Walking as a Performative Inquiry, Labör, Zurich, 2026. Video: ILEA
Past project · Performative essay · Zurich · 2026
Walking as a Performative Inquiry
Walking as a Performative Inquiry is a performative essay by Sharon Chan and Charles Kwong, presented as a walkshop. Here walking is not the subject of the piece but its structure. It begins with a live deconstruction of actor-training exercises, in which the audience walks too, and moves through orientation systems and cultural memory, asking how the frame of a performance dictates how a body is read. Then language gives way to sound: theremin and ceramic-vessel feedback carry the walk out of the room into the open air, where the ordinary human gesture dissolves into nonhuman traces of weight and sound.
To the theremin and the ceramic vessels, we are just interference. To the ground and paper, I am only body mass.
From the script of Walking as a Performative Inquiry
Date
- 6.6.2026, 2:45 PMWalkshop at WALKING – Thinking in MotionLabör, MFO-Areal Oerlikon, Zurich
Symposium & walkshops by the Institute for Land and Environmental Art (ILEA), 5–7.6.2026
The walk
- Walking the space. Actor-training exercises, done together with the audience: travelling in space, stopping mid-motion, levels of tension, the Arlecchino walk, a body with one foot.
- Orientation. Stage right and stage left, reading direction and cultural memory, from Chinese script and Egyptian reliefs to the bridge of the Noh stage.
- Interference. Language gives way to a live sonic experiment with theremin and microphones inside ceramic vessels. The feedback follows the performers out of the room into the open air.
Video
The ending
Photos
Photos: ILEA
Symposium poster, ILEA