Bring Your Own Record Listening Party

Number 5 in the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series by PME­ART

Conceived as part of The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Thursday April 24, 10p, The Off Center), the project invites you to bring your own record (or a song on your MP3 player) and share your own story.

The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information grew out of our passion for music. It explores the way music and the stories we tell around it actually create our subjectivity, changing the way we understand love, work, and society.

An Introduction to the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series

Hospitality goes beyond invitation. With invitation we expect a guest to arrive without surprise. Hospitality requires absolute surprise. We are unprepared or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any Other. Hospitality is the receiving or welcoming which has no power, protocol or law. It is an opening without the horizon of expectation where peace can be found beyond the confines of conflict. – Marko Zlomislic

Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a ‘subject’ (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one. – Roland Barthes

Begun in 2007, HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project by PME­-ART created collaboratively between Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren. It is a series of performances, workshops, interventions, events and conferences that take place in venues as varied as bars, theatres, art galleries, international festivals and restaurants. While the precise nature of each edition can vary, all HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY activities focus on questions surrounding how friends and strangers alike can interact in a manner that is at the same time useful, critical, hospitable and surprising.

We are using the word hospitality in an old world sense: a stranger arrives at your door, and if you decide to let them in, in what way do you welcome them into your home? The hospitality you choose to show might determine whether they come to think of you as a friend, remain a stranger or become a future antagonist. We can think of the people who come to see a performance or work of art as strangers in an analogous sense. But also people on the street, who sit next to you on the train, anyone. Some of these people might hold views you don’t understand, or that you find repellant. Might hospitality be a way to begin to open a dialog? Without some way to open a dialog with people we don’t know, or don’t agree with, how can anything begin change?

Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today might sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort often present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might mean to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know, of how we can participate within a “community of strangers”.

A Brief History of PME­-ART and Vinyl

PME­-ART first began playing with records and record players as one aspect of the material that eventually became HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was A Mistake (2008). We made use of vinyl during one section of that show, and it is now clear to us that it is something we should continue to explore, a rich territory that will reward an ongoing, considerably more thorough, development. We then did some small try outs (30 min. at Articule in 2009 and 20 min. at Escales Improbables in 2010) and the response was positive. We decided to develop the project that has been presented in fourteen cities in Québec, Canada and Europe.

This expanded way of working, taking aspects of one project and further developing them into new works, is an essential component of the overall HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series, allowing us to create a richness of thematic and performative language that would be impossible within a shorter time frame or different context. As well, it emphasizes the deeply collaborative nature of our work, since ideas that occur during a process are fundamentally ideas we came up with together, premises with no single author, impulses that arose spontaneously, that excited us and we decided to follow.