Two strangers face each other across a table, separated by a clear screen. A stack of 181 cards sits at the centre of the table, an arrow printed on the top of each indicating whose turn it is.
The first arrow points to me. I flip over the card and follow the instructions to offer a simple greeting to the stranger opposite.
She responds. We share a nervous laugh. Neither of us were briefed before we entered this small book-lined room in Sydney’s Mitchell Library. I thought I was attending a media briefing for Vivid festival but, when I arrived at the appointed time, I was the only reporter present.
Now I find myself seated in this room opposite a person I’ve never met. It appears the two of us have become unwitting participants in a furtive social experiment, or perhaps an impromptu performance piece. Is there a hidden camera? Are we the unsuspecting entertainment for an audience elsewhere?
It is disquieting. Yet intriguing.
The questions on the cards segue from polite to probing but demand only affirmative or negative responses. You can’t ask for more information or elaborate on answers. The cards are compelling me to gradually construct an imagined life for my stranger, based on her responses, actions and reactions. It feels as though we’re playing truth or dare, or perhaps speed dating.
“Have you ever broken a bone?” gets an eye roll and the response: “Multiple.” That’s because she grew up somewhere rural, I decide. Near Taree, maybe, spending her childhood falling off horses and out of trees.
Have you ever broken the law? She nods guiltily. I bet she shoplifted with her teenage pals at the local IGA. In Taree.
Have you ever broken a heart? Hesitation. A flash of contrition, possibly remorse, crosses her face; then comes a slow, softly spoken response with just a hint of a smile. Yeah, I figure they got over it.
Some cards direct us to make sustained contact with the screen using our hands and fingertips. I can’t hold that position and reach for my next card – my left hand is in a splint after a surgery – so she picks up my card and places the written side up to the screen to let me read it. An everyday gesture of courtesy becomes an extraordinary act of compassion. I don’t know why.
This is A Thousand Ways: An Encounter, part of the ideas program for Vivid Sydney 2024. An Encounter pushes participants to explore the barriers between strangeness and kinship in a world where social distancing has created an ambivalent, and at times distrustful, approach to human interaction in public spaces.
It is a work, according to its creators, the husband-and-wife team Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, collectively known as 600 Highwaymen, that seeks to engage with humans’ craving for contact, and confronts the complications of dealing with strangers. If visitors buy more than one ticket, their parties will be split up.
We may be separated by a barrier but the cards are our connective tissue. Some of them don’t contain questions at all, but instructions to imagine something about the other person. Picture them doing something they’re good at. What keeps them awake at night?
When the stack of cards has dwindled to what looks to be no more than a dozen, my stranger writes a word on her card and posts it up to the screen for me to read.
Anastasia.
Her name, I have her name! But wait – maybe the card instructed her to choose the name she wished she had. Anastasia is the answer but what was the question?
Several cards later she stands suddenly, collects her belongings, looks into my confounded face with what seems to be both apology and disappointment, then leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
I’m alone. Anastasia has deserted me. How could she do that? It’s too soon.
There’s so much more I want to ask her. I want to drink coffee with her in her immaculately furnished terrace house. I want to meet her cat, whose name may or may not be Anastasia. I want to talk through that thing that’s keeping her awake at night.
The last card on the pile instructs me to leave the room. The encounter is over.
She is not waiting for me on the other side of the door.
The emotion of this experience lingers for days. I continue to construct my imaginary life for Anastasia. Empathy, as even my nearest and dearest will concede, is not my strongest attribute, so I’m astounded by my capacity to care so much about a stranger I still know so little about.
“Even if it scares you, go,” the New York Times wrote in 2021, describing An Encounter as “a work of inquisitive humanity and profound gentleness which, over the course of an hour, buffs away the armour that lets us proceed through our days brusque, numb and antagonistic”.
In a Vivid festival that takes “humanity” as this year’s theme, An Encounter’s act of bringing strangers together will send them home alone with the feeling they have just experienced something slightly unsettling, unexpectedly empathetic and gently poignant.
Anastasia, if you’re reading this, please make contact. I miss you.
A Thousand Ways: An Encounter is at the State Library of New South Wales from 29 May to 10 June
