AUTOTEATRO

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Rotozaza's 'Autoteatro' series explores a new kind of performance, whereby audience members perform the piece themselves, for each other. Using simple technology, participants are given instructions - often via headphones - about what to say and do. There is no actual 'audience' beyond the other participants. In Etiquette and Wondermart, the piece is done in couples; in GuruGuru, five at a time.

Each participant hears a different soundtrack, with different instructions. The different tracks are synchronised and pre-recorded, meaning the participants are alone with each other during the experience, with no human input beyond someone handing them the headphones or sometimes pressing 'play'. An Autoteatro work is a 'trigger' for a subsequently self-generating performance.

For Rotozaza's third work, ten years ago, Ant Hampton and Sam Britton (alias Isambard Khroustaliov) created 'BLOKE' for a friend they wanted to see on stage. To get around the problem of him worrying about the job of being an actor, they said 'just do whatever you're told, try hard, and don't worry if you mess it up'. And so in responding to a list of pre-recorded instructions, their friend gave a performance suffused with a kind of honesty rarely seen on stage, embracing error and clumsiness, and transforming the audience from passive specatator to a more active role: they were discovering everything at the same time as he was.

Since then Ant and Silvia explored the idea with a number of works both for the stage and for particular landscapes, buildings and one-off events. The idea for Etiquette came soon after BLOKE, but it wasn't until 2007 that the piece started to develop. Since then it has toured worldwide and has been translated into ten languages. Wondermart and GuruGuru make a start on what can be seen as a large catalogue of possible implications and applications offered by the Autoteatro device.