Category Archives: Processions or Marches or Parades

The First Secession, Ancient Rome (494 BCE)

Lucius Sicinius Vellutus organized the first of the Pleb strikes. Source: (quora.com)

“In 494 BC, the plebs were fed up with the senate passing tax laws that increased the debt of the working class without offering them useful services in return. Lucius Sicinius Vellutus, a working-class pleb, suggested that the workers unite in a walk-off to protest the doings of the senate. In large numbers, the plebs walked out of the city and congregated on the Mons Sacer (“sacred mountain”) while Vellutus and others negotiated with the patricians.

The strike was a rousing success, resulting in the expungement of many plebs’ debts and the creation of the Tribune of the Plebs, the first government position to be occupied by a member of the plebeian class.”

These early strikes show civil rights have always been a human interest.

Bloody Sunday, Selma to Montgomery March (1965)

Edmund Pettus Bridge

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“On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.”

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

Marching British Guards

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” “A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” Francis Alys, 2005

Francis Alys walks a lot. The city is his open-air studio. ‘Guards’ (2004) is one component of ‘Seven Walks’, the body of works commissioned by Artangel and developed over the course of five years spent walking through the streets of London, which includes paintings, drawings, and works in moving image. ‘Guards’ draws upon many of Alys’s long-term concerns: how street-scapes structure behavior, the unspoken rhythms of the city; and the use of daily walking to encounter new phenomena and ideas. The artist provided a series of instructions which form the basis of the film: 64 Coldstream guards enter separately in the City of London, unaware of one another’s route; the guards wander through the City looking for one another; upon meeting, they fall into step and march together; when a square measuring 8 by 8 Guards is built, the complete formation marches towards the closest bridge; as they step on to the bridge, the guards break step and disperse.”

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

Carmen Papalia, Mobility Device (2019)

Carmen Papalia – Mobility Device – 2021

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“Carmen Papalia is an artist and disability activist who uses organizing strategies and improvisation to navigate his access to public space, art institutions, and visual culture. His socially-engaged practice expresses his resistance of support options that promote ablest concepts of normalcy, like white canes and other impairment-specific accommodations that only temporarily bridge barriers to participation in an otherwise inaccessible, policy-based system. Papalia designs experiences that invite participants to expand their perceptual mobility and to claim access to public and institutional spaces.

For the High Line, Papalia presents Mobility Device, an innovative, collaborative performance in which he is accompanied by a marching band that plays a site-reactive score as guidance for navigating his surroundings. The work transforms the white cane—a symbol of someone with visual impairment—into a collective, sonic experience that opens up ways of thinking about care, collaboration, and a normative hierarchy of the senses. Papalia will bring Mobility Device to the High Line with the Hungry March Band, an 18-person ensemble founded in 1997 for the Mermaid Parade. With this work, he urges visitors to experience public spaces through the non-visual world.”

Lee Walton and Jon Rubin, “Playing Apart” (2011)

“On Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011, over one square mile area of downtown Denver, artists Jon Rubin and Lee Walton worked with the Bear Creek High School Marching Band to present “Playing Apart,” a one-of-a-kind musical event that dismantled an entire 90-piece marching band into single performers who collectively use the whole city as a playing field. Each band member started on a different corner and walked a specific route, collectively covering one-square mile of downtown Denver. Mimicking the experience of city life, band members intersected randomly in an unpredictable mash-up of instruments and sounds. Viewers throughout the city— sitting in cafes, walking the sidewalks and working in the offices, saw one band member after another passing by, like solitary pieces of a larger puzzle. The performance was both subtle and obvious, small and large. Disrupting and re-imagining the normal flow of the city, this project invited viewers to contemplate social and auditory patterns within the chaos of the city.

Jon Rubin is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. His projects include starting a radio station that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, training a hypnotized human robot army, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and running an ongoing take-out joint that only sells food from countries the United States is in conflict with. Rubin’s project Thinking About Flying is currently at the MCA Denver, and consists of a group of young homing pigeons that are trained by museum’s visitors continually taking home the birds and releasing them to fly back to the loft on the museum’s roof.

Lee Walton is an artist who playfully questions the world we live in. His work takes many forms and often involves collaboration with numerous participants from artists and non-artists alike. Walton once played an entire round of golf by taking only one shot a day, competed in a season-long free throw competition with Shaquille O’Neal and started a competitive residency program inside an international supermarket.

