Community Walk is a participatory walking performance that explores intersections between bodies, costume, movement, site, and collective experiences. Through the participation of diverse audiences, the performance explores how costume interventions can shape relational, sensory, and performative interactions within urban–natural environments.

Community Walk reimagines what performance is—and, importantly, what a performance company can be. Here, the costumes (“garments-for-two”) themselves constitute the company: as non-human agents, they hold agency and actively shape the unfolding performance. Participants (audiences) are not cast as performers in a traditional sense; rather, they engage playfully and attentively with the garments.

At the core of the company are twelve stretchable and visually distinct “garments-for-two.” As a non-human company, these costumes act as agents that influence proximity, rhythm, and interaction as well as that they invite participating audiences to move, negotiate, and sense together.

In the Community Walk performance, the stage is mobile and embodied. The costumes form the stage, and the participating audience becomes the performers. As the performance unfolds through walking, there is no fixed frontal orientation or external audience. Instead, all present—including participants, costumes, the site, and passersby—become co-performers within a shared, shifting situation.

Working with a diverse participating audience, this non-human company explores how costume and textile interventions generate sensory, caring, listening, relational and performative encounters. As the only human member of the company, Charlotte Østergaard hosts the participatory walking performance, allowing the textiles to perform alongside—and through—the participants and vice versa. Participants are invited to listen through and with the stretchability of the costume, with fellow participants, and with the site.

Rather than rehearsed choreography, actions are improvised. Movement emerges in response to the site, a shared framework (a set of walking intentions that function not as instructions but as invitations and potentials), and the affective and physical qualities of the costumes. The performance is thus contingent, relational, and continuously negotiated.

Through collaborative design, collective walking, and embodied engagement, participants co-create experiences that foreground shared agency, attentive listening, and material-discursive exploration. Community Walk emphasizes inclusivity and co-creation, highlighting the active role of costume in shaping collective expression and fostering connections between bodies, textiles, sites and communities.

Read the article “Embodied Connections between People, Materials and Situated Atmospheres” where I unfold the development of Community Walk.

Community Walk have been shown at Metropolis performance festival “Performing Landscapes (2025) and the “15th Prague Quadrennial for Performance Space and Design” (2023) and the twelve our version was performed at Metropolis performance festival “Wa(l)king Copenhagen” (2020). Additionally, Community Walk have also been presented in workshop formats at PARSE conference, University of Gothenburg (2022), Malmö Theatre Academy/Lund University (2023) and the Art-based research PhD course, Aarhus University (2024).

Community Walk (2025)

Metropolis Performing Landscapes. Three performances at Refshaleøen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Performing Landscapes, three performances in Gribskov Kommune. The images below are from Munkeruphus.

Community Walk (2023)

Community Walk , Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2023.

Corinne Heskett wrote in “Review – Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2023, artistic director Markéta Fantová, Czech Republic, Prague, 18–18 June 2023” in Studies in Costume & Performance 9:1 (page 87–93) that

Community Walk was a co-costumed performance experience designed with costumes that cleverly stretched and adapted to allow for more than one wearer. Created and led by Danish artist and designer Charlotte Østergaard, the ingenious two-person costumes created a vehicle for joyful entanglement between participants and the exploration of urban spaces and natural objects. As co-wearers, participants were able to test and explore the materiality of the costume by stretching and entangling it with other pairs, as well as with objects they encountered in the streetscape such as traffic lights, trees or streetlamps. The Community Walk was exciting as it not only offered the participants the opportunity to connect closely within their costume pair, but also encouraged shared group connection and unexpected encounters with the general public (Heskett 2024: 90–91).

Following Community Walk at PQ2023, I carry with me a deeply felt experience of the work as it unfolded across five performative walks. Participants joined from Chile, China, Brazil, Mexico, the USA, Canada, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, forming temporary yet meaningful constellations of shared presence.

Throughout the walks, I was continually struck by how the materialities and stretchabilities of the costumes performed on and with the participants—how they generated connections, shaped social dynamics, and fostered emergent communities. I was particularly moved by the openness, attentiveness, and playfulness of participants, many of whom had not met prior to the experience. Within a short span of time, groups of up to 24 people—and the pairs formed through the garments—became familiar with one another, connecting through and with the costume.

I am deeply grateful to all who participated. Through their ways of engaging, entangling, and collaborating, they revealed new possibilities within the work and expanded my understanding of what costumed communities can become.

I also wish to express my sincere thanks to Carolina E. Santo for selecting and curating Community Walk as part of the PQ performance program, and to Statens Kunstfond / The Danish Arts Foundation for their generous support.

Performance dates:
Sunday June 11, 2023, 11:00–12:30 & 15:00–16:30
Tuesday June 13, 2023, 13:00–14:30 & 16:00–17:30
Thursday June 15, 2023, 16:00–17:30

Images and video by Susan Marshall and Charlotte østergaard

Community Walk (2020)

The very first version of Community Walk was a part of the festival Wa(l)king Copenhagen – a festival concept that Metropolis developed as a direct response to the pandemic/lockdown: over 100 days (starting May 1, 2020) 100 different artists walked for twelve hours in different areas of Copenhagen. Every artist was asked to live-stream on Facebook five-ten minutes each hour. Due to theCovid 19-pandemic government regulations of public distance and assembly limitation and the live streams were the way that the public/audience could follow the festival. 

In Community Walk (July 30, 2020) I walked for twelve hours in the urban environment of central Copenhagen wearing a costume that connected me with twelve different participants – one hour with each participant. Community Walk became an beautiful experience of 12 hours of costumed and embodied conversation about communities (fællesskab).

12 hours of following and leading, 12 hours of being connected, 12 hours of being approached, ignored, commented on, and yelled at, and 12 hours of moving in, reacting to and engaging with the city and the environment.

This version of Community Walk was a part of my PhD thesis. Read more here

Thanks to all the wonderful and inspiring participating artists: dancer/choreographerDaniel Jeremiah Persson, dancer Camille Marchadour, designer/photographer Agens Saaby Thomsen, actor Lars Gade, dancer /choreographer Tanya Rydell Montan, dancer/choreographer Julienne Doko, dance artist Anna Stamp Møller, dancer/choreographer Paul James Rooney, scenographer Aleksandra Lewon, dancer Josefine Ibsen, costume designer Jeppe Worning and visual artist/dancer Benjamin Skop.