“We feel The Walk is a natural walk, walking with nature. There is a very strong energy, all the different elements helped the walk keep going,” Liu said.
The show, however, will be nowhere near as arduous as the real journey either for the 13-member company or the armchair travelers in the audience. As animated as Liu was in recounting the trip, she admitted it had taken a toll.
“With my health, my age, it’s very hard for me to walk these 50 days ... so I just concentrated on the feet. Sometimes I couldn’t eat at the end of the day; I just went to sleep,” she said.
The key she said was kanzuxia (看足下), literally “watching under your feet,” or focusing on the process of moving step by step. It’s a very Zen thing, she said.
“On the walk you get the chance to watch inside yourself,” she said.
When she walked she wore a piece of cloth wrapped around her head to help protect her from the sun. She also pulled some of the cloth over her eyes. It didn’t completely block her vision, but it helped her focus on walking. Without that strip of cloth, she said, she might not have finished the trip.
“One day we were walking in Kaohsiung, we had to go under a bridge. It was very narrow, very dangerous, a little dark. I lifted the cloth up [to see better] and I fell down,” she said. “I was so tired. Once you use your brain, everything breaks down.”
She felt like she couldn’t move another step.
“They wanted to put me in a car to catch up with the rest of the company. But I said no,” she said. “After coming out [from under the bridge] I could see the members very far ahead. I pulled the cloth back down and thought, ‘Watch the feet,’ and I arrived [at the next destination] at the same time as they did!”
The company’s next trip will be a bit easier, at least on the feet. They are heading off to the US in the middle of next month on a month-long tour to perform their 2002 work Meeting With Vajrasattva (金剛心). U-Theater will perform this piece for local fans at their mountain home on Laoquanshan (老泉山) in early December.
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