Ant Hampton with Tim Etchells
Not to Scale
US premiere
Audio experience / Participation
Not to Scale is a full-length ‘autoteatro’ performance which draws two participants into shared experiments and intertwined processes of drawing, erasing and listening. Guided by a binaural soundtrack, participants create a shared journey using pencil on blank sheets of paper. Crude doodles soon come to life in a comical and unsettling picture book narrative that plays constantly with the tension between creation and destruction, life and death, energy and entropy. By simply following the prompts as best you can, things start to happen: performance is triggered from even the smallest movement.
Things – stories, pictures, ideas – appear and disappear constantly on the page, a site which starts to unfold into a lo-fi carnival of possibility; a carnage of crossing out, overlapped drawings and landscape traces.
Like Ant Hampton’s other ‘autoteatro’ work, including his previous collaborations with Tim Etchells (The Quiet Volume, Lest We See), by simply following the prompts as best you can, things start to happen: performance is triggered from even the smallest movement. And they have never been so small.
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Voiced by Terry O’Connor
With thanks to Isambard Khroustaliov and Lothar Ohlmeier for allowing samples from their album ‘Nowhere’
Production – Ana Riscado
Created thanks to support from the following coproducing partners:
Access Point, St Petersburg, Russia
Dublin Theatre Festival, Ireland
Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Portugal
Noorderzon Festival, Groeningen, NL
Ant Hampton (1975, CH) is a British-German performance maker and writer. His work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations and interactive relations, using automated devices. From 1998 until 2009 he worked in / as Rotozaza.
Together with David Bergé, he co-founded Time Based Editions in 2023, starting with his own project, Borderline Visible. His “Autoteatro” works tour internationally in over 80 language versions, some of them without anyone needing to travel – a paradoxical outcome for an art committed to liveness and presence which in turn informed his Covid-era advocacy and researchproject: ShowingWithoutGoing.live – an Atlas.
In more recent years his practice has expanded into a wider investigation of risk-taking and leaps of faith, for example with The Thing – An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans.
A new series of work with Alice De Crais called phased / romantic began in 2025.
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction.
In recent years Etchells has exhibited widely, with solo shows at Ebensperger (Berlin), VITRINE (London and Basel), Bloomberg SPACE (London), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and Kunstverein Braunschweig as well as large-scale commissions for public space at Royal Festival Hall, London (2023), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2021). He has created permanent sculptural commissions for numerous locations, including Deutzer Hafen, Koln (2022), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021) and Komuna Warsawa (2020). His work has appeared in Frieze Sculpture, London (2022 and 2018), the biennales Manifesta 7 (2008) in Rovereto, Italy, Goteborg Bienale (2009), October Salon Belgrade (2010), Aichi Trienale, Japan 2010, with Vlatka Horvat, Manifesta 9 (Parallel Projects) 2012 and as well forming part of Folkestone Triennial 2014 and The Great Exhibition of the North at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2018).
Selected group shows include The Weight of Words, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, (2023), The Horror Show, Somerset House, London (2022), …of bread, wine, security and peace (Kunsthalle Wien, 2020), Lichtparcours Braunschweig (2020), Re-Creatures, Mattatoio, Rome (2021), Between Us, Kunsthalle Mainz (2019), Was sind die Wolken? (What Are the Clouds?) Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, (2019), The Cipher & The Frame (Cubitt Gallery, London, 2015), MirrorCity (Hayward Gallery, London, 2014), as well as Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), MUHKA (Antwerp), Galleria Raffaella Cortese (Milan), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona) and Kunsthaus Graz. His work is held in numerous institutional and private collections around the world.
Etchells was Artist of the City of Lisbon (2014) and won the Spalding Gray Award in 2016, awarded by a consortium of U.S. performance institutions including PS122 New York, Walker Arts Centre Minneapolis, Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh and On The Boards, Seattle, recognising him as a ‘fearless innovator of theatrical form’. Under Etchells’ direction Forced Entertainment won the International Ibsen Prize 2016. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2019.
The Dark is supported through a Market New York grant, awarded to PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance from Empire State Development and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
Digital content coverage for The Dark is supported by Bloomberg Connects.
The Dark‘s business sponsors are Millay Arts and The Mountains Media.
Thank you to the many generous individual supporters who helped fund The Dark.
PS21’s programs are made possible in part with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
While this performance does not have reserved seating, we are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
