For our performance, we wanted to challenge originality and pose the question that if books are stored in the library, read and quoted to form new academic writings, is anything new actually being created. The quotes included in academic writing have come from other source texts, and even the individual words used by writers are only known because they have been read elsewhere. This idea can be demonstrated very literally through Dadaist poetry. This form of poetry is created by taking an article, cutting out each individual word, mixing them up, and transposing them individually at random. For our piece, we wanted to attempt this to create something much longer with the source being from a large variety of books from the library. The product would symbolise a compendium of knowledge made purely from words being read and directly typed out. In order for our piece to be engaging we wanted to find a way we could get the audience to carry out this process of jumbling words from books to create the final compendium.
One of the first stages of research for our performance within the library was to look into the history of the building. One of the main things we discovered is that the building used to be a railway goods warehouse. We discussed that despite the building having not always been a library, there are still some similarities in its purposes over the years. The building is still a warehouse except the goods that it stores are books. The building has a constant flow of these ‘goods’ going in and out of the building as they’re supplied and called for. Everything has a specific location to be stored in and there are straight paths to follow through the building allowing you to collect what’s needed along the way. There are also many instructions on signs all over the walls and announced through a speaker system stating what you can and can’t do, much like what a modern train station would look and sound like. We wanted to take influence from the strict parameters of a train station by filling our room with a barrage of instructions in different mediums.
Combining these two ideas, we made a meticulous set of step by step rules on how to create the Dadaist compendium influenced by the steps Tristan Tzara gave in the Dadaist manifesto
“Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.” (Lewis, 2007, 107)
Our instructions went into a lot more detail specifying exact places in the room to go to, how to ensure a truly random page is picked with dice, and which exerts from the pages can count as words. The instructions also contain many puns as the overall concept challenges definitions of individual words taken out of context and the process is literally playing with physical words. After practicing typing out individual randomly drawn words we believed that on average it would take about an hour to type out a single A4 page and because we wanted to create something fairly substantial at the end, we decided to make our performance twenty-four hours long. This would also acknowledge that the library functions as an always open building with a constant cycle of work occurring within at all hours. We planned for the layout of the room to have a path going through the room made of tape to look like a railway line, going from each of the ‘stations’ to the next. Each part of the room was signed with a different station name and we printed the instructions to be put up all over the room and on one wall we had a television looping a PowerPoint presentation of the instructions.
Early on in our process, it was important to work out where exactly we would source the books from. We wanted the piece to be informed by the library so we asked the staff there if they could supply any library books that we could destroy. Although they could supply a few it wasn’t enough to represent the wide range of information that can be found within a library. As the books in the library do not originally come from there and are sourced from elsewhere, we decided it would be fair to look elsewhere for books and house them at the library. As well as taking cheap collections of books from charity shops and taking in donations from people we knew, I decided it would be interesting to supply a large collection of my own childhood books taking inspiration from Michael Landy’s Breakdown. In this performance in 2001 he destroyed all of his own personal belongings. Including books that we have previously owned and read would allow us to have more of an emotional connection with the performance and possibly influence what it means to destroy these old books to create something new.
The next thing we looked at was the context of the books and how people would feel differently to different types of books. When initially sharing our concept, it was noted that the idea of tearing pages out of books is something that can make people feel uncomfortable. We wanted to find out how different people felt about carrying out this action, why, and whether they felt differently depending on the book. We used three books for an experiment, asking people to tear a page from each if they were comfortable, and tell us about their experience from it. Firstly, Discovering The Wonders of Our World is an encyclopaedic book full of pictures of nature and knowledge on the earth. Secondly, a translated copy of The Quran is the holy text of Islam which is believed to contain the exact words of Allah and tells Sharia law which forbids damaging the texts in a disrespectful manner. Finally, we used my own childhood copy of Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. Of the 53 people who agreed to take part in our experiment, 36 took a page from Discovering The Wonders of Our World, 26 took a page from Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, and 22 took a page from The Quran. In many cases when people handled the encyclopaedia, they rifled through the book’s many varying pictures to find one they were drawn to and looked nice. This was definitely the book that despite being a source of knowledge, most people felt comfortable tearing pages out of without an emotional connection. Secondly, the Harry Potter book affected people a lot as it is the book most people had previously read and had an emotional connection to its content. This attachment to the series of books became very relevant in our final performance. Finally, there was a lot of controversy around The Quran as it is against the Islamic religion to destroy their holy text and people had a lot of concern they would cause offence or show disrespect. However, the one person who told us they identified as Muslim said that although he wouldn’t tear out a page himself, he was not offended by the fact that other people had done it if it wasn’t done out of hatred and for an experiment. When sharing the concept of our piece with the library staff, we demonstrated what we would be doing with our copy of The Quran. It raised discussions about the morality of damaging religious texts and our safety if someone with extremist views found out what we were doing. Although we made the point that our performance would be including all texts and it would make more of a statement to exclude religious texts from our piece, the staff agreed that not everyone may share this view and they would not like us to include religious texts in our piece.
