MANUAL is a one-to-one performance that transforms a public library into a space of sensory encounter and heightened awareness. Staged covertly during public hours, participants arrive on site with instructions to meet a guide, and from there they are led silently through a series of tiny actions following written notes and immersive audio in headphones. They walk through the space and listen together. They look at books and read to each other. Sounds and images found in the library combine and blur. And as the piece progresses the materials they encounter come to form a manual for slowing down.
Intermingling with the daily life of the library, MANUAL proposes a performance that develops through the act of listening and reading with another person. Through a slow and careful process, this piece stages a quiet meditation on the library as a space of shared attention.
Credits
Co-created by: Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner
Dramaturgy: Hanna Sybille Müller
Performers: Adam Kinner, Hanna Sybille Müller, Christopher Willes, Sym Mendez, and Chao-Ying Rao (Betty).
Past performance contributors: Alexa Mardon, Denise Kenney, Chao-Ying Rao (Betty), and Rosa Postlethwaite.
Audio contributions: Michael Davidson, Colin Fisher, Thomas Gill, Terri Hron, Philippe Lauzier, Germaine Liu, Philippe Melanson, Karen Ng, and Felicity Williams.
Production assistance: Rosa Simonet
Developed with the support of: Take Me Somewhere (Glasgow), LA SERRE – arts vivants (Montreal), and Festival TransAmériques.
Produced with the support of: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ontario Arts Council.
Details
MANUAL runs every 15 minutes starting at 11:15 am from Tuesday 15 October to Saturday 19 October. The last entrance is at 6pm on Tuesday 15 October and 4 pm every other day. The performance lasts 40 minutes.
Access
You will be required to move around the Library of Birmingham. You will have some control over the speed of this. You will be invited at points to read out loud, and lie down; you can say no to any of these invitations. This work involves binaural recordings listened to via headphones.
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“When I reopened my eyes at the start of the performance, it already felt like something had shifted, that I’d transitioned into a different way of being…”
- Elspeth Wilson, Diverse Critics, 2023.
Fierce Says
We last saw Adam and Christopher at the Festival in 2017 with Listening Choir. In the great tradition of one-on-one performances, MANUAL re-frames our relationship to the civic, democratic space of libraries and peels back the layers, opening up new worlds and sparking our imagination.