Passers-by zoomed past University of Michigan dance students as they took part in a one hour, one-block walk on State Street in Ann Arbor

Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com

One city block. Roughly 87 steps.

So why did it take a group of 13 women an hour to traverse this distance on Tuesday afternoon?

Jessica Fogel, professor of dance at the University of Michigan, led a group of her students at a snail’s pace up the city block. They were instructed not to talk, not to respond to the many gawkers asking questions around them.

They just walked. Very. Very. Slowly.

Fogel started the exercise as an experiment with a two friends in New York City in 1975. She’s led a slow walk once a year every year since, first recreationally, and now as part of her class, but she doesn’t try to assign a specific meaning.

“It’s really just walking slowly,” said Fogel, who would rather just let her students individually take whatever they want out of the experience. “Usually you hear a lot, and you see a lot more things that you don’t really notice normally. It becomes like a meditative thing.”

That there’s no specific purpose for the walk didn’t stop passers-by from inquiring. Fogel instructed her students not to respond to questions, not that their answers would have provided much clarification.

“When someone asks 'What is this?' I always just want to say ‘it is,’ ” said first year graduate student J. Lindsay Brown. “It really is just walking slowly. I think the interest is in how it could mean so many things even though it’s not anything.”

Fogel used the campus bell tower, which chimes every 15 minutes, to pace the walk - which began at 3:40 p.m. and ended just after 4:30 p.m., a little earlier than normal. Fogel sped it up so as to not take up her students’ time during the busy exam period.

Though the walkers began very close to one another in one group, by the end there were significant gaps between three distinct groups.

“You don’t realize that you’re moving at different paces because you’re going so slow, but then you look up and you notice the gap,” said first year graduate student Lauren Morris, who compared the walk to watching a flower bloom.

“There’s so many almost different many narratives it’s almost like flipping channels on a TV,” Brown said. “You hear people talking about you, and then you hear different music from different stores and then that will be obscured by a car.”

Some onlookers stopped to take pictures, others took videos, a few joined with the dancers, while some took the dancers’ focus as a challenge and tried to get the them to come out of character.

Others were apparently annoyed by the group taking up the sidewalk for a long time and walked right through them.

Some were more cordial.

“There were these guys with this huge metal crate thing, they actually just waited behind us for like 10 minutes,” said sophomore undergrad Lynsey Colden. “They eventually gave up and walked in the middle of the street…I felt bad.”

Colden had more problems than blocking the sidewalk. Her full backpack felt like it weighed 100 pound by the end of the walk

“My back was pretty sore,” Colden said. “(Carrying the backpack) was a bad choice.”

Contact Pete Cunningham at petercunningham@annarbor.com or by phone at 734-623-2561. Follow him on Twitter @petcunningham.