conversations in ten questions 10 : Ant Hampton
In this series of interviews we try to get to know the artists who will be the guests at the Arter’s Performance Programme in Spring 2020. Our next guest is Ant Hampton.
Ayse Draz, Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Mehmet Kerem Ozel, Writer
[The Turkish translation of this interview is published and can be accessed on art.unlimited]
What is the essence of performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary performance today?
There’s a great, small text in Tim’s book ‘Certain Fragments’ called ‘On Risk and Investment’ which I think goes a long way towards getting at the essence of what performance is or should be. The rest of the book is also fantastic and has always been, for me, the most useful writing in this regard. As for contemporary performance today, I prefer to see it as undefined and continually in flux.
Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?
I can only really give personal examples. Reading Nabokov aged 14. Seeing Blurt! play live aged 16. Seeing Handke’s ‘Kaspar’ aged 17. Discovering Forced Entertainment in my 20’s, and Vivi Tellas in my 30’s… I guess everyone has so many examples of people or even communities being transformed by art - is anyone in doubt that this happens?
When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?
To stay free, make the best work I can, make it possible for others to do so too, and when being an artist reaches its limits, use other tools and collaborate, organise.
When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?
Yes, dreams play a role. But so does something I might hear on a bus, a safety announcement in a pool, an advert or a toxic political slogan, a joke told by a 7 year old… when it comes to ‘sources’ things are fairly open.
When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?
Right away, just so there’s a point of reference when talking about a project with other people or saving files on a computer. It might change later.
What’s your favorite moment/line in this performance, and why?
One of the biggest challenges making this kind of work (we are facing this again right now as we create a new piece, tentatively titled Any Trace) is that it’s easy to come up with individual moments or ‘moves’ that feel cool or interesting in isolation, but much more difficult to create longer passages where one activity or action really leads into and opens up others. For that reason, it feels weird to think about particular moments in the piece - I’d hope that when people experience it, they feel a kind of movement running through it from one section to the next - something like a swimming motion. But if you held a gun to my head, I’d probably choose either the first moment of reading the notebook, and the following pages (‘You find yourself reading after all’), or perhaps leafing through the Basilico photos while thinking back to the Saramago text.
You create works oscillating between different disciplines of performing arts and visual arts. Your resume on your website begins in 1998, the date of your first works. In order to get to know you better, and if you don't mind, could we learn about your education and the process that brought you to the point to create these works?
I did a lot of theatre at school but didn’t figure out immediately that I needed to actually train and get practical skills. I went to university to do drama and French but dropped out very quickly (I still don’t have a higher education or any degree) and instead went to quite a particular theatre school in Paris called Ecole Jacques Lecoq (1995-1997). This was very useful for me - collaboration, devising work and not speaking English became something like second nature, and I found myself with a network of friends all over Europe and beyond. There was a short period of confusion following that, but from 1998 I started making my own work, often in collaboration with others, and initially under the name Rotozaza. From around 1999 on I drifted towards the edges of what you could call theatre, away from representation, and more into the field of performance. That year, 1999, was when I first made work involving instructions to unrehearsed guest performers, which amazingly (to me) is what I’m still doing today.
"The Quiet Volume" is one of the examples of the performance/theater in the form of "Autoteatro" that you have been developing since 2007 with different projects. "The Quiet Volume" was performed for the first time in 2010 and has since turned audiences into performers in many different countries and languages of the world. Have you observed how audiences from different countries reacted in this performance? Could we generalize audience reactions by country or by person?
No - reactions are really very similar everywhere, be it in Ghana, Mexico, Japan, Estonia… I think for most people everywhere the Autoteatro work offers rather unusual experiences, but usually based on skills or phenomena that are common among humans today - in The Quiet Volume, that’s silent reading; In ‘OK OK’, it’s reading aloud. In Etiquette, it’s conversation and cafes. In the Thing, it’s a conference room, and the activist impulse… and so on.
Do you think libraries are a non-place conceptualized by French anthropologist Marc Augé?
No, not really, but they’re obviously spaces that are common to most cities worldwide. The Quiet Volume was commissioned to be part of a festival called Parallel Cities, which featured works created for spaces that exist in any city. The festival was able to travel and plug itself into different places - first Berlin, then Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Delhi, Zurich and many others.
Is there anything in particular you want to tell people before they experience this performance? Is there anything particular you would like to tell the Istanbul audience?
I think this Turkish version is one of the best we’ve made, but please let us know how you find it. I do hope we can eventually bring it to other places in Turkey beyond Istanbul.
