Walking in Suriashi as a Radical and Critical Art of Inquiry

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the discussion on moving in and through site-specific and urban space; at the cusp between higher dance education and everyday life, creating a post-Certauian tear through space and time as a call for agency. It draws from my Ph.D. research Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, where I propose an experience of society from within a Japanese practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. Gender is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body. The original practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage. My research asks whether suriashi also could be a method for agency to act, as being active, or to activate, and temporally alter spaces outside the theatre; i.e. the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical context. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. Suriashi performed in urban spaces was able to unfold and identify new relations between aesthetic practice and politics, between movements and monuments in the city as a way to critique the unequal distribution of power, and by looking for new ways to protest/resist peacefully. I assess this from three of my many experiments with slow suriashi walkings. The first one is Suriashi Intervention, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. This experiment did two things: it engendered the city’s unacknowledged dance archive, while performing critique of the unequal distribution of funding of the arts. The second experiment is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. It showed how artistic methods are necessary when democracy collapses. The third experiment regards introducing suriashi as methodology to master students of Contemporary Performative Arts at University of Gothenburg. Here, suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces, necessary for the art student. To further contextualize, I interlace my arguments through positionings by sociologist Doreen Massey.