Desert Walker is an experimental performance that investigates the extremities of human space/time perceptions. It took place on the desolate salt flats of Utah and Nevada, USA. The performance was inspired by ‘Quad’ – the first in a series of minimalist experimental television plays made by Samuel Beckett in the 1980s for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk. Quad is performed as a serial game involving the motional pattern of four simultaneous solos. Four cloaked performers, whose coloured hoods make them identifiable yet anonymous, perform a relentless closed-circuit choreography on a white square. Once inside the square, they monotonously and synchronously pace the respectively 6 steps of the lengthwise and diagonal lines it contains. The mathematical precision and choreography is made possible by the exactness of the timing. Choreographic variation is confined to the number of performers, and the resultant changes in colour constellations. The middle of the square, which is marked by a dot, must always be bypassed on the left-hand side. In the course of the performance, the feet leave behind faint traces on the diagonals of the white square. It takes approximately 8-12 minutes to perform the piece.

The sequences of movement are:
Sequence 1: AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA
Sequence 2: BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB
Sequence 3: CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC
Sequence 4: DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD

Desert Walker performed ‘Quad’ on the salt flats that surround Wendover, a small town on the edge of mountains and salt flats, located at the point where the Basin and Range of Nevada spill into the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, USA. A desolate place of barren rock and white alki, Wendover is a place where “no person would want to live”. It is a stop-over place for people driving from New York to San Fransisco, and is bisected by the state line. On the one side lies the remains of the gambling boom town of Nevada’s Wendover, while the Utah half is dominated by the remains of an Airbase abandoned in 1977. It is here that The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI, Los Angeles) has established the Wendover Residency Program and The American Land Museum.

The Airbase was established at the beginning of WWII to train bomber crews, including the Enola
Gay team. As a consequence, between 1940-50 the surrounding area was bombed, ripped and
splattered with chemical and biological agents. The military still holds some 3 million acres of
restricted testing ground, while large-scale industries remove salt and process minerals from the
flats, and extract copper and gold from the mountains. The residues and relics of both
(undocumented) military and industrial activity can be found scattered around the almost
uninhabital landscape.
The barren landscape can, on first site look like a place of beauty, untouched by humans. Its
vastness can be phycically and psychologically disorientating, disrupting all perspective of space
and time. Under certain weather conditions, and at one point on the playa, it is possible to see the
earth bend on the horizon. The climate, which has been described as “weather on drugs” is another
aspect to be contended with. Boiling in the summer, freezing in the winter and with long periods of
stable moderate conditions in between.