Know your place: An investigation of site-specific performance as an exchange of hospitality between artist and audience

The thesis offers analysis of a practice-research investigation of site-specific performance and its potential for supporting a reciprocal exchange between artist and audience, using hospitality as a theoretical lens and as a principle for artistic practice. Through engaging the laws of hospitality in the creation of four pieces of performance, the practice moves away from making work as an autonomous artistic action that is thereafter offered for consumption by an audience of strangers, and towards collaborating with the audience as people invested in the performance. The thesis engages hospitality to extend the possibilities for exchange between artist and audience. I draw on the discourse on audience experience, participatory processes, and cultural policy on public engagement in the arts to suggest that aspects of performance practice could be enhanced by a consideration of the relationship between host and guest. The thesis then offers worked examples of how hospitality can be placed as a central concern in the design of site-specific performance. I explore how far the audience can act as host to the artist, in an inversion of the usual order whereby the audience (individual member or collective) is invited into a frame for presentation provided by the artist. The research engages hospitality with performance practice towards contributing to the discourse on Cultural Democracy and the critique of participatory projects constructed by institutions that confirm the status quo. The practice-research is informed by post-colonial critique, whereby when viewed through the lens of hospitality, the arrival of the stranger – ‘the other’ - at the threshold is the drama that precipitates a difficulty. I suggest that the difference in the level of cultural capital held by the artist relative to that by the audience, individually or collectively, is at the heart of the difficulty, and that this can be interrogated through site-specific performance. The trajectory of the research moves through the presentation of a set of experimental performances towards exploring how artists might mitigate this difficulty. I propose that a beginning can be made through a consideration of performance form. As an entry to developing such a form, I work towards articulating a dramaturgy of hospitality.