Crawling, or Undoing Verticality

As part of her digital residency conducted in partnership with Érudit, art theorist Georgia Phillips-Amos explores the act of crawling as a gesture of resistance to authority, social performance, and normative verticality. Through the lens of artists, activists, and theorists, this text demonstrates how this movement embodies exhaustion, refusal, accessibility, and the unlearning of dominant colonial, ableist, and capitalist logics.

Crawling is a refusal to perform. One tactic of resistance my four-year-old daughter deploys against getting dressed for school is to make her body limp till it folds to the ground, and she crawls away. It is impossible to stoop fast enough to catch her, to pull her back into the morning rush. Inspired by her ungovernability, I examine crawling as a defiant spaciotemporal practice utilized by artists and protestors. For this digital residency, I follow crawlers, along with notions of verticality, propriety, authority, and refusal.

Crawling remains doable when little else is, making it nearly impossible to control. “To stop someone from crawling,” writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “you have to put him in a hole, plant him in a jar where, no longer able to stir his members, he will, however, stir some memories.”¹ 1 - Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann,SubStance 24, no. 3, issue 78 (1995): 6. Deleuze considers crawling in relation to exhaustion. He was writing about absurdist theatre, but exhaustion is a hallmark of contemporary life. What to do in the face of it is a question that confronts us all.² 2 - See, for instance, Susan Cahill and Erin Morton, “On Burnout and Recovery: Academic Life, Lately,” RACAR 49 (2024): 128–30, accessible online; Julia Smith, “‘I Felt like I Was Losing Every Day’: Women Educators’ Lived Experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Labour 92 (2023): 259–80, accessible online; Alexis Truong et al, “Burnout, stress traumatique secondaire et détresse psychologique chez les intervenant(e)s et les gestionnaires dans le milieu communautaire au Québec. Portrait de la situation pendant la pandémie de la COVID-19,” Santé mentale au Québec 49, no. 1 (2021): 49–68, accessible online. I write “us,” but exhaustion is as asymmetrical as it is pervasive. It is disproportionately felt and resisted by the poor, the female, the disabled, the queer, the dispossessed, and the racialized—those who do not have the privilege to retreat.

William Pope.L (1955–2023) is the most iconic practitioner of crawling. On the origins of his practice, he wrote, “Initially, I did it to explore the short circuits of communication. Today I do it to change the world. This permits me to be changed by the world.”³ 3 - William Pope.L, “William Pope.L,” Esse, no. 40 (Fall 2000), accessible online (our translation). For Pope.L, crawling was a reaction to a glitch, a fault line in an exhausted system. But how does crawling address that exhaustion? How does crawling change the crawler?  

For decades, Pope.L hauled his body horizontally across long stretches of city asphalt, accumulating grime on his glasses. In 2005, the year he staged Bringing the Décarie to the Mountain (a group crawl up Mount Royal in Montréal), Mark Lanctôt wrote in the “Dérives”issue of Esse on the alienating effects of crawling: “Once verticality as an agent of meaning is recognized and transgressed, the entire order it represents is thrown into question.”⁴ 4 - Mark Lanctôt, “William Pope.L: Lève-toi et rampe,” Esse 54 (2005), accessible online (our translation). Lanctôt doesn’t call Pope.L’s work Brechtian, but he implies that these horizontal processions tip the logic of the upright world on its head. He considers the defamiliarizing effect of crawling on the habitual verticality both of the human body and of urban planning. Pope.L draws a perpendicular axis between his body and the built world, insisting on a motion at odds with the one the infrastructure incites. I am reminded of a photograph from his first crawl across Times Square (1978), in which a policeman attempts to catch his shoulder. Ever unruly, Pope.L’s crawls only gained momentum. One of Pope.L’s final performances was a group crawl titled Conquest (2019). A hundred and forty participants were given blindfolds and flashlights and asked to wear only one shoe as they crawled through Greenwich Village over paved Lenape land. Through “Reinventing Strangeness,” by Charlotte Jacob-Maguire, I learn that this same year and only a few blocks north, a gathering of disabled individuals and allies, led by the artist Shannon Finnegan, staged theAnti-Stairs Club Lounge to protest New York City’s singular obsession with verticality.⁵ 5 - Charlotte Jacob-Maguire, “Reinventing Strangeness: Shannon Finnegan and the Demand for Disabled Futures,” Esse 100 (2020), accessible online.

