Abstract

This paper will discuss two performances created between 2013 and 2014
titled Host and Host(s) that explored how openness and trust are gained
through the promise of hospitality. These performances saw strangers
open the borders that separate the inside and outside of their bodies
to allow hand-fed food to cross their accepting thresholds in return for
personal narratives. Openness suggests potential passage into or through
something, and here there is literal openness as the permeable body opens
to receive the food on the spoon. The body as site becomes accessible once
trust has been gained, and an emotional openness plays out as audienceparticipants both mentally and physically open up to their host.
The paper will explore social thresholds through the analysis of
performance using Marie-Eve Morin and Jacques Derrida’s writing on
the conditionality and thresholds of hospitality. Morin comments that
the threshold ‘functions both as the place of closure and the place of
openness’ (Morin, 2015: 31), and, underpinned by Nick Kaye’s positioning
of site as a process rather than fixed location, these movements between
being open and closed frame processes of becoming social with strangers.
Doreen Massey’s ideas on social ‘throwntogetherness’ are interwoven with
this framing as intimate personal details are exchanged through the collision
of trajectories in social space. Massey proposes that ‘we understand space
as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ (Massey, 2005: 9).
This framing of coexistent space converges with Marc Augé’s positioning
of place and non-place to propose an interrelationality that opens new
dialogues and modes of participation.