Parallel City: A Participatory Audiowalk Performance Concept by Lindon Shimizu / MU&MA Studio

Parallel City is an immersive, site-sensitive group walking experience guided by a prerecorded audio track delivered through individual headsets. Set within urban landscapes—both outdoors and indoors—the work invites participants to traverse familiar environments as if for the first time. Through a choreographed sequence of sensory prompts, movement explorations, poetic storytelling, and subtle performative tasks, Parallel City proposes an altered, embodied way of perceiving the everyday world.

This participatory audio journey transforms the act of walking into a collective ritual of perception, attention, and transformation. The audience becomes both witness and performer, moving together while navigating a layered choreography of public and private spaces. The voice guiding the walk shifts between roles—at times a storyteller, a historian, or a somatic facilitator—inviting listeners to slip into a parallel reality embedded within the cracks of the visible city.

The audio interweaves:

• Somatic and bodily invitations to slow down, notice, and respond physically to textures, temperatures, sounds, and spatial dynamics.

• Guided movement tasks, subtle and performative, that heighten awareness of gravity, proximity, rhythm, and connection to others.

• Imagery-based visualizations that blur the line between memory, dream, and present moment—suggesting new geographies and inner landscapes.

• Historical and mythological fragments, site-specific or speculative, that reframe the streets, walls, and architecture as porous containers of layered time.

• Relational and collective actions, both synchronized and individual, gently reconfiguring how participants relate to each other and the world around them.

As the group moves through the city, they inhabit a parallel experience that reveals the poetic and the political, the intimate and the expansive. The walk becomes a subtle occupation of space, a temporary reweaving of the urban fabric through bodies in motion, attuned to sensorial richness and shared presence.

Parallel City challenges the notion of the city as merely a functional space. It asks:

What if we walked not to arrive, but to encounter?
What if perception was a radical act?
What if cities held invisible choreographies waiting to be danced into being?

By inviting slowness, attention, and embodied imagination into the daily rhythm of urban life, Parallel City opens portals into other ways of being in the world—parallel, yet always already here.