Finnegan’s was a seated action at the base of The Vessel,a 150-foot-tall structure composed entirely of stairs—a monument to ascension. Jacob-Maguire frames Anti-Stairs Club Lounge as a disruption of able-bodied city planning and a centring of those unable or unwilling to ascend (“anyone who is not ‘young, bipedal, non-suicidal, stroller-less, luggage-less’”). This was a temporal as well as a spatial protest, as loitering, like crawling, defies demands for speed and efficiency. Since that article’s publication, at least four suicides have occurred at The Vessel,⁶ 6 - Eric Levenson, “The Vessel in NYC’s Hudson Yards reopens with safety netting 3 years after spate of suicides. But is it any better?”CNN, October 27, 2024, accessible online. a reality that might have been avoided by heeding Finnegan’s warning. Crawling en masse has itself been powerfully enacted in protests over accessibility. In 1990, in Washington, DC, hundreds of disability rights activists marched from the White House to the Capitol, where dozens of them dropped their wheelchairs and canes and clambered up the steps, a collective demonstration that preceded the establishment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In their article for Theatre Research in Canada, Katherine Zien and Arseli Dokumacı recount a “reperformance” of this crawl at an inaccessible festival venue in Montréal.⁷ 7 - See Katherine Zien and Arseli Dokumaci, “A Mobile Social Realm: Labour, Sovereignty, and Subjecthood in Disabled Theatre / Affordance Creations of Disability Performance: Limits of a Disabled Theatre,” Theatre Research in Canada 37, no. 2 (2016): 186, accessible online. In noting that the reperformance was both hyperlocal and pulled from an international protest/performance repertoire, they remind me that a signature strength of crawling, as both performance and protest strategy, is its reproducibility. All a crawl requires is space, time, and at least one willing body.

BORDÉLIQUE

To crawl is to get dirt under your fingernails, to let the ground scrape your knees. In a 2016 interview with Véronique Hudon, the dancer Dana Michel describes her surprise at reactions to her solo performance Mercurial George. Critics have called the way Michel intermittently crawls, while embodying the “mercurial” character, as “grotesque.” She recounts her experience as the opposite and calls the pleasure in performing uninhibited movement beautiful “because I let myself go to a dimension I don’t usually go to.”⁸ 8 - Dana Michel quoted in Véronique Hudon, “Dana Michel ou la beauté toute crue,” Jeu, 161, no. 4 (2016): 88 (our translation), accessible online. Michel’s performances are relational as much as they are embodied. “I have the urge to cry when I see a body that is ‘elsewhere,’” she says about the uncanny feeling of observing another person “who isn’t affected by ‘what you’re supposed to do,’”⁹ 9 - Ibid. who shapes their body in unsanctioned ways. She acknowledges that people who inspire her with their own wayward movements are often suffering. She describes this paradox as bordélique, or chaotic. To welcome the outside, the messy, the unsettled as elemental to life is key to the logic of the crawl.

In 2024, I published Michel’s handwritten score to Yellow Towel, another solo performance, in the anti-discipline magazine o bod.¹⁰ 10 - Dana Michel and Michael Nardone, “JACKERS,” o bod, February 13, 2024, accessible online. Though carefully composed, this score is handwritten on paper towels, and the first written word is “Uh,” starting off with a doubt. From her performances to that score, Michel’s work celebrates what you’re not supposed to.

UNDOING

Synonyms for “crawl” include “slink,” “trail,” and “creep.” In Serpentine (2019), a solo performance choreographed by Daina Ashbee, the artist Areli Moran crawls nude across an oiled stage. Snakes, whose movement Moran mimics, have up to fifteen thousand muscles, whereas humans possess only seven hundred. It must take insistence from every inch of Moran’s musculature, and will power, to refuse the impulse to either stand or collapse. Didier Morelli—who, inspired by Pope.L, performed his own crawl in 2011—recounts what I would call an undoing as Moran pushes beyond exhaustion.¹¹ 11 - “Undoing” after Saidiya Hartman’s “The Plot of her Undoing,” Feminist Art Coalition: Notes on Feminisms, 2016, accessible online. He details how she makes “indiscernible sounds between each breath.” Her movements grow “unceremonious” as she returns to the starting line and rebegins.¹² 12 - Didier Morelli, “Daina Ashbee Serpentine,” Esse 96 (2019), accessible online. Ceremony and discernibility fall away as the dance carries on. What else is being undone? Verticality as a code of conduct?

The upright witness is left in the position of voyeur. Morelli describes the uncomfortable feeling of watching at a distance, from what he calls a “position of authority.” This idea recurs among those who watch crawlers. Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre uses the same language of being “placed in the position of authority” to account for her feeling of discomfort watching Michel perform. St-Jean Aubre compares her role to being “a judge of a patient’s condition through the glass of the examination room.”¹³ 13 - Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, “Voir: un acte d’interpretation informé,” Esse 83 (2015), (our translation) accessible online. Though evocative, the trouble with this description is that it retains the standing hierarchy that the crawl upends. To crawl is to break with the jurisdiction of the judge. There is no authority to be had over a crawler.

With “falling into matter,” karen elaine spencer argues that authority is a relational construct, that it must be acknowledged to be effective. There is always power in, as spencer puts it, “being the one to confer, or to not confer, the authoritative position.”¹⁴ 14 - karen elaine spencer, “falling into matter,” Esse 50 (2004), accessible online. She was writing not about crawling but about hunger strikes. Such actions are direct assertions of sovereignty that remain available to children resisting their parents’ rule at the dinner table and to prisoners refusing the authority of the guard. No one can anticipate or control these penultimate actions.

UNLEARNING

Beyond being an affront to authority, wayward movement generates embodied knowledge. “Let us imagine a person who has a job, possesses the means to remain vertical, but chooses to momentarily give up that verticality? … That person would learn something,” explained Pope.L.¹⁵ 15 - William Pope.L, interview with Martha Wilson, BOMB, 1996, accessible online.

A special issue of Performance Matters on the theme of “Performing (in) Place” theorizes precarious movement. Jimena Ortúzar considers her migration from South America to Canada a kind of fall across the map and down the social ladder. Attempting to break with the aspiration to assimilate that she felt as a young person and move instead toward what Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson call a “grounded normativity” rooted in relations that are neither dominant nor exploitative, Ortúzar enacts a walking practice that intentionally induces a sense of vertigo in her body. She walks along steep edges, nurturing a feeling of being “unbalanced, unsettled, unsure.”¹⁶ 16 - Jimena Ortuzar, “Migrant Memory, Movement, and Misrecognition: Reactivating Diasporic Experience Toward an Anticolonial Politics of Place,” Performance Matters 7, no. 1–2 (2021): 87, accessible online. Being off balance calls upon the sensation of the world shifting under her feet as a new migrant. It is a visceral reminder to avoid falling into pre-existing patterns of settler entitlement.

Likewise, in that issue, my friend Nazli Akhtari recounts her own practice of walking backwards on unceded land as an Iranian diasporic subject. Akhtari’s thinking is inspired by Rinaldo Walcott’s call for an “ethics of arrival” in which diasporic communities are accountable to ongoing histories of coloniality in the places where they land. Akhtari walks backwards as a form of reorientation. These are what she calls embodied “lessons in unlearning” the assumptions of coloniality and capitalist choreography.¹⁷ 17 - Nazli Akhtari, “Diaspora Walks: Small Lessons in Unlearning,” Performance Matters 7, no. 1–2 (2021): 74, accessible online. Giving yourself vertigo, risking a fall, or simply bringing yourself down may not be the most intuitive means of resisting the systems and worldviews that you do not consent to, but undoing the high ground may be a first step. If we can move outside the upright “common sense” that respects authority, decorum, and entitlement and get closer to the sustaining ground, what else might be undone? What else might each of us unlearn?

Links to the articles cited: William Pope.L Mark Lanctôt Charlotte Jacob-Maguire Katherine Zien et Arseli Dokumaci Véronique Hudon Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre karen elaine spencer Jimena Ortuzar Nazli Akhtari