Ant Hampton with Tim Etchells
The Quiet Volume
Audio & reading experience / Theatre
The Quiet Volume is a whispered, self-generated and ‘automatic’ performance 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 sit side-by-side taking cues from words both written and whispered—via an iPod and headphones—and 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.
The Quiet Volume won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Sound Design in 2013.
“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
‘The Quiet Volume’, this play by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells leading a spectator into the world of books, is theatre of a very magical kind. A theatre of the gradual construction of thoughts whilst seeing, listening and reading. A theatre that pulls the world in and around, closer to and into the spectator, by making the very ability to read the world its thematic focus point. (…) It offers a kind of instruction for how to become blind: effectively nothing other than the careful readjustment of sight. Here it works most beautifully, because the direction of viewing or thinking suggested to the spectator via headphones and text always works both internally and externally, focussing on the material objects just as much as on the clusters of thoughts to which they are attached. ” —Doris Meierhenrich, Berliner Zeitung, 20.09.2010. original german here
“…the feeling of heightened awareness in which every sound is magnified, every movement has increased significance and all words dance with possibility (…) there is a sense that we are all privately running amok in the libraries of our minds.” —Lyn Gardner, The Guardian. Full review here
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!
Co-production with Vooruit Arts Centre, Ciudades Parallelas, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Nowy Teatr, HAU Berlin, ProHelvetia, and the Goethe Institut.
by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells
Produced by Katja Timmerberg
Sound design and edit by Ant Hampton.
Binaural recordings: TiTo Toblerone
Additional sounds: Sam Britton and Lothar Ohlmeier
All foreign language versions directed by Ant Hampton.
Original versions in English and German, plus Spanish, Polish and Dutch versions commissioned and produced by Ciudades Paralelas, an itinerant yet ‘site specific’ performance festival curated by Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias.
English version:
In coproduction with Vooruit Arts Centre, Belgium
First voice – Ant Hampton
Child’s voice – Seth Etchells
Third voice – Jenny Naden
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.
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.
