Written, recorded and edited by Ant Hampton
Original Brussels version, 2015, commissioned by
for its 50th anniversary.
Voices - Diederik Peeters and Ana Wild
Design - Britt Hatzius
Engraver - Yannick Castegna
Creative production - Katja Timmerberg
Thank you for the conversation / inspiration:
Christophe Meierhans, Richard Gregory,
Sarah Vanhee, Katja Dreyer, Anna Rispoli,
David Helbich, David Weber-Krebs, Bart Capelle.
The work's challenge is two-fold, functioning both at the raw level of a dare, and as starting point for something bigger - an exercise for a particular kind of social imagination: what might result from a deliberate breaking out of your usual circles? Is it so difficult? And what role can art - or an art centre - play in such an encounter? Would it even be possible to be a spectator, or a 'viewer', or does the situation call for a different kind of behaviour?
Someone Else
Ant Hampton / The Other People
for two at a time. 45 mins
With a mix of sincerity, confession and humour, Someone Else explores a line of logic that would have you going up to a stranger and attempting to form a connection, 'from nothing'.
The 45 minutes that constitute Someone Else are an attempt to contemplate and feel what such an action might be like, for you. To do this, the work begins by situating the audience (two at a time) inside the opposite of such unpredicatable realness; a constructed situation. Sitting just inside the body of the theatre - looking out through its windows - both find themselves 'speaking' from inside someone else's body, and with another voice, until the time comes to shake off the artifice and head outdoors.
Hampton's Autoteatro practice once more employs an advanced use of highly realistic, site-specific and 'binaurally' recorded audio, but this time extends its form beyond instructions towards something more like an open-ended assignment. It also adds and relates to his ongoing project, The Other People - structured encounters with people from outside theatre and art.
Winner
