Conversation between Adam Kinner & Christopher Willes and Kerstin Schroth about MANUAL

Could you share the background and starting point for creating MANUAL?

In our collaboration, Christopher and I are interested in listening as an activating force in public space. We started our work together taking people on listening walks and doing ambiguous actions in public space that focused on sound and interpellated spectators as “participants”. We were interested in the possibility of public space to become a highly sensory space where we could flatten some of the hierarchies between performer and spectator, and get everyone to focus on something real about these spaces that we share. Working in public space just made us constantly feel how wild and magical these spaces are – like, how loaded and important they are. You know, I’m talking about the sidewalk or the park, or the alleyway. To be in a space with everyone is so special and also so fraught! And of course, these spaces are more and more precious and policed and regulated and in many cases they are disappearing.

After doing these interventions on sidewalks and in parks with loudspeakers, we became interested in public libraries as a space where we might be able to create a subtler sonic intervention. We also just love public libraries and think they should be used and celebrated. Concurrently, we started researching binaural audio and doing experiments with it in performances. Binaural audio is a recording process where sound is precisely spatialized around the listener. If you listen to a binaural recording in the place where it was made, you have the uncanny effect of listening to something that happened in the past. It really feels like ghosts. It’s highly sensational; it’ll give you the shivers. So, we began work on MANUAL with these two ideas: that it would take place in a public library and that we would use binaural audio to give people a highly sensory experience. We started work at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow (on an invitation from the performance festival Take Me Somewhere) where we encountered a third idea: that the performance should not disrupt the normal functioning of the library. We wanted to be able to work on the piece, and even perform it, without disrupting the other library users. These became the starting points for MANUAL.

MANUAL is an intimate performance, a one-to-one encounter between a performer and a single audience member. How do you reflect on the various encounters you have had through this format?

In MANUAL, audience members spend about 40 minutes in silence with a stranger. It’s often a unique experience for audience members to spend this kind of intimate time with someone they don’t know. And to do so without speaking is both more intense and also makes it safer in a way – the audience member gets to stay in their bubble (mostly). There’s the frisson of an encounter with a stranger, but there is also this knowledge that you likely won’t ever see the person again. We sometimes refer to the performers as “guides” because they aren’t performing in the sense that one might expect. For nearly the entire show, the audience member and the performer stand or sit next to each other, facing the same direction. MANUAL asks people to attend to something else – the books, the sounds around them, the space of the library – and so, in a way, it is those things that perform. Another way to put it is that in MANUAL, it’s our attention that’s choreographed, not the performer’s movements.

Within this context of relatively little intervention, audience members often find something surprisingly intense. We call MANUAL our “psychedelic library piece” and I think it is psychedelic in that it transforms this normal, conspicuously uneventful space (a library) into something altogether different. Another world. By looking at images very slowly and listening to sounds that seem to emanate from the space around you, the library becomes something sensorially very full and extraordinary, like watching a Pedro Costa film or reading a very beautiful poem that grabs you and immerses you in its time, its rhythm, even while you sit on your couch. The role of the performer/guide is to support this – to allow the audience member to feel safe or held enough to really have this other worldly experience. I think of this time with strangers as so rare and valuable. The intimate encounter with a stranger holds a unique place in our culture – it’s a space where we might break through the social codes and get to something very deep, some part of ourselves that doesn’t exist in our day-to-day life. In this way, the intimate experience with audience members in MANUAL can be deeply emotional, or challenging, or quiet – and, sometimes, you feel that even in this short period, and even wordlessly, you’ve really come to know someone.

You have presented MANUAL in several countries and in a wide range of libraries. How have these diverse contexts continued to shape and evolve the performance?

Libraries are the living hearts of different cities. In an oblique way, they tell you everything you need to know about a place, and they give you a snapshot of daily life, of the way people gather, of what they are looking for. We have done this show in libraries around the UK and Canada, in northern Norway, in Thailand and Japan. Everywhere we go, we work with a new group of performers who adapt the show to the space and work with books and sounds from that context. So, each version of MANUAL is different – it contains different material within the same score.

Because of the way that the show travels and incorporates new people, there’s really a lot that changes in each library and each city. The performers bring new ideas and have new questions about the score. They might perform it in a different language, or multiple languages. The library itself presents new challenges or perspectives – some spaces are quite free and open, while others are more securitized and scrutinized. And the books in one city are completely different from the books in another. Also, the performers end up performing the work on their own for many days in a row, and come to find their own approach or their own performance quality to bring to the situation. So there is a lot that MANUAL is responding to and a lot that it holds within it as possible outcomes or approaches to the performance. Over the years, we’ve learned what to insist on – what elements absolutely have to be there for MANUAL to “work”. But we’ve also learned that the more porous the show is to the reality of the situation, the more interesting it is. The cool thing about working in public space is that you can’t control it. Someone might be doing a strange ritual on a library desk next to you, young people might be kissing around the corner as you walk silently by, someone might be using the library as their temporary home. We’ve come to see MANUAL as just one of the activities that is going on in the library, among all these others, and we’ve tried not to get in the way of all the different scenes that can be held within its fragile frame.