Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.
Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner MANUAL: a sensorial experience with public space
Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner’s MANUAL is a one-on-one performance that turns 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 who leads them silently through a series of subtle events, following written notes and immersive audio in headphones. Elspeth Wilson recounts the experience at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival.
I am being invited to take ten deep breaths with my eyes closed. It’s the first time I’ve paused all day and as I do, something inside of me untenses.
I’ve been guided along a cool, echoing marble corridor in the Mitchell Library by a volunteer who points out that sometimes, if you listen carefully, the motorway outside can sound like a roaring river. Finding the beauty in a controversial piece of infrastructure that has caused pain and destroyed Glaswegian neighbourhoods is a sign of what’s to come in the next forty-five minutes as I’m taken on a one-on-one performance which invites reassessment and rethinking.
Once I’ve breathed in the chill air, I open my eyes and am greeted by a different person who communicates with me via handwriting in a tiny notebook. I am told that we will be going on a walk and I follow my guide through huge stacks of books, past desks with chunky computers and lobbies with tired-looking industrial carpets. We stop at a kind of mezzanine area where we can look down to the floor below where people are talking with advisors at a Citizens’ Advice Bureau.
Via the notebook, I’m invited to listen together to the sounds around us – at first those that are closer and then those further away. 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 in the library, and this invitation compounds my sense of slipping into a new relationship with the space. As someone with noise sensitivity, I often feel like I’m in a battle with noise, viewing it as a kind of ‘pollution’. But when my sole goal is to listen and tune in, I find that the coughing, typing, tapping and page-turning around me becomes surprisingly soothing – almost like the white noise I usually use to survive in loud situations.
I am a part of MANUAL, a performance created by Christopher Willes and Adam Kinner, with dramaturgy by Hanna Sybille Müller, and programmed as part of Take Me Somewhere festival. Performed at libraries around the world by a host of performers, the work encourages a deeper sensorial experience with public space than is often afforded to us in busy, harried lives – especially when public space is increasingly under threat from budget cuts and ideological opponents.
The Mitchell Library is a cavernous, impressive building with a huge array of public services and different ways of enjoying public space housed inside. In a huge, high-ceilinged room, my guide takes me to a desk and uses various books they have found in the library to create a new book and tell a collaged, wordless story. Using a kind of sculpture created from books, they open them at pages marked with plain paper to show me a series of images that starts with a focus on hands, expanding to full bodies then natural landscapes then rock concerts. At the same time, I listen to a recording of sounds from this same room that the performer previously made, elevating the soundscape of the everyday to something worthy of repetition.
The piece culminates in a quiet corner with a shared reading of a text the performer has selected. We take a turn to read a line each and it is surprising to hear their voice for the first time – an interesting play on the convention of no talking in libraries. The performer has also picked an image of blurry amorphous white shapes and, upon their instruction, we take it in turns to pick out things we can see and name them. It is an exercise that broadens ways of seeing as it goes on, a microcosm of the effect of the whole performance.
As MANUAL ends, I am left, slightly disoriented, in an unfamiliar part of the library next to a cart where returned books represent a jigsaw of interests – post-punk, the Thames, streams. When I have to ask a member of staff for directions, I find it difficult to speak. MANUAL is true to its name – I’ve felt guided in a gentle manner that paid attention to accessibility requirements. Without my guide I feel a little lost.
On my own, the enormity of the beauty of libraries combined with their increasingly precarious existence feels overwhelming. MANUAL is a performance with tranquillity and deep emotion at its heart but an implicit anger too – public spaces are (at best) deliberately and chronically underfunded in this country. I desperately don’t want MANUAL to be a swansong but rather a call to community and protection.
Reproduced with kind permission of Disability Arts Online
Originally published 17 November 2023.
Main photo © David Wong.
Diverse Critics is a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. Over the last eight months, eight aspiring writers based in Scotland have been supported with a bursary, training, mentoring and publishing opportunities. Take Me Somewhere have partnered with Disability Arts Online to offer further bursaries to a selection of the cohort to attend and review works as part of this year’s festival.
About the writer
Elspeth Wilson is a writer and poet who is interested in exploring the limitations and possibilities of the body through writing, as well as writing about joy and happiness from a marginalised perspective. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Too Hot to Sleep, was published by Bent Key Publishing in April 2023. Her creative work on embodiment and accessibility has been supported by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and the Royal Society of Literature.
Insta @elspethwrites
Twitter @elspethwriter
