Ant Hampton

Ant Hampton (b. 1975, Switzerland) made his first works under the name Rotozaza – a performance-based project that began in 1998 and ended up spanning theater, installation, intervention, and writing. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with the 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 partnered with Silvia Mercuriali, and ended in 2009 after their last production “Etiquette”, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then, Ant has worked with Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama, and Sam Britton to create works that continue to tour internationally – over 80 different language versions of the various Autoteatro productions have been created so far.

His performances sometimes require no one to travel; a paradoxical outcome (for an art committed to liveness and presence) which in turn informed his advocacy and research project, ShowingWithoutGoing.live.

In September 2023, he founded Time Based Editions with David Bergé, a series of “live books” binding print to time, merging sound with paper. The first edition was his own “Borderline Visible”, which won the 2024 IDFA DocLab award for Creative Technologies. On the second, titled “ADE DEA”, he collaborated with musicans Ulla and Perila.

Other solo projects include experimentation around “live portraiture” such as “The Other People”: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieus. He was head dramaturg for “Projected Scenarios” at Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, and has contributed to projects by other artists including Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel, and Forced Entertainment.

Ant has created and led workshops worldwide including “Fantasy Interventions – Writing for Site-Specific Performance” and has also worked as coach/mentor for artist programs such as MAKE (Ireland), A-PASS and Sound Image Culture (Belgium) Onassis AiR (Greece), and DasArts (Netherlands), where together with Edit Kaldor in 2013 he designed and mentored a 10-week block, “Every Nerve”. The work with Kaldor spawned his own wider investigation into radical trust, risk-taking, and leaps of faith, most notably through the “The Thing”, an “automatic workshop” created with Christophe Meierhans.