Hello for Dummies is a further development of a project by Ant Hampton and Glen Neath called The Bench (2010).
The audience is split up into pairs of strangers and sent out to sit on a bench together. This journey, and the conversation they find themselves having on the bench (their lines fed to them via headphones), all happens without them ever seeing each other’s face.
What happens when we don't have recourse to the face in our communications? If it's mostly useful as a kind of glue between what we read from someone's voice and body, the face is also sometimes hard to control... and can just as often get us into a sticky mess. In Hello for Dummies, our identities roam free from the tyranny of facial expression: happily unstuck, slightly unhinged.
