Takashima Megumi | KYOTO EXPERIMENT Kyoto International Festival of Performing Arts 2025 ⑤ Adam Kinach & Christopher Willes "MANUAL"
Adam Kinach & Christopher Willes' "MANUAL" is an intimate performance set in a library that sharpens the audience's perception.Summary
"MANUAL" by Canadian-based artists Adam Kinach and Christopher Willes, featured in the latter half of the KYOTO EXPERIMENT Kyoto International Festival of Performing Arts 2025, is an intimate, audience-participatory performance staged in the Ito Memorial Library of Kyoto City University of Arts. The performance begins by tuning the participant's physical senses through a deliberately circuitous route to the venue, transforming the library—a "place of silence"—into a space for heightened perception. Guided by notes and whispers, the audience engages with subtle environmental sounds and a sequence of images revealed by the performer slowly turning pages of photo books, creating a journey of linked images and sounds. Towards the end, participants engage in a task of alternately naming what they see, exploring minute differences in perception and the gap between sight and spoken word. The experience concludes with the participant alone navigating the stacks, tasked with defining the end of the performance themselves, raising questions about the boundary between the everyday and the extraordinary, and offering a trust that the lesson in restoring perception can be resumed at any time.
(Source：artscape)