A group of revolutionaries enters the archive of an official order that no longer exists. As they sift through the filing cabinets, examining fragments of an American past, its mythologies, and foundational events, they begin to uncover pieces of unofficial records and fragments of their own histories.

“The Disrupted Library” seizes the metaphorical moment after the revolution and stretches it out, examining it from all angles, in the hopes of making it tangible, adhering to the idea that performance offers the possibility to rehearse the revolution.

With the nexus of unexpected histories that intersect on Governors Island as its backdrop, “The Disrupted Library” explores the places where the individual is inevitably entangled with the larger fabric of history and asks how these moments might disrupt official narratives. Through an unarchiving process, the piece questions the legacy of the American Revolution and evokes the vast geographies that are intertwined with the American project. The piece touches on the Haitian Revolution, the Salvadoran Civil War, as well as instances of industrial and environmental disaster.

“The Disrupted Library” navigates the debris scattered by conceptual and real explosions. Taking the here-and-now of site and performer, the performance explores instances in which an architecture has been upended, burnt either to ruin, or become something new. It asks, where through this burnt wax might we peer into the future or look back into the past? In an era of ecological devastation, what can we salvage from former wreckage and wreckage yet to come?

Throughout the piece, I read accounts of disparate historical moments, which were retrieved from a moving pulley device manned by the other performers, who also sifted through cabinets. A fourth performer feverishly took notes on a whiteboard, erasing and starting anew once it was filled. Moments of voiced-over narration recounted spatially and thematically interconnected anecdotes from the performers’ lives, during which all actions on stage slowed to near stillness.