2026 Performance Lending Library: Terry Hempfling and Rachel Jendrzejewski

Backwards Walk

An invitation to walk backwards slowly, in a sustained tempo, while listening to fragments of text and focusing your sensory orientation along a single path. 

Developed as a collaboration from 2016 to 2025 and adapted in 2026 for Kaatsbaan, Backwards Walk is a site-responsive movement practice designed to interrupt your habitual patterns of perception, attention, and locomotion.

Before you start the audio recording, head to the start of the path with the fences on either side. 

You will be asked to take a stick from the white bucket, turn your back to the path, then stand between the fences with the stick in one hand.