Now Not Moving

Image credit: Prompt number 823 by Barbara Campbell Story written by Tim Etchells Performed by Barbara Campbell 21st September 2007 at sunset, GMT

1001 Nights Cast Discussion with Barbara Campbell, Adrian Heathfield, Sarah Jane Bailes, Tony White and Lara Pawson at The Live Art Development Agency Office, London, 21st September 2007

It’s not generally considered safe to meet up with strangers you’ve met through the internet, as Adrian Heathfield reminded us at the start of the 1001 Nights Cast Writers’ meeting in London on 21st September. But here we all were, thirty individuals brought together through Barbara Campbell’s online project, which involves collaborators from all round the world.

The discussions went some way to teasing out the community fostered by Campbell’s project, which emanates from a structured base, through Campbell and its contributors, to those who read and view the project online. Each morning for 1001 days, Campbell selects a ‘prompt’ from that morning’s newspaper coverage of the Middle East. She sends the prompt – normally a few words long – to a writer who has one day in which to write a story. At sunset, Campbell performs the writer’s story on a live video stream broadcast on http://www.1001.net.au.

1001 Nights Cast amounts to a complex and reflective network of creative production that circles round a series of oppositions, some of which were identified by Sara Jane Bailes, who has written for 1001 Nights Cast on nights 692 and 795: truth and fiction; freedom and restraint; east and west; reading and performance; one and many.

Adrian Heathfield (nights 688, 806) also spoke in terms of productive oppositions. The act of writing that the project fosters is both enabled by new media (the internet), and reminiscent of an old one – letter writing. Bringing these things together, 1001 Nights Cast draws attention to the act of sharing between people and traditions. ‘I really appreciated that reminder,’ Heathfield said, ‘that storytelling and narrative are about survival, that at its core narrative has a virtual movement between one to another and that this movement is restorative, that it is full of life force.’

From a writer’s point of view, however, the experience of contributing to 1001 Nights Cast can be isolated. Campbell acts as a kind of two-way valve for the writers’ creativity – she directs our concentration through the prompt and the deadline, then she receives our work and gives us a voice by performing our texts. Coming together at the Live Art Development Agency’s Office, then, the writers gave substance to the virtual social community we had helped to form. It was a meeting between people with a stake in the project – as writers, all of us had participated in the growth and shape of 1001 Nights Cast – and it was an opportunity to share our approaches to the challenge of writing for it. But the meeting also focussed around the locus of communication we had in common: the pivotal role of Barbara Campbell herself.

As well as the point of entry and exit for each writer’s work, Campbell is also of course the author of the project, the teller of stories, and the one to whom stories are told. She is both the ‘she’ of the frame story that gives a reason for 1001 Nights Cast – a woman who travels the world in order to find redemption from grief through the narratives of strangers – and the writer of the frame story itself. But while Campbell could be said to embody the project – she is perhaps the only person to have read each source, each prompt, each story – she is bound by her own rules to incorporate ideas from outside.

Perhaps as a result, she learned early on to exercise some control over this process. Rather than rely on unsolicited submissions from writers through the site, she, ‘quickly came up with the “booking system”’. As well as guaranteeing a story every day, this allows Campbell to choose the prompt with the contributor in mind. As Narelle Jubelin (Madrid webcast host) put it, ‘You have a consciousness of the prompt suited to the writer.’ But Campbell still accepts stories that are submitted online, and the prompts act as open invitations into the layers of the project.

It is, then, both Campbell herself – as author, story teller, reader, listener – as well as the prompts that link the structural oppositions of 1001 Nights Cast, building bridges that are formal as well as thematic. Lara Pawson, a journalist, (nights 729, 784) said that the prompt functions like a quote in a news story. Just like the restraints that Campbell sets, journalists have to work with ‘a short, almost nonsensical quote, a tight deadline.’ But, unlike journalism, 1001 Nights Cast has no ‘aspirations to objective truth.’ Tony White (nights 701, 758, 815) compared the prompts to stage lights. Instead of anchoring the story to a central fact, they cast a new light on their surroundings; like, ‘changing the gel on a light above a stage … to flood the stage instantly with a particular colour.’

As a result, said Pawson, ‘you can explore real ideas and real problems and real issues.’ And it’s this tension between truth and fiction that lies at the heart of the project. In contrast to the blanket-nature of rolling news coverage, the fictional written accounts often feel personal, revelatory and ‘true’. Campbell described them as the ‘punctum’ in the Barthesian sense, meaning something that emotionally or physically pricks or bruises us, as opposed to the banal or ‘studium’ experience of the news. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26)

It is of course the firm structure of 1001 Nights Cast that enables this freedom of movement and gives rise to the effect of punctum. The structure is what brings the writers together into a project that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is the restorative nature of storytelling that Heathfield identified, and it highlights both the stories that are being told and the act of telling. ‘Perhaps, the process is not for us to expose further the horrors that we all have sometimes witnessed’, Branislava Kuburovic (nights 728, 788) said, ‘… but actually that this weaving of these completely different stories is what it’s about.’

Mary Paterson (nights 583, 689, 777, 826; DIY workshop nights 760, 762)