When entering the library one of the first things I usually notice are the people, and I notice what they are doing. Today I decided to try and find out why they were doing it. We set up camp under the stairs on the bottom floor of the library as it is a space that usually goes unnoticed. This is an interesting space as when sitting under the stairs you can see the people outside clearly, however you can only see the people inside through the gaps in the stairs. It made for an exciting conversation with the passers-by. We had a piece of paper on the stairs saying “say hello” most of the people walking past did, it was a casual interaction but it made people look at the space differently.
There was a period when not many people were using the stairs but we realised that people walking over the bridge had noticed us. We tried to start a “conversation” with them by waving and hoping they would respond. We had varied responses from people avoiding eye contact, people looking confused, some people were unsure if we were waving at them and then we had the people who were more then happy to interact with us and smiledand waved enthusiastically. It was interesting to see how different people reacted to what we were doing as “it’s not just about a place, but the people who normally inhabit and use that space. For it wouldn’t exist without them” (Wilkie, 145, 2002).
We then changed the sign on the stairs to “Sonder – the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid your own” and then “Tell us something we don’t know”. This caused people to take longer on their way up or down the stairs as they stopped to see what we were doing and to read the note. One person stopped to speak to us for quiet a long time, he asked what we wanted to speak about but we said this was about him and we wanted him to decide the topic. He decided to talk about his day and then in turn ask us what we were doing, after this we wished him luck on his deadline and he thanked us and left. It was nice to get to know even just one of the library users.
The point of this experiment was to get to know the users in the library as the inhabitants of the space give it its life. They will one day be the history of the library and right now they are stories that are walking through the library. Richard Schechner states that “theatre places are maps of the cultures where they exist” (Schechner, 2003, 179), the library users themselves through their stories bring their culture to the library. Without the library users the library is just an empty space. We did not record or write down anything anyone said to us as it made the performance ephemeral, no two people had the same experience and if we did this again we would get different responses but still have interested stories about the library users.
Citation List:
Wilkie, F. (2002) Mapping the Terrain: a Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain. New Theatre Quarterly. 18 (2) 140 – 161.
Schechner, R. (2003) Performance Theory. New York: Routledge.