Walking, Running, Dancing

I used to hate running when I was at primary school, when the teachers made me compete in the cross-country because I was good at it. I remember hating the feeling of my body being at the limits of my breath, but also hating loosing, so I would fight myself all the way to third place. Later, I hated my body after arriving back from a gap year in England where I had eaten English boarding school fare three times a day or more, and so I started running an hour at a time up and down Dunedin hills on concrete paths, returning to something my body knew as a child. Eventually my knees protested and I had to slow down. By that time though, I had grown to love the feeling of my body being pushed, expanded to limits and going beyond – runners highs and all that. So, I found myself running between places in downtown Dunedin, between class, home, catch ups, the library. I'd just run because it felt good. I sought out bush trails to negotiate, ground that was softer, less linear, and full of sensation. I would run on low walls, jump on rocks, go off path and seek out stairs. When I came to Tāmaki Makaurau, I would say that my legs are missing the hills they were made from.

There is a something available to you when you are practicing beyond need, and working through feeling, moving for the pleasure of the movement. In running through my life, I found that I had a sense of my everyday, functional movement, as a space that could offer joy, surprise and wonder.

I attribute much of this habit of seeing the beauty of the everyday, the potential of our habitual spaces to be framed or perceived within an artistic experience, to my father, David Mann. As a child, I would walk or bike with him across the urban and 'wild' spaces of Greater Dunedin. He would have his camera, taking pictures of us, other people, the landscape with us in it – all the while telling stories, of things he knew about or things he made up. His was an art making through a pedestrian embodiment and expression of land/scape as storyteller. Myself and my brother were his audience and collaborators, making and witnessing at once. We would walk or bike for the whole afternoon, a whole day, getting out of the house and maybe out of his reality of low wage/on the dole living. Some of the time our walking was a necessity, with the budget not covering petrol money that week. I have a memory of a walk from Northeast Valley to Moana Pool at the age of five or six – what seemed an enormous trek across the whole city for small legs. Walking as a mode of being became normal for me through this combination of need and pleasure.

Between running and walking, there might be a related set of desires and drivers. How then does dancing come into conversation with these pedestrian practices? Besides my active body, trained through all manner of physical practices growing up, dancing has been another site of feeling as a relational expression of rhythm, community and later, landscape, or site. Those days of walking and biking with my father may have also ended or been punctuated with connections with his friends – artists and others – at parties or gatherings, with fires and dogs and other kids, musicians and records playing. He would be dancing, limbs shaking, wrists twirling, fingers playing the air, and I would be with him, cartwheeling and jumping to ska, or punk, or Van Morrison, or maybe local Dunedin sounds. There we found ourselves offering entertainment in the form of my small body flying around his, an intuitive contact improvisation between father and daughter, with rhythms of music and audience 'whoops' fueling our dance. This memory – of joyful, yet risky dancing, through unfolding pathways, inverted and spiralling, held by the safety of my father's strong arms and frame – still lives in my body at the age of 42. We were dancing for the pleasure of our bodies in motion, as well as for the need of being in, and recognised by, community. I am distant from my father now, with complexities of personalities, social expectations and mental health proving too much for a regular space of communication between us, but I hope that where he lives, with trains and bush and family memories*, he still finds pleasure in his moving body.

What do I know from this space, of yes and? Between running for need and joy, walking for both pleasure and requirements of living, dancing as expression of self and other in vibration? Maybe nothing more than this is what I am made of, and that I am always in processes of evolving the practices in relation to the needs and potentials of my current ecology. These are still all practices I come back to, walking, running, dancing, and now I am consciously asking the questions of how I should be practicing them? What durations are needed? What rhythms? What music and who should I be moving with? Who are the audiences, and where do we need to walk, run and dance? I know that in seeking to come into deeper relationships with our places, that we need to consciously practice listening, feeling and moving with them through lenses of both need and pleasure.

In walking to arrive somewhere else, we learn different things from walking to be in relation to land. By dancing to tell a known story, we are inhabiting a different consciousness to that of an improvised unfolding of sensation, energy and relations to place, where a 'story' or theme is revealed as a 'third' being, unknown, or maybe only felt intuitively before the dance. In our performance ecologies, we need both; stories of what we know, or need to remember; as well as stories that emerge through processes of listening to our places - our everyday habitats, as well as our larger nested systems - through and with our bodies as conduits for emergent whakapapa.

*On the first Sunday of most months, you can visit the Bush Tramway Club that my grandfather Bob Mann helped to start up and run. My dad might be driving one of the trains. https://www.bushtramwayclub.com/