A Day on Hospitality and Multi-Sensorial Performance Making.

How do we — as artists — engage with our audience? How do we invite? What does successful hosting mean and what roles do access and accessibility play? Choreographer Julia B. Laperrière participated in the dialogue organized by Theater o.N. in collaboration with tanzhaus nrw "How do we Invite? – On the Fusion of Access and Hosting in Artistic Production" and writes about her experiences for tanzraumberlin. She reports on multi-sensory approaches in dance and reflects on language as a form of access and on audience members as experts.

Julia B. Laperrière
Choreographer, Performer and Facilitator

A RADICAL INVITATION
The day opened with a workshop on hospitality led by Micaela Kühn Jara. Reminding us that not everyone present is a German native speaker, she encouraged us to use short sentences and simple vocabulary. The question of language in relationship to access arose, or, as I’d be tempted to refer to it: language as access.
We then moved on to an introduction to the concept of hospitality proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who also left his mark on dance studies. Derrida differentiates between ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ hospitality, the latter suggesting the unlimited and unconditional reception of a stranger, and the first implying the application of terms and conditions to this reception. For Derrida, it is between these two figures that responsibilities and decisions must be negotiated. While he mostly discusses this in political terms — e.g., with respect to borders and policymaking — Kühn proposes also applying the concept to art, challenging the roles we traditionally assume as performance makers. She offers a concrete example:

PELLE — ALFREDO ZINOLA PRODUCTIONS
In PELLE, adults are blindfolded and guided into the room by the children. Once they’ve arrived on stage, there is an invitation to touch the perform-
ers, bringing them into movement. Again, the children serve as guides to the adults, facilitating their tactile experience.

In PELLE, audience members function as activators. Without their participation, the piece doesn’t happen. The setting challenges traditional roles and hierarchies between audience and performers, as well as adults and children, posing the question of ‘who is responsible for whom’. PELLE is radical in its reversal of social hierarchies and distribution of responsibilities, but also hierarchies of the senses, as it prioritizes a multi-sensorial approach where vision is dethroned. Children are suddenly given the double responsibility of attending to their caretakers as well as the artists, and the development of the piece is in their hands.

CONDITIONAL HOSPITALITY
● Reciprocity
(expectations towards guest)
● Right to visit but not to stay
● Requirements
(border control,
ID check, etc.)
● Roles are fixed
(the host remains the host and the guest stays the guest)

UNCONDITIONAL HOSPITALITY
● Open doors
● Nothing is expected from the guests
● No border/door/key, no ID checks
● All are welcomed, also unexpected guests
● The roles are fluid
(e.g.: the guests
can perform hosting, etc.)

ROLEPLAY
Taking Derrida’s concept as inspiration, it’s interesting to have a closer look at the roles we play, and how fixed they are. If we assume the audience are the guests, the institution and its staff play the host, and one could playfully say the artist (or the dance) is the meal, or what is being served.
In plays for young audience, facilitation and hosting are often a big part of the experience. Although hospitality is mostly conditional, the workshop encourages us to perceive the different roles in a more fluid way.

A lot of performances for children are held in schools, often in the gym-hall. Naturally, the question of ownership of the space inevitably arises. Whose space is it? Who is welcoming whom? When artists enter a space that is usually inhabited by children, they are confronted with a set of rules and behaviors that already exist outside of their artistic proposal. It can be interesting to perceive ourselves as guests, and consequently adopt a different set of behaviors.

THE PLACE AS POINT OF DEPARTURE
This example of the gym-hall invites us to consider the specificity of the place where the performance takes place. Some participants suggest taking the ‘place’ as departure point. This is the case for Daniella Strasfogel, who experimented with creating scores for families and kids on playgrounds. Ironically, she discovered that kids on a playground often just wanted to play, rather than follow contemporary dance scores.
Each place — the theater, the gym-hall, the playground — comes with its own set of rules. We could see those as conditions of hospitality. When we aim to infiltrate a place with art, we must decide where we want to play along: which rules are necessary, which ones do we want to break, and what knowledge do people already arrive with. The more established the rules, the bigger the performative shift will have to be, in order to allow new behaviors in.

