Stilted Language

Actor Randall Kent Cohn makes stilt-walking look easy. After he slips his feet under rubber straps, his stride quickly grows to a leap.

Cohn, a founder of the Evaporated Milk Society, is nonchalant about suddenly becoming 9 feet tall. Walking on stilts is not as difficult as it is simply disorienting. Most novices are stilt-walking on their own within a couple of hours after their first timid wobbles.

Cohn and fellow instructor Allison Waters have performed on stilts in Kansas City before, and they hope that people who attend their upcoming Stilt-Walking Workshop will want to put on a public performance.

Waters is a performing-arts activist, determined to radically change the way people view theater. Just because an actor has supposedly internalized a character’s emotions (an approach she calls “self-indulgent and therapeutic”) doesn’t mean the actor will be able to connect with an audience, she says. Walking on stilts, Waters adds, “really forces you to take on the character of the tall person from the outside in.”

“We’ve gotten to a point where theater is no longer necessary to our culture because people don’t connect with it,” Waters says. “That’s why theater is dying a long, slow death. To be involved in experimental theater means to be part of a small group of people who want to save theater by finding new ways to make that connection.”

Because Waters and Cohn go through a warm-up routine and move students along only when they have mastered the basics, the dangers of attending the workshop are few. The stilts have built-in knee pads, so even taking a spill poses little threat. The worst part is that for about half an hour afterward, a participant’s actual height will no longer feel normal or sufficient.