Ayse Draz, Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Mehmet Kerem Ozel, Writer
[The Turkish translation of this interview is published and can be accessed on art.unlimited]
Ant Hampton, Photo: Britt Hatzius
What is the essence of performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary performance today?
There’s a great, small text in Tim’s book ‘Certain Fragments’ called ‘On Risk and Investment’ which I think goes a long way towards getting at the essence of what performance is or should be. The rest of the book is also fantastic and has always been, for me, the most useful writing in this regard. As for contemporary performance today, I prefer to see it as undefined and continually in flux.
Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?
I can only really give personal examples. Reading Nabokov aged 14. Seeing Blurt! play live aged 16. Seeing Handke’s ‘Kaspar’ aged 17. Discovering Forced Entertainment in my 20’s, and Vivi Tellas in my 30’s… I guess everyone has so many examples of people or even communities being transformed by art - is anyone in doubt that this happens?
When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?
To stay free, make the best work I can, make it possible for others to do so too, and when being an artist reaches its limits, use other tools and collaborate, organise.
When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?
Yes, dreams play a role. But so does something I might hear on a bus, a safety announcement in a pool, an advert or a toxic political slogan, a joke told by a 7 year old… when it comes to ‘sources’ things are fairly open.
When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?
Right away, just so there’s a point of reference when talking about a project with other people or saving files on a computer. It might change later.
What’s your favorite moment/line in this performance, and why?
One of the biggest challenges making this kind of work (we are facing this again right now as we create a new piece, tentatively titled Any Trace) is that it’s easy to come up with individual moments or ‘moves’ that feel cool or interesting in isolation, but much more difficult to create longer passages where one activity or action really leads into and opens up others. For that reason, it feels weird to think about particular moments in the piece - I’d hope that when people experience it, they feel a kind of movement running through it from one section to the next - something like a swimming motion. But if you held a gun to my head, I’d probably choose either the first moment of reading the notebook, and the following pages (‘You find yourself reading after all’), or perhaps leafing through the Basilico photos while thinking back to the Saramago text.
You create works oscillating between different disciplines of performing arts and visual arts. Your resume on your website begins in 1998, the date of your first works. In order to get to know you better, and if you don't mind, could we learn about your education and the process that brought you to the point to create these works?
I did a lot of theatre at school but didn’t figure out immediately that I needed to actually train and get practical skills. I went to university to do drama and French but dropped out very quickly (I still don’t have a higher education or any degree) and instead went to quite a particular theatre school in Paris called Ecole Jacques Lecoq (1995-1997). This was very useful for me - collaboration, devising work and not speaking English became something like second nature, and I found myself with a network of friends all over Europe and beyond. There was a short period of confusion following that, but from 1998 I started making my own work, often in collaboration with others, and initially under the name Rotozaza. From around 1999 on I drifted towards the edges of what you could call theatre, away from representation, and more into the field of performance. That year, 1999, was when I first made work involving instructions to unrehearsed guest performers, which amazingly (to me) is what I’m still doing today.
"The Quiet Volume" is one of the examples of the performance/theater in the form of "Autoteatro" that you have been developing since 2007 with different projects. "The Quiet Volume" was performed for the first time in 2010 and has since turned audiences into performers in many different countries and languages of the world. Have you observed how audiences from different countries reacted in this performance? Could we generalize audience reactions by country or by person?
No - reactions are really very similar everywhere, be it in Ghana, Mexico, Japan, Estonia… I think for most people everywhere the Autoteatro work offers rather unusual experiences, but usually based on skills or phenomena that are common among humans today - in The Quiet Volume, that’s silent reading; In ‘OK OK’, it’s reading aloud. In Etiquette, it’s conversation and cafes. In the Thing, it’s a conference room, and the activist impulse… and so on.
Do you think libraries are a non-place conceptualized by French anthropologist Marc Augé?
No, not really, but they’re obviously spaces that are common to most cities worldwide. The Quiet Volume was commissioned to be part of a festival called Parallel Cities, which featured works created for spaces that exist in any city. The festival was able to travel and plug itself into different places - first Berlin, then Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Delhi, Zurich and many others.
Is there anything in particular you want to tell people before they experience this performance? Is there anything particular you would like to tell the Istanbul audience?
I think this Turkish version is one of the best we’ve made, but please let us know how you find it. I do hope we can eventually bring it to other places in Turkey beyond Istanbul.
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