The Quiet Volume

2010
Interactive Performance
Collaboration with Ant Hampton


Images: © Tim Etchells

The Quiet Volume is a whispered, self-generated and ‘automatic’ performance (Autoteatro) for two at a time, exploiting the particular tension common to any library worldwide; a combination of silence and concentration within which different people’s experiences of reading unfold.

Two audience members / participants sit side-by-side. Taking cues from words both written and whispered they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books. The piece exposes the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader’s sphere into another’s.

“This now of the page is what grips me – the present moment, this one, summoned here with this arrangement of marks/code, ink/pixels, letters and words.”  – Tim Etchells.

Read notes on The Quiet Volume and Autoteatro by Ant Hampton.

English, German, Spanish and Polish versions commissioned and produced by Ciudades Paralelas, an itinerant yet ‘site specific’ performance festival curated by Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias.
There are also versions in Danish and Portuguese.

Made in coproduction with Vooruit Arts Centre, Belgium

Upcoming performance dates of The Quiet Volume.

Related notebook entries