What does it mean to walk? To follow someone, barefoot, on to some of the most treacherous sands of Britain’s coastline? To follow them into the mist, across a shifting landscape where the tide comes in ‘quick as a horse can gallop’? To walk with several hundred other people, and collectively place one’s faith in someone’s embodied local knowledge?
Invisible Flock’s new performance, Sand Pilot, does several things at once. It asks that we walk, and keep on walking, into the grey haze that may or may not lift to reveal Morecambe at our backs, Grange over Sands and Kent’s Bank ahead, the hills rising beyond. It asks that we listen – to the sounds of the bay, to the wind, to occasional birdsong – and to Cedric Robinson’s recorded voice on our headphones, speaking of a lifetime repeating that single journey across the bay at low-tide. Always the same, always changing. 50 years and enough steps to take him around the world and more, though Cedric, fisherman, son of a fisherman, has rarely left Morecambe, never flown in a plane. It asks us to imagine a straight line, starting in Morecambe and heading out across the globe, all his bay crossings lined end-to-end. Walking through time zones, tropical zones, war-zones. Walking through history, through social change.
As we listen, we catch glimpses of Cedric up ahead, see him engage with the other walkers; we see him stop to gauge the weather, scan the skyline, test for quicksand. Occasionally he shouts, loud and harsh, at someone wondering off the route he has marked, a route that changes with the tides and the wind. The theatre of it all – everyone stopping, hushed, while he finds the right crossing point, tests the sands again. Remaking, remapping. The company have spoken of the difficulty of mapping this landscape with technology, the trickiness of getting any kind of fix on the tidal sands, and the crazy changes in depth as the sea races in and out.
And, towards the end of the walk, we reflect on endings: the end of particular kinds of industry and ways of life, the end of commercial fishing in the bay. We remember those that have died on the sands. It is also the end of the line for this unique role in the nation’s geo-consciousness, the Queen’s Guide to the Sands. Every step is taking him closer to his father.
Invisible Flock’s Sand Pilot begins with four days in September 2012 leading to an installation and book later this year. The final two Sand Pilot walks take place on 22nd & 24th September. It was made in collaboration with Cedric Robinson, Queen’s Guide to the Sands of Morecambe Bay, with financial support from Arts Council England and Lancashire County Council.
Matt Fenton is Director of Live at LICA, Lancaster University’s contemporary arts organisation. Invisible Flock are Live at LICA supported artists based in Leeds, and Sand Pilot is a Live at LICA commission.