Showing Without Going: Interview with Ant Hampton

In what reads as an urgent call for change in multiple fields, the manifesto trumpets “agile, low cost, telematic, multi-sited modes of performance . . . devised and bundled up so that they can travel from site to site and company to company with sharply reduced human travel.” Ant Hampton (he/him) is a British-German theatre artist, whose work spans and spreads across multiple fields (be it theatre shows, performance acts, installations or interventions), ones that yet loosely unite in a shared interrogation of liveness per se. Since his first experiments with unrehearsed performers in the late 1990s and then with Autoteatroin 2007, Hampton remains preoccupied with liveness as coupled with and challenged by the automated and the pre-recorded, the unrehearsed and the unexpected, or the distant, the absent and the telematic as is the case in Showing Without Going. The focus on reduced artistic mobility as imperative in a world of climate crisis is not new; what I wished us to discover in shared discussion was the “deep adaptation” and “unlearning” for theatre praxis that this involves; the ways in which not going / going slowly / going differently may redefine, challenge, benefit or limit “showing” and sharing in performance. In Autoteatro, there’s no one else watching; your participation is reciprocal, producing and maintaining a performance that is for each other only. Since 2007, I’ve made about ten different works like this, many of which have ended up sometimes travelling without me due to being very light. If we know that nothing on stage is variable except the human response of the performer(s) who are discovering everything at the same time as us the audience, then that is where our attention is: very much heightened and focused on that human element and its quality.