“The more a path is used, the more a path is used.” —
Sara Ahmed in What’s the use?

This sentence from Sara Ahmed approaches ‘use’ as something that can inherently bring quite conservative behaviors along with it. When we think about the ‘place’ as a departure point, it’s interesting to think about the way a particular place is used, and the set of behaviors its ‘use’ produces. In the context of performing arts, I find Ahmed’s concept of queer use quite inspiring:

“Queer uses, when things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended,
still reference the qualities of things; queer uses may linger on those qualities, rendering them
all the more lively.”

While using the qualities and initial functions of the place to its advantage, queer use also poses the question of ‘who?’ gets to use a place/a thing, much in alignment with notions of access:

“queer use might refer to how things can be used in ways other than how they were intended to
be used or by those other than for whom they were intended.”

A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE CREATION OF A MULTI-SENSORIAL PERFORMANCE

“You can put a blindfold on and feel what it’s like to not see for an hour. But you can’t know what
it is like to live blind. For this you need me.” — Silja Korn

Following the workshop, the afternoon concluded with a discussion on multi-sensory performance making with Silja Korn (educator and blind consultant), Daniella Strasfogel (choreographer) and Susanne Tod (access dramaturge). One of the highlights of the discussion was the imperative to not assume. Interestingly enough, I believe this imperative could be applied to all performance making: treat your audience as the experts and invite them into the process as early on as possible. Don’t assume, but question, experiment and find out together.

Another key question was: why do you do it? One answer was about access being part of the artistic concept from the start; not considering it as an added layer, but rather for the creative potential it can unleash. Another perspective was that accessibility measures should become a normalized baseline and that addressing a general audience should also include addressing people with different abilities.

TRANSLATION AS ACCESS — PRACTICING HETEROLINGUISM
Looking at my notes from the day, I noticed they were in French, English, German and Spanish, as well as including signs and drawings. Whether it be from a language to another, from a sense to another, from a context to another, I consider translation to be a means of access, and a political one too.
Given this perspective, I would like to take inspiration from the concept of heterolinguism, in its proposition by Myriam Suchet, professor at the Sorbonne University: “Unlike bi-, pluri- or multilinguism, which leave each of the idioms present untouched, enhancing them at most by virtue of a diversity that remains external to them, the prefix ‘hetero’ emphasizes the difference that transforms them from within.” For her, it’s about radically modifying the imagination around “the language”, rather than merely adding or juxtaposing different ones as if they were stable and homogenous entities that could avoid contamination.
In the context of the professional exchange , I find it interesting how multi-sensorial approaches and the presence of different languages — and when I say language, I mean it in an expanded way — can create frictions, and how these frictions allow interpenetration, possibly creating new hybrid languages. These would be the property of no single one, while potentially being crafted by each. I’m inclined to perceive these frictions and plurality as something that we can learn from and that can profoundly change the ways we communicate and approach creative processes.

4 SHORT PROMPTS (IMPRESSIONS):
● DO NOT ASSUME
Research, try out, invite early on, ask, test and
find out with
● ESSENTIALIZE YOUR AUDIENCE(S)
Make them essential, they are your experts
● REFINE YOUR INVITATION
Information gives people agency
● BE A COOL HOST
Leave space for the party to happen

Theater o.N. and tanzhaus nrw organized four exchanges in 2023 / 24 and 2024 on openness, access and participation. While 2023 focused on intergenerational forms in dance and participatory choreographies, the workshops and discussions in 2024 led to the major topic of hosting. This text is a shortened version of a longer article that is published by Theater o.N.:

○ Die Grenzen verwischen (2023) and How do we invite (2024) are available online:
www.theatre-on.de/veroeffentlichungen