Swimming Home is a private meditation that takes place in your bathroom, developed through interviews with swimmers from all over the UK. Are you ready to dive in?
Autoteatro places the participants at the very centre of the action. Developed by Silvia Mercuriali and Ant Hampton in 2006 which explores a new kind of performance whereby audience members perform the piece themselves, usually for each other. Participants are given instruction via audio, visual cues or text for what they do or say. By abandoning themselves to the script, audience members relinquish some of their responsibility for their actions to the authority of the pre-recorded instructions.
The piece is experienced following an audio track which guides the participants through a series of actions to be performed in their own bath. The track uses 3D sounds, binaural and underwater recordings, in order to recreate and amplify the sense of being in the swimming pool, taking you all the way to the bottom (where sound is quick and thick) and back to breaking the surface.
The participants will be immersed in an aquatic and sonic world. The ordinary becomes fantastic, your home becomes a film set and the bathtub or shower turns into a deep swimming pool at the bottom of which we sit quietly, where time is suspended.
Narrating voices belong to Silvia Mercuriali, Sam Booth and Simon Kane and to the swimmers’ interviewed by the artist during the R&D process. Multiple voices mixed in with a combination of ambient sound music and bits of filmic dialogues, transporting us, in and out of the pool, allowing the audience to superimpose imagined realities onto that which they watch.
Swimming Home runs at various times from 15th December. Full details and tickets can be found here.