Despite excluding religious texts from our final performance, our research into how these books are correctly handled influenced the ending of our performance and what to do with all the remaining damaged books and torn out pages. We found in research that old and damaged copies of The Quran are disposed by either being buried, burned into ashes, or placed into a natural body of water. These acts of disposal could almost be likened to a respectful funeral for the books and we wanted to do something similar. Originally we liked the idea of having something in the style of a Viking funeral on the Brayford Quay, placing all the books on a raft and setting them on fire whilst we read the finished compendium as a eulogy to the books. However, we soon realised this was not plausible due to health safety and disturbing the activities that happen on the water. We then found a video of how Sikhs dispose of their holy texts by burning the pages and disposing the ashes into water. From this we decided we would burn the pages in a drum in front of the library whilst reading the book stood on a plinth over the flames.
For our piece to have the intended effect of a barrage of instructions, we made sure the instructions were scattered all over the room and had very specific rules that were hard to follow at points. There were certain aspects of this which we only noticed during the actual performance. When our instructions asked to pick a book that either you have read before, you have never read, you would like to read, or you would not like to read, some people tried to pick a book that met all the criteria before realising it was impossible due to their contradictions and one person picked out four books with one meeting each separate criteria. We noticed that many people immediately went for children’s books they’d read before with the most popular being the Harry Potter books. This affected our final compendium heavily as there were many words that stood out as being from Harry Potter. This demonstrated how despite placing specific instructions all over the room for people to follow, our audience still interpreted them differently, and sometimes acted emotionally rather than randomly.
Although we had a few technical difficulties, we felt this was suitable because it matched people’s attitudes to how train stations are run, being infamous for having constant delays and disruptions. The final step of the instructions in our piece was to type out the words for the compendium on an old typewriter. We were aware that this may cause difficulties for people that didn’t know how to use a typewriter despite our instructions detailing clearly what to do and even on the day we had a few difficulties with the typewriter. The keys jammed regularly and the ribbon got stuck so that sometimes the ink would not show up well on the paper. However, we liked the idea that this would add to the confusion of the piece. People had to ask for help or attempt to struggle through even though the typewriter wasn’t typing anything clearly.
We also increased the confusion by having regular pre-recorded instructions that sounded like they were coming from a speaker system. We took influence for these announcements from many places including the library itself, train stations, airports, supermarkets, television, roller coasters, and other recognisable announcements that had nothing to do with the instructions for the performance. The constant announcements were mixed with random music playing constantly in the background to create a confusing soundscape. The music was a mix of various genres including, pop, television themes, classical, dance, country, futurist, and avant-garde, to match the Dadaist style of randomness. This music meant the atmosphere changed randomly and was sometimes coincidentally fitting. For example, as one person typed out the word ‘Christmas’ into the compendium, a festive song started playing which created a shocked and amused reaction.
Due to the twenty-four hour nature of our performance, the audience changed throughout. One interesting period was between 3:00 and 5:00 when a drunken audience came in after leaving the nightclub opposite. The confusion when reading the instructions was heightened and the spelling accuracy in the compendium dropped for a section. We anticipated this as we used a typewriter which means that any mistakes typed out can’t be undone. This follows the purpose of Dadaist poetry to be incoherent at times, not following syntax, and to be more about the sounds of the words written down rather than their original definitions. After this period we had no audience between 5:00 and 8:30 and we had to carry out the process on our own. As performers, this was the period that was most draining and when we felt the most tired because we had no audience to react to and perform for. We were purely doing it for ourselves in this time and nobody would have known if we stopped.
Overall, we received a positive reaction to our performance and many questions were asked about the message of the piece. Despite people sometimes struggling to follow the instructions, everyone attempted to follow them and people rarely tried to defy the rules. There were many people that took their dry page to the cutting section, and read the instructions in disbelief that they were then meant to cut out every word from the page. Some people, despite annoyance, carried on and cut out all the words just because the instructions said to. Some people went back and swapped their page for one with fewer words, and one person got up and left rather than sit and cut out words or do anything else. At the end of the process many people seemed confused as to what to do after the last step. People asked us what to do and we told them that it was the end and that they could do what they liked which caused more confusion. They had been following instructions throughout the performance, and were now left to their own devices, which seemed to make some people feel stranded without guidance.
The ending of our piece was very controversial and drew in an audience of strangers who asked many questions. As soon as we placed the drum full of paper outside the library and started placing the books in a circle around it, lots of passersby stopped to ask us what we were doing. There is such a taboo around burning books in society and it caused many whispers. Lots of people asked if they were allowed to take books away to prevent them being burned. We said we were happy for people to do this as long as they were aware that some pages may be missing from the books. Yet again people were most protective over the Harry Potter books rather than the ones that contained real world knowledge. When we asked people why they wanted to save these books they told us they viewed them as ‘sacred’ and removing it meant future generations would miss out on reading it, despite Harry Potter being one of the most published books of all time. Once we set up the drum with all the books around it, we started the fire exactly twenty-four hours after we started. I read the compendium aloud to the now fairly large audience in front of the library while Dwain added books to the fire. It took an hour to read the sixteen page compendium we had created. The final compendium included many interesting quotes and funny statements that received a good reaction from the crowd. We are now in the process of getting the compendium coded and housed within the library so it can stay where it was created to be read by other visitors to the library. Despite initial fears from the people around that our book burning was attempting to make a negative statement against art, in the end we shared ideas that new art is fuelled by deconstructing the knowledge we take in from sources around us.
References
Lewis, P. (2007) The Cambridge introduction to modernism. London: Cambridge University Press