Rubin and Walton have each created commissioned projects for museums and cities both nationally and internationally. Their work can be viewed at jonrubin.net and leewalton.com

The Bear Creek HS Instrumental Music program boasts one of the strongest music programs in the Jefferson County School District and in the state of Colorado. The Bear Creek HS Band as an all-inclusive program which is home to the Bear Creek HS Marching Band, a 2010 state finalist and a nine-time state semi-finalist. Bear Creek has one of the strongest percussion programs in the state. They are a four time World Class Percussion State Champions (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) and the two-time WGI World Concert Class Percussion National Finalist. The Winter Guard program has been a national finalist and is the 2010 RMCGA state Color Guard 3rd place champion and a 2011 state finalist. The Bear Creek Band has performed throughout the state, most recently with the Denver Brass and the Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra.” (credit)

Phil Kline, Unsilent Night (1992- )

Phil Kline, Unsilent Night

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Unsilent Night is an original composition by Phil Kline, written specifically to be heard outdoors in the month of December. It takes the form of a street promenade in which the audience becomes the performer. Each participant gets one of four tracks of music in the form of a cassette, CD, or Mp3. Together all four tracks comprise Unsilent Night. The fact that the participants play different “parts” simultaneously helps create the special sound of the piece. Participants carry boomboxes, or anything that amplifies music, and simultaneously start playing the music. They then walk a carefully chosen route through their city’s streets, creating a unique mobile sound sculpture which is different from every listener’s perspective.

It all started in winter 1992, when Phil had an idea for a public artwork in the form of a holiday caroling party. He composed a multi-track electronic piece that was 45 minutes long (the length of one side of a cassette tape), invited a few dozen friends who gathered in Greenwich Village, gave each person a boombox with one of four tapes in it, and instructed everyone to hit PLAY at the same time. What followed was a sound unlike anything they had ever heard before: an evanescence filling the air, reverberating off the buildings and city streets as the crowd walked a pre-determined route. Phil says: “In effect, we became a city-block-long stereo system.”

The piece was so popular that it became an annual tradition, and then an international phenomenon, spreading across the USA and to other countries worldwide. Since 1992, it has been presented in 101 cities and four continents, drawing thousands of participants in cities like New York and San Francisco.

About his inspiration in starting Unsilent Night, Phil says: “It was a combination of my love for experimental electronic music and memories of Christmas caroling as a kid in Ohio.”

Flavorpill describes the New York event as:

“An annual seasonal favorite, Unsilent Night is an open procession for an unlimited number of boomboxes that starts under the arch of Washington Square Park. Musically, it begins with delicate strains of Phil Kline’s composition rising as marchers turn their boomboxes up to 10 and wind their way through the streets of the East Village, enveloped in the bubble of Kline’s glorious ambient score. Unsilent Night’s pageant ends under the giant elm in Tompkins Square as the final notes once again reach up to the heavens, offering thanks for the past 45 minutes of joy and redemption.”

James Bay Cree youth, The Journey of Nishiyuu (2013)

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Six youths and a guide left Whapmagoostui in January to snowshoe and walk to Ottawa in support of the Idle No More movement. They called the trek “The Journey of Nishiyuu,” which means “The Journey of the People” in Cree.

The group numbered nearly 400 in the trek’s final hours, according to volunteers and Gatineau police, after other children and youth from Cree and Algonquin communities joined them along the way. Thousands more people joined them on Monday afternoon at Parliament Hill as their journey came to an end.

The group’s wish to meet with the prime minister was not met, as Stephen Harper was in Toronto Monday for a special ceremony to greet two Chinese pandas en route to the Toronto Zoo.

But Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt did meet with a small group of the original walkers late in the day. No cameras were allowed at the meeting, but the minister was said to have accepted an invitation to visit their First Nation this summer and learn more about their concerns.

7 walkers began journey

David Kawapit, 18, is one of the original seven walkers who set out from Whapmagoostui.

“It feels really good, but at the same time I’m really sad that it’s ending,” he said on Sunday as the group reached Chelsea, Que., about a three-hour walk from Ottawa. “Because a lot of us shared a lot good times here, sad times, but we all stuck together.”

Others on the walk have told Kawapit it’s helping them deal with personal struggles, Kawapit said, including depression and suicidal thoughts. Kawapit struggles with the same.

“It feels really good that a lot of people are paying attention to what’s going on, and that a lot of these guys that are walking with us are helping themselves on this journey.

“But this journey’s really shown me a lot — how much I can help people. And it’s really given me a better understanding of life. I’ve made a lot of friends here, so there’s no way I’m going to leave them.”

“An Indigenous-led Social Movement

Idle No More started in November 2012, among Treaty People in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta protesting the Canadian government’s dismantling of environmental protection laws, endangering First Nations who live on the land. Born out of face-to-face organizing and popular education, but fluent in social media and new technologies, Idle No More has connected the most remote reserves to each other, to urbanized Indigenous people, and to the non-Indigenous population.

Led by women, and with a call for refounded nation-to-nation relations based on mutual respect, Idle No More rapidly grew into an inclusive, continent-wide network of urban and rural Indigenous working hand in hand with non-Indigenous allies to build a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky.” [credit]

Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle (2010-)

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Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle (2017)

In 2010–in response to the failures that I experienced as a recipient of disability support services–I started resisting support options that promoted ablest concepts of normalcy and self-identified as a nonvisual learner. The choice was in line with an effort to distance myself from marginalizing language like “blind” and “visually impaired”, and helped me realize the position that I occupied as a liberatory space. Using my nonvisual senses as a primary way of knowing the world lead to Blind Field Shuttle (BFS), an experience in which groups of up to 90 people line up behind me, link arms, and shut their eyes for the duration of a roughly hour-long walk through cities and rural landscapes.

Conducting BFS helped me exercise my nonvisual senses and find a community with whom I could develop a critical methodology for engaging nonvisual space. By 2012 I considered BFS a form of practice-based research and produced a series of nonvisual tours that aimed to uncover the unseen bodies of knowledge in fields influenced by visual primacy. One engagement–at the Guggenheim in 2013–was a touch tour that set a precedent for me to make further work about the potential for critical haptic engagement to become a viable practice within contemporary art and criticism.

Now I perform BFS as a way to demonstrate my proposal for Open Access (2015), a relational model for accessibility that centers considerations of agency and power in relation to the social, cultural, and political conditions in a given context. When performed as part of the Open Access movement building campaign–an ongoing tour across the US, UK, and Canada–BFS establishes an organizational space where participants model trust and mutual support while practicing new, process-based systems of access together.

sensory map

Blind Field Shuttle has been initiated in Portland OR in 2010, Blind Field Shuttle has taken place in: London UK, Sligo IE, Vancouver BC, Surrey BC, Kelowna BC, Ottawa ON, Regina SK, Oakland CA, San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA, New York NY, Hudson NY, Beach Lake PA, Haverford PA, Greensboro NC, Louisville KY, Boston MA, Cambridge MA, Chattanooga TN, Ann Arbor MI, and Baltimore MD.)

The Blind Field Shuttle Walking Tour by Carmen Papalia on Vimeo

Practicing Accessibility by Jacqueline Bell in Field Journal

Creative Conciliations by David Garneau on Conciliations.ca

Blind Orientations: Walking, Stumbling, and turning Towards New Points of View by Amanda Cachia in catalog for “Long Time No See” by Carmen Papalia

Heightened Perception by Jennifer Van Evra in Forecast Public Art

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Walking Sculpture (1967)

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people rolling a large ball in the streets

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Walking Sculpture (1967)

Pistoletto (1933-) rolls a ball made of newspaper down the streets, beckoning the participation of the whole community. This work is considered part of the Art Povera movement.

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture (1973)

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a person wearing a T-shaped sculpture on their head

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture

Head Sculpture (1973) by Efrat Natan (1947-) has photo documentation that presents a descriptive view of what occurred during the walking performance, and what it looked like from multiple angles. In this work, Natan used a wearable T-shaped sculpture that narrowed the field of view and hearing for the wearer, emphasizing concepts of surveillance and mapping. The photographs showcase both the sculpture and the figure in the street.

“Natan walked through the streets of Tel Aviv, her head covered by a hollow plywood, T-shaped box/mask/sculpture the morning after [the independence day] military parade [in Jerusalem, five months before the outbreak of the Fourth Arab-Israeli War], meld[ing] the language of minimalism, body art and installation art of that period with Christian influences (public self-signifying is a mark of Cain; the act is one of walking the Via Dolorosa).” [credit] The sculpture “can be read as a cross, as an airplane, and even as an angel with outspread wings.” [credit]

“The Minimalism went well with my shyness: it was a kind of mask. The space, which sits strongly in my body, led me to Body Art”, Natan says. Body Art sets up the artist’s body as a central object to be viewed, and puts the tension between the body as subject and as object in the center of the action.” [credit]

“The T-shape is reminiscent of the children’s house in her kibbutz. The sculpture’s visual appearance calls to mind Robert Morris or Charlotte Posenenske. Due to her restricted field of vision, Natan could only see part of the people surrounding her.” [credit] ”

“The kibbutz, where she had lived from her second year of elementary school until the end of her 11th-grade year in high school. The T-shaped structure of the children’s house, the most familiar architectural structure of her life in the kibbutz, contained bedrooms, a dining room, the showers, and a classroom. The long side of the children’s house, with the dining room in the center and the bedrooms on both its sides, faced west.” [credit]

“Head Sculpture (1973) was Efrat Natan’s first street performance to a chance audience. In many ways, this work was a harbinger of an artistic genre of quiet action in the public space, which was recognized thanks to the remaining photographic images. Such works, that combine body art and minimalist sculpture, are formed in a space that is devoid of institutional artistic context, with the very occurrence often affecting the content of the work. Thus, for example, the title of this work was given by two random tourists who were observing Natan walking along Dizengoff and Frishman Streets, her head stuck in a hollow MDF sculpture in the shape of a cross, or the letter X or a plus sign. One tourist said to the other: “Look! A head sculpture!”” [credit]

From the Wanderlust catalog: “Natan draws on her upbringing in her work, which reflects the Israel “religion of labor” and the ideological imperative of “making do with little.”

“The flattened aerial perspective transforms the human form into a sculptural object and suggests modes of surveillance and mapping, which are emphasized by the function of the sculpture itself”

“Her performance suggests a framing and reduction of the senses and the ambiguity inherent in collecting a narrow field of vision and hearing.”