Exeter’s high street.