Drag & Drop - walk performance with two guides

guided urban contemplation, various cities from 2013 on

photo above:
An audience member being dropped at a hang-out spot in Birmingham.
Soon he will be picked up again and dragged to the next drop-spot.

Still Walking Festival, Brimingham, Sep 2013 (photo D.H.)

Drag & Drop - a social choreography, an urban contemplation

performances:
- Tuned City Festival, Brussels, June 2013 (four guide version)
- Still Walking Festival, Brimingham, September 2013 (two guides version)
- Action Class, LUCA School of Arts, Brussels 2013 (no guide version)
- Wanderlust Festival, Ixelles/Brussels 2014 (two guided version)

Program note Tuned City Festival, June 2013:

For Drag + Drop, David Helbich and three more guides (Shila Anaraki, Christoph Ragg, Christophe Meierhans) will pick you up at the Kaaistudios and get you to the location of the next event.

They bring you from one point to the other, an apparently simple task, but at the same time an open field for interventions.

Together with the audience, they will collectively execute a narrow score that guides all attendees towards a structural experience of this very particular environment: the typical Brussels topography with its very quick rhythm of social and urban changes.

The walk will be highly scored, but still inviting the chaotic. A space where individual experience hits the ground of a collective restriction: the city.


Dropped audience member justbefore being picked up again. D&D in Ixelles fro Wandelust Festival, March 2014 (co-guide Helena Dietrich)

Two audience members being dropped in Anderlecht, Brussels. The one behind the car is about to be picked up by a guide,
just to be dropped again at another corner in the neighborhood.
Tunes City Festival, Brussels, June 2013 (photo D.H.)

At this points on the map of the neighborhood in Anderlecht (Brussels) we leave people behind. They have to hang out on
this street corner, till a next guide pics them up. This can take between 4 and 12 minutes. After they will be dropped again at
one of the other points. The colors indicate the different guides, who drag and drop people in the entire neighborhood.

This are the paths the (in this case 4) guides have to walk. The paths of the audience members look very different, since they
are dropped individually and always picked up by another guide again.

Co-guides Christoph Ragg, Christophe Meierhans and Shila Anaraki (who is busy calculating the incredible complex score
of draggings and droppings for four guides with an audience of ca. 100 people).

Gathering in front of TAG Gallery with students and teachers of LUCA School of Arts (Sint-Lucas), Brussels December
2013. (photo Stijn Beekman)

This alternative version doesn't need a guide. People are given a track (here 'up and down the Rue Brabant' in Schaerbeek),
a tempo (120, or two steps in a second) and a rule ("Every 4 minutes stop for 4 minutes wherever you are at this
moment."). Then they leave one every 30 seconds. (photo Stijn Beekman)