Ant made his first works under the name Rotozaza—a performance-based project starting in 1998, which ended up spanning theatre, installation, intervention, and writing-based works. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, Ant’s practice has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007, it has included the audience itself within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro. Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali and ended in 2009 after their last production, Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then, Ant has worked with Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama, and Sam Britton to create the works listed here, which continue to tour internationally; over 80 different language versions exist of the various Autoteatro productions created so far.

At times, Ant’s performances do not require travel; a paradoxical outcome (especially for an artist committed to liveness and presence), which in turn informed his recent advocacy and research project, ShowingWithoutGoing.live. 

In September 2023, he founded Time Based Editions with David Bergé, an ongoing series of “live books” binding print to time, merging sound with paper. The first edition was his own Borderline Visible, which won the 2024 IDFA DocLab Special Jury Award for Creative Technology. For the second edition, ADE DEA, he collaborated with musicians Ulla and Perila.

Other solo projects include experimentation around “live portraiture” as The Other People: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu. He was head dramaturg for Projected Scenarios at Manifesta 7, the European Biennial for Contemporary Art and has contributed to projects by other artists, including Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel, and Forced Entertainment.Ant has created and led workshops worldwide, including FANTASY INTERVENTIONS: Writing for Site-Specific Performance and has also worked as a coach/mentor for artist programs such as MAKE (Ireland); a.pass and Sound Image Culture (Belgium); Onassis AiR (Greece); and DasArts (Netherlands) where, together with Edit Kaldor in 2013, he designed and mentored a 10-week block, Every Nerve. The work with Kaldor spawned his own wider investigation of radical trust, risk-taking, and leaps of faith, most obviously via the The Thing: An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans.

http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/
http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/autoteatro.html
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