Tom Meilleur
ODESSEY'S: a series of walks
Walking is important to me. I know of no other activity that is as honest and direct as walking is. I am always looking for ways to disrupt and elevate this act into a creative practice, mixing the pedestrian with the profound, the everyday with the dreamworld.
"
"
The Walk,
the Drift
...I like to call it Drifting.
It’s not like spacing out, it’s more like tuning out of the conventional and habitual ways we walk, and ‘tuning in’ to the world as a creative and collaborative ever-changing stage.
​...we are told that in our dreams that every character we meet is really an aspect of our own self...
Sometimes it’s helpful to employ some kinds of tactics on a drift to help gently dislodge ourselves from our conventions... follow a cloud... talk to a lamppost, tell it about your day... only turn left...
We will know it when we find it...
it will invite us...
it will have a sense of openness...
of peaceful expectation...
The Movement
The Place
“Do you have the courage to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear... can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself” ~ Lao-tzu.
The extraordinary ordinary
I think it’s important to also be ordinary on a drift. Don’t make it too sacred.
Disrupt your own disruption.
A Reflection.
I’d heard about dérives
, even taken myself on one
, but this was something entirely different.
Being in a car with a b l i n d f o l d e d passenger who was listening to a stone for directions felt so right…
…like how do we manage to operate our lives from any other basis than this?
Met-a-phor s e e p e d into everything.
​
The r o u n d s and r o u n d s of c i r c l e s landing us right in the heart of a place so well known, a seemingly boring path leading to a sacred grove which none of us knew about.
Tom holds space in a way apart from all others.
​
There is no facade.
I think what he actually holds is truth.
​
And that is the place from which the dance arose.
It was gnarly, uncompromising, gentle and beautiful.
None of us could escape ourselves in this set up.
We literally w
a
l
k
e
d ourselves right into it.
This is the kind of dance that I want to engage in and I’d love to see a community of truth-seeking dancers form around it.
