I don’t have many reoccurring dreams, but there is one that stands out. The dream is of me running on all fours. I distinctly recall feeling the need to throw hands on the ground to gather speed and it somehow working. The gait was a bit awkward, but I still managed to gain speed, and the view of the world was – with the ground a constant blur – amazing.
So I was surprised when a friend linked me to the following video, by done by one of his classmates, Lenka Chludova. Except that Lenka, an artist from the Boston area, dwells on the awkwardness of the human gait:
It is particular to the movement on all fours that it is straining from the beginning of the act and therefore does not go through a physically and visually obvious progression as, for example, running on two as fast and for as long as possible. The muscles and skeleton resist this abnormal motion in a way that makes the human body give out signals as if it is on the verge of collapsing three minutes into the act the same way it signals fifty minutes later. The sense of a pending total exhaustion therefore occurs repeatedly.
The video is a bit long, but that is what makes it amazing. Lenka runs as fast as she can on all fours, through out New York, for over 45 minutes. The scenery changes are quite spectacular and appear – possibly coincidentally – to map to her emotions. Starting out relatively fast with a backdrop of the skyline and ending exhausted in an isolated part city.
Endure:
As fast and for as long as possible from Lenka Chludova on Vimeo.