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Mech, Wesley

Natural Resources

2013

MS

Bipedalism has been humanity's locomotion, the means of mobility by which it became human. In the late 18th-19th centuries, writers and artists romanticized walking in the countryside for its liberation from industrialization. Recent decades display a yearning for a return to the pedestrian city. In turning towards walking both trends are reactions to the western world's motorization. In the 1960s American post-modern dance repudiated technical virtuosity and embraced pedestrian movement, blurring the frontiers between art and life, breathing the everyday onto the stage and exhaling dance onto city sidewalks. Dance trans-illuminates the evanescent kinematics of footsteps, strides, and gaits, illustrating how pedestrian practices produce Burlington's urban ecology. In doing so, dance offers a prism through which to reimagine the porous and changing relationship between people and urban environments. Through observation and creative writing and improvised dance performance with a group of seven dancers, this thesis has journeyed into the daily experiences of walking in Burlington. In a literary style the thesis searches for the qualities of walking in Burlington, and in dance performance, it finds a language of experience. As the world's human population increasingly inhabits cities, walking is the most site-adaptive dance form that befits itself to the human scale intitmacy of cities.