For my next poem in motion, I decided to start by creating a soundscape around WALKING from which the movement and the visual will take shape. (I touched on the creation of soundscapes a few weeks back.)

The final production will be a Dance on Film that might become a live show later:

At Walkfall / À la tombée de la marche

This creation stems from my personal experience of slowly loosing the ability to walk then regaining it as well as having to learn/speak a second language and live as a minority language speaker in my everyday life.

Part of my questioning:

• How walking is not something so easily done for everyone. How we take it for granted.
• How walking is also falling into each step. A recovery of balance from the falling off balance… What if you cannot catch your self in the next step?
• How walking is a deconstruction/reconstruction in each step.
• How language is a moment-to-moment construction.
• How learning and speaking a foreign language is a deconstruction of the native language and its reconstruction in the new one in each moment.

How can I walk along the railroads of my vulnerabilities with my wounds, my scars, along the faultlines of my becoming…

All sounds, images, editing: Geneviève Johnson • Excerpts: Sofina Johnson & Tyler McIIwham

This soundscape is a starting point. I will let movements stem from it.
A conversation will arise from movements, sounds and words encounter.

Building these worlds in dialogue.

This time, instead of images, movements or objects, I wanted to start from words. Entering the process of transforming them: let them become something else, a new world, which would trigger and unearth poetry in motion.

The only thing I know about the movement is that it will be a trio. I want to explore being supported/supporting and not supported/ not supporting, with and without others and nature, same and different…

I wrote a biomechanical description of the action of walking in both English and French.
I recorded them.

From this straight forward description, I deconstructed words in sounds and sounds in beats.

I used echo, reverb, repeat, phaser, change of speed and reverse effects on different sections or words.

Created layers of different qualities of the text and words to create stereo effect.
I reconstructed the fragments into more poetic combinations,
new arrangement of meanings.

As if to say that all the possibilities are in everything:
we just have to put time, listen and build new worlds from there…

I love layers.

In everything I do: photography, video, performance, installation, poetry, visual art…

It was important to me to create depth for the listener and the mover
to inspire emotions, meanings and stimulate imaginary worlds.

I use many different elements of water. The free flow and rolling of water or its abrupt falling, hitting, stopping is in my mind related to the flow or no-flow of walking and speaking.

• running water from a nearby stream
• a CoreAlign sound transformed into a stormy ocean by Tyler McIIwham

I used sections of field recordings I did through out the winter.

• my steps walking and running in mud, getting suctioned down and freed out in each step.
• an eerie recording of kids playing in a park with their voices reverberating . It gives a sense of discomfort totally related to my subject of feeling out of place or discombobulated in walking or speaking.
• a walk under the rain: calm and spacious to inspire movements to arise.

Sections of music made by my daughter, Sofina Johnson, were integrated
to create pockets of time without words for relief and breathing.

• a very small sound section rebuilt into a grounding rolling loop that comes and goes – an electronic version of running water and waves.
• a boat whistle section that I attached to its mirrored reverse version – relates to water again
• a drums section slowed down – relates to steps on ground

Chose one thing to inspire you today – Let it move you