The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information

Number 5 in the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series by PME-­ART

A turn­table and a pile of records. For each record, a story.

The stories came from hearsay and internet research, from books and magazines, from friends and our own lives. One after another, we put