Ant Hampton
Ant Hampton is a British artist and performance maker based in Germany. His performance works are diverse in content and tone, yet consistently explore the tension between fixed formal or structural elements and what has to be lived and negotiated in the moment. For over 20 years he has explored a strategy of guiding peοple through unrehearsed performance situations. This developed to include the audience themselves - a strand of work that became known as Autoteatro, usually involving small-scale and intimate formats, sometimes site-specific eg in cafes for Etiquette, or library reading-rooms for The Quiet Volume. He often collaborates with other artists, including Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Ivana Müller, Anna Rispoli and Rita Pauls. Not to Scale is Ant’s third ‘Autoteatro’ collaboration with Tim Etchells. In more recently years his practice has expanded into a wider investigation of radical trust, risk-taking and leaps of faith, most obviously via his ‘automatic workshop’ The Thing, and his multilingual project with Rita Pauls, Mouth Piece which brings him back to Thessaloniki in 2023. 

Maria Ristani
Dr. Maria Ristani is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Department of English Literature (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), where she teaches contemporary Anglophone drama and performance art. Since her doctoral research on the intrinsic musicality of Samuel Beckett’s ‘text-scores’ (completed in 2013), she has shared an active interest in the ways modern Anglophone theatre draws on and interacts with sound art and acoustics, researching, in particular, the fields of audio-based theatre, podcast drama and sound walk performances. Part of her work has been presented at conferences in Greece and abroad, and published in international journals and volumes.

Autoteatro
Coming from his practice since 1999 of creating shows involving unrehearsed guest performers, in 2007 Ant Hampton developed a format that became known as “Autoteatro”, where audience members perform the piece themselves, for each other. By means of instructions via audio, visual cues or text for what to do or say, spectators are guided through situations - their actions, however big or small, become the performance. Not to be confused with gaming (or ‘game show’-like improvisation), Autoteatro does not require audience members to be clever, inventive, or competitive.
 
Ant’s Autoteatro works, many of them collaborations with other artists, are at the core of his performance practice, and continue to tour widely in many languages. Two of his Autoteatro creations with Tim Etchells - Not to Scale (2020) and The Quiet Volume (2010) - are presented in this year’s FOREST festival, in Greek.
 
Showing without going
What are the options for presenting and touring live performance art in a world where we must drastically reduce our energy consumption? Ant Hampton, building on his experience with Autoteatro, and together with Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne and an international working group, made an online ‘Atlas’, mapping existing practical approaches against the many theoretical implications and questions they bring. The result is a inspiring tool for imagining ways forward.