Call for Papers
Hospitality / Hostility
The spring seminar of Finnish Society for Theatre Research (TeaTS) will take place on Friday 11th April at the Theatre Museum. We are now inviting papers that explore and contemplate the themes of hospitality and/or hostility in the context of performing arts.
Etymologically, both hostility and hospitality can be traced to a Proto-Indo-European root (*ghos-ti-) meaning “stranger, guest, host,” properly “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality” (www.etymonline.com). However, “as strangers are potential enemies as well as guests, the word has a forked path,” bleeding across terms like guest, hospice, hospital, host (as person and multitude), hostage, and hostile – the Latin and Greek variants being hostis (also as an enemy) and xenos (hence xenophobia).
Philosophically and psychologically, “the feeling of strangeness … has marked our encounter with the other, even the other within our self,” inviting fear or fascination, violence or welcome, hostility or hospitality (Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds, Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality; Fordham University Press 2011). Anthropologically, it might even be argued that the kind of hostility currently so rampant on the political stage (“at home” and abroad) has been prepared for by highly schematic institutions that might be necessary between strangers – organized violence, bureaucracy, market exchange – but now all but override the economies of care and hospitality that remain the norm between people who actually know and understand each other (see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years; Melville House 2011).
In the theatre, traditionally anyway, much of the ‘drama’ has been understood to revolve around the hostility of ‘conflict,’ latent or overt – but at the same time, the event of performance is always also an event of hospitality in itself, a convening of people “that incubates and amplifies the theatricality incipient in all human exchange” (David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange; Routledge 2016, 4).
In the seminar papers, the themes of hospitality and hostility can be approached either separately focussing on either of them, or together in relation to each other. They can be discussed through, for example, language, politics, performance or performing, actors/performers, space, costume, or any other element of the stage. Linguistically, the terms share roots that reveal and sustain an inherent tension. Politically, performances may reflect and challenge societal divides, such as migration and censorship. In terms of performance, space shapes the audience experience—welcoming or unsettling the spectators. Performance spaces and institutions also embody these dynamics, determining who is included and who is left out. Ultimately, the potential of performance for reconciliation raises the question of its role in fostering dialogue and understanding.
The length of the required papers is max 20 minutes. The seminar is on site only and no video or other kind of recording will be produced.
Please send your abstract (200 words) and a short bio (50 words) no later than 15.3. by email to teats@teats.fi. Further information: teemu.paavolainen@tuni.fi (secretary).