Ant Hampton with Tim Etchells – The Quiet Volume
DATES:
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
11:00 am—5:00 pm
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
11:00 am—5:00 pm
Thursday, February 19, 2026
11:00 am—5:00 pm
Friday, February 20, 2026
11:00 am—5:00 pm
Saturday, February 21, 2026
11:00 am—3:00 pm
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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.