News / slow travel

A 1000 mile experiment in the art of slow travel

By Ursula Billington  Thursday Sep 19, 2024

Tom Bailey is finally home. He’s immersing himself in the city, revisiting old haunts around Stokes Croft for the first time in three months. “I’m slowly finding my feet again,” he says with a gentle, slightly bewildered smile.

Those feet left home at the beginning of May and carried him 500 miles over land, and 500 more by sea. They crossed countries and waterways, traversed beaches and climbed mountains; they were soothed by mossy woodland floors and icy river swims.

The journey, from Scotland to Denmark via Norway, was “somewhere between a walk and a pilgrimage. A clown-esque nomadic work of art both stupid and serious, combining Monty Python with a spiritual purpose.”

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Most of all, it was an experiment in the art of slow travel.

Bailey’s a theatre maker and nature lover. He’s all too aware of the climate impacts of touring performance work – in particular, the reliance on carbon-heavy flying.

His radical response to the problem was inspired by the way that nature travels. In tackling the practical challenge of transporting his theatre piece Crap At Animals to Passage Festival near Copenhagen, he had a brainwave: a Really Long Walk.

Not just any old walk though: Bailey carried a 16 metre long piece of silk emblazoned with the names of the 44,000 extinct and endangered species on the IUCN’s red list – what he has called “a book of both life and death”.

Each day he’d pick a species – most often one he’d never heard of – as inspiration: enacting playful rituals, imagining the creature in various settings, doing what he calls ‘physical embodied theatre exercises’.

He’d photograph himself as a jumping anchovy on the beach, upside down on a grassy verge as a western clownfish, or as a cheer pheasant, delighted after finding nut butter in a shop – “Yes, I’m from Bristol…,” grins Bailey.

Bailey, in Norway, shrouded in the IUCN red list species list – each day he would pick one of the 44,000 species on the list and embody it physically

The practice reflected the concept of his performance, ‘a kind of clown show where one guy fails to do species impressions, as a tragicomic metaphor for the current extinction/biodiversity crisis.’

“I was quite a busy body on the walk!” says Bailey. “A lot of the days were quite solitary, but at no point did the loneliness get to me.

“There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude. Most of the time I felt in some kind of dialogue with the landscapes, ecology, geology of the place.”

This was especially true with the trees he met along the way. The route was no accident: it followed the boreal treeline connecting Scotland and Norway that is slowly progressing northwards as arctic temperatures rise.

Tree sites formed markers for his pilgrimage: fossilised remains on a Hebridean beach, remnants of ancient Caledonian forest, birch woods and old growth Norwegian pine.

Tom found spending time in these forests profoundly moving, writing that “to be within them is life-changing. It’s more than blissful – it’s beyond words… I didn’t know nature could make me feel this way,” in his blog.

Bailey connected with trees and nature along his route, often finding the wooded sites he visited to be surprisingly moving or to inspire profound waves of joy

“The natural life of the area hit me so much in a way I can’t explain,” he says.

“With really old trees and woods, there’s just a different sense of natural intelligence – it’s palpable. The sense of something – almost like you’re being watched – hits you. It feels like Life 2.0 in some of those places.

“I found, in Norway, with the shape of rocks and treescapes creeping up mountains – the landscape was hitting me like a piece of music might. I found myself gripped, or opened, or deeply connected to a place.”

When he did meet people, how did he explain what he was doing and what was the response?

“As an independent theatre maker, making devised work about climate change – it’s pretty niche!” laughs Bailey.

“Probably 70 per cent were abit like, ‘oh, I don’t really know what that is but it sounds cool’. The other 30 per cent were open to it and we had lots of interesting discussions about what I was doing.”

The species list was a useful conversational prop, he says:

“That was by far the most concrete way to engage people. They were very keen to be part of the unspreading of the sheet, and taking photos with it.”

The species list, over 16 metres long, was a useful prop in engaging people he met with conversations about what he was doing and why, says Bailey

But on the most part there was an invisible conflict between Bailey and others. Primarily, he felt, his personal interactions with the environment needed to be an unobserved and intimate two-way conversation.

“I found that the more ‘arty’ works I did, like photo shooting, embodying species or laying out the sheet, I was abit of a squirrel,” says Bailey, who has a habit of describing himself with reference to nature – ‘woodlousing’ across the map, or feeling tired “like a wizened mushroom.”

“I tended very much towards the ‘is anyone looking’ approach. It was about me and the place, I didn’t want to create a false distinction between human and non-human audiences,” he explains.

“I found, unexpectedly, that performing a species or embodying a tree felt just like being on stage in the theatre – that same connection with people, objects, beings around, watching.”

Bailey tackled many different terrains on his trip, overcoming challenges including tough mountain climbing and dangerously icy walks

Secondly, his overarching approach differed fundamentally from most other walkers he met out in the wilds.

“People are engaged with climate change issues, but my engagement with the landscape is different. Most people ask for quantifications – how far you’ve walked, what your pack weighs, how many days you’ve been walking,” he says.

“I’m just walking for pleasure, for the love of it. If I find somewhere I love, I stay with it. You meet a lot of people who are passionate about being outdoors, but interact with it within a certain lexicon – ‘I‘m on this route, getting from A to B and passing through this place.’

“For me, it’s not about passing through, it’s about being in and with the place.

“I see this weight, distance, time culture as abit competitive and sad. It’s unfortunate that so many people’s interactions with the outdoors are focused in this way.”

Bailey experimented with connecting with landscape and nature in different ways on his walk, including developing a dialogue with the natural world around him

But on arriving at the festival, Bailey found the response to the walk’s artworks to be “really lovely.” Audiences were interested in his mission and approach, affirming the potential in exploring environmental issues in an artistic way.

Walk over, show performed, Tom took a long train ride home and landed back in Bristol with much to reflect on.

“I learnt stuff that can’t be articulated in words,” he says, attempting to explain how he’s gathering his thoughts after such a unique experience.

“My main point was physical interaction with nature – learning through actually being there. Not reading about it, but physically interacting with the trees and landscape, measuring that with my body.”

Being alone, immersed in nature for so many weeks provided its own kind of learning about what’s important in life, says Bailey

Perhaps Bailey’s words in the moment, taken from his blog written on the journey, sum it up best:

“Forget everything we have ever known about planet Earth, all the science, all the myths, all the writings and facts and things that people tell you. All that matters is Now.

“Walk out, see the flower; see it as if for the first time. Move with it and let it move you. Attend to it, and let it attend to you. Make your meaning.”

Read more of Bailey’s thoughts and experiences on his journey in his blog: journeyofalosthuntergatherer.wordpress.com

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