Showing without going

Ant Hampton made his first show in 1998 under the name Rotozaza, a performance-based project which ended up spanning theatre, installation, intervention and writing-based works. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, this has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007 it has included the audience themselves within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro.

Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali, and ended in 2009 after their last production Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then Ant has collaborated with different artists including Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Rita Pauls, Gert-Jan Stam, Britt Hatzius, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama and Sam Britton to create works which continue to tour internationally - over 60 different language versions exist of the various Autoteatro productions created so far.

At Dasarts (NL) in 2013 he designed and mentored with Edit Kaldor a 10-week research block called Every Nerve, looking into impact, outcome and asking "what can art do". Since then his practice has been marked by a step away from the idea of art as a safe or autonomous space towards works (Someone Else, The Thing, Time for Answers) where a participating "audience" take meaningful risks and experience real consequence. In Mouth Piece (2019) with Rita Pauls the artists themselves become the subject for experimentation and risk in an immersive and eccentric engagement with Germany. He has created and led workshops worldwide: eg. Fantasy Interventions - Writing for Site-Specific Performance, and Raising Voice in Public Space, with Edit Kaldor. Other solo projects include ongoing experimentation around "live portraiture/documentary" as The Other People: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu.

Ant has also worked as coach/mentor for artist programmes such as MAKE (Ireland), A-PASS, Sound Image Culture (Beligum). In 2007 he was head dramaturg for Projected Scenarios at Manifesta7 Biennial for Contemporary Art and has contributed to projects by others, including Ivana Müller, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel and Forced Entertainment.

STATEMENT

The idea for this project did not begin with my own fairly recent decision to stop taking planes - it was almost the other way around. For years my own performance work has been playing and tied up with "automated" formats, and over time I’ve seen how it can often be presented without anyone needing to travel. The decision to give up air travel would have been harder to take without the confidence I could still share my work with audiences far away, in different ways. And that those ways can be artistically interesting; more than just a compromise.

Following this logic, we’re hoping to build a useful and optimistic tool for artists and producers of live work; a catalogue of formats opening options for showing and sharing performances in far-off places without flying and without compromising on the uniqueness of the live encounter. It’s not meant to be a decree (thou shalt not fly). Everyone already knows that faced with the catastrophic global situation now unfolding, the biggest steps we can make as individuals are to stop eating meat and stop taking flights. Some can afford to give up air travel today, others cannot. What this project tries to contribute towards is a collective and imaginative expansion of our resources, such that the consequences of making that change become more affordable, in every sense.

It’s also not advocating for any sudden, mass conversion of all existing live work requiring bodily presence into something else, in the way we saw many performances and plays retreat into the space of a laptop screen when Covid hit - the understandable panic to try and preserve businesses and livelihoods. We are hoping for a calmer and more long-term, considered approach to what’s coming; deep changes that will anyway require a whole spectrum of adaptation and new approaches. Whether due to ecological collapse or advances in social justice or decolonisation or combatting racism and fascism, the context for any art, especially the kind dealing with the here-and-now of people coming together, is bound to be transformed.

And every day it feels more urgent that we do come together effectively. We hope for a re-appraisal of what we mean by cultural exchange, a term that can easily feel tired but which will continue to be key for building empathy, understanding, solidarity, resilience, allies. Many of the formats we are collecting suggest ways for new networks to emerge between the well-placed / well-connected and regions often left off "today's cultural maps"; networks which could and should allow for inspiration, influence and ideas to flow between artists and audiences in both directions.

Ant Hampton, January 2021