Street Training

22 August 2010 by Lottie Child

Modesty of gaze, voice and bearing were equated with virginity and were to be guarded just as heavily, since each could ruin a woman’s reputation just as easily. A woman’s reputation was not just her own but her entire family’s, for familial honor rested in the chastity of its women. A maiden was thus to be above all other things chaste. In addition to castità, pudacitia, vergogna, sobrietà, modestia, and pietà were virtues all virgins should seek, ociosità, loquasità, audacità, curiosità, il discorrere quà e là, vices from which they should flee. These same characteristics by and large were expected of all other women, be they wives, widows or nuns. Chastity and enclosure defined a woman’s life.

Vanessa Chase Lilly; Casa delle Zitelle: Gender & Architecture in Renaissance Venice (2002)

I desire then that women in every place, at all times, and in all their actions, show modesty; that is to say they ought to do this easily, in standing still, in going about, in speaking, in their eyes, in their face and finally in all the movements of their body.

Francesco Barbaro’s 1415 tract De re uxorial
Citing antique authors Plato and Virgil, Barbaro stated that 
‘the most gracious virtue is found in the most beautiful body.’ 
Yet comportment too was a sign of the soul.

Arrived in Venice yesterday and felt overwhelmed, I felt so awake. In the afternoon I went for a walk and within two minutes there was loads of play going on around me. Some small children – maybe four and five years were on the ground outside a bar on Via Garibaldi, they were rolling around and falling over on purpose.

Excellent martial arts training – we forget how to fall and fear it as we get older. Good clowning too, especially the little girl who rolled on her back and opened her legs as wide as she could – then the little boy mirrored her.

Like the Opies say in their book The Language and Lore of Children – sometimes they really have their own culture – here it was somewhere between martial arts, being animals and clowning.

Then there was a football game between a boy of about six and a man – whenever the ball went off course a passer-by would send it back in the right direction, nothing remarkable about this – a natural impulse that is pretty much impossible in central London.

I was resisting my urges to copy children’s movements. I’ve been practicing what might be called ‘phenomenological ethnography’ –
I worked hard at it for four months in Brazil, emulating Capoeira masters, dancers and receiving instruction in how to walk and dance from girls in favelas.

Because I think it is possible to understand a culture through reflecting on how it feels to enact the body movements of its people. Years emulating my Capoeira master have changed
my body and mind in many ways.

Of course a woman moving in the ways I’ve described means something totally different to when a child does it, but I wonder what life could be like if we stayed open to urges to move and feel? Can the movements of children be clues to uncovering desires beyond conventional street behaviour for all of us?

When a woman talks of ‘desire’ and ‘street walking’ in the same paragraph it has to have clear connotations. Can a multiplicty of desires be lived with liberty, without conforming to restricting norms of behaviour, behaviours that may be scripted beyond us and perhaps not always best serving our humanity?

I felt like an arch tourist, making my covert little videos of the play I was interested in. And later I spotted two kids playing in a calle, one of them performed and confirmed the roles – mine of ‘consumer of spectacle’, his as actor and enactor of the fairytale city.

He came and turned cartwheels for me, for my camera. His smaller sister was drawing in wax crayon all over the step in front of her door. I sat with her and asked if I could join in. We drew together, her brother joined us and soon we were all turning cartwheels and making backbends down the walls. Passing the video camera from hand to hand the performance was for and by
us together for a while.

Their mum came and introduced herself and invited me back tomorrow, she sent them to accompany me to Via Garibaldi and we found leaflets for paper planes on the way, a few Capoeira kicks and spins were demonstrated and we said goodbye. It was half-past nine at night and groups of children were still walking in the streets together.