A minimalist comedy performance by the audience itself!
Not so very long ago, Ant Hampton was our guest with Someone Else, a performance in which members of the audience had headsets through which they heard a story and instructions. In OK OK, the audience splits into groups of four, each of which sits at a table somewhere in the Beursschouwburg to create a small comedy together. This time, it is not by way of a voice in your ears, but by following a script in which your text is indicated by a particular colour. By 'just reading', you discover as you go on how meaning and intent fall into place, with no pressure whatsoever to act or speak in any particular way.
Don't worry – no acting experience is required! The text in fact reflects the uncertainty that anyone would feel when they have to leave something aloud in a group. Everything falls into place all by itself.
The result is an amusing sense of the script actually behaving as a unique, 'living' thing, a text that is perhaps being written at the moment it is read aloud. This sensation increases as the performance develops, moving inexorably on to a surprising ending.
There are 5 time slots for OK OK: 18:00, 19:00, 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00.
4 participants per time slot, both in English and Dutch. Choose your time slot and language via the given ticket link.
+/- 45’
NL/EN spoken
Concept & text: Ant Hampton & Gert-Jan Stam
Created in residency at: Vooruit (BE) as part of the festival 'The Game is Up!
Supported by: Project Arts Centre (IR) and Het Huis van Bourgondie (NL)
Creative Production: Katja Timmerberg
Ant Hampton is an English artist and performance maker whose has been experimenting with performance settings in which the audience participates. A new kind of performance, in which members of the audience play a part, for each other. They are instructed what to do, what to say,… By simply following the instructions, an event falls into place. Autoteatro works are always automatic, and never involve any audience other than those taking part.
After a career in visual arts, Gert-Jan started writing for theatre in 2007. OK OK, a collaboration with British theater maker Ant Hampton, was his first DIT-theatre play. In 2012 he made the theatre installation KHOR I for the Floriade in Venlo (NL) together with the Belgian architect Breg Horemans. Together with Horemans he founded TAAT, a collective operating on the cutting edge of theater, architecture, visual art and design. Taking the complex relationship between theatre and architecture as a starting point TAAT focusses on developing ‘architectural dramaturgy’. Gert-Jan Stam currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
