CRAZY BUT TRUE is an interactive installation for children aged 7 to 11: a panel of experts addressing the audience. The children become the “experts”, they are fed sentences through headphones, and they repeat what they hear into microphones, without any prior rehearsals. The outcome is a list of extraordinary facts disguised as conversations – some of which are serious, others really funny. You are twice as likely to die crushed by a vending machine than by a shark. On average, sharks kill 12 humans each year. And on average, humans kill 100 million sharks each year. We know where the problem lies and we are perfectly capable of fixing it. Sometimes the world seems to become stranger every year. CRAZY BUT TRUE exposes our responsibility in all of this, ours and that of the humans who came before us and of those who now sit in front of us, in the stalls, watching and listening. From outside, the reality of the situation becomes transparent: children saying, just for fun and fantasy, everything they are told to say. The information is channelled through their ears, their brains, and out of their mouths. If despite the amusement, this seems problematic, the provocation is consistent with the broader purpose of the play: to meet an inevitable challenge. Many adults find it hard to imagine a child growing up and absorbing such kind of information. Perhaps bringing a child into the world is the easy part. The most difficult part is bringing the world to the child. Crazy But True exists as a prototype for 2016, on show in Santiago de Chile (Espacios Revelados), Santiago de Compostela (Escenas do Cambio) and Athens (Performance Biennial “No Future”). It will be further developed in 2017. ç
Ant Hampton
Ant Hampton (1975) founded Rotozaza in 1998, a project which explores the use of instructions given to unrehearsed “guest performers”, directly on stage and in more intimate formats, in which the performers are the audience themselves (Autoteatro).
Cast & crew
Written and directed by: Ant Hampton | Creative producer: Katja Timmerberg.
Première
April 2016. Espacios Revelados, Santiago de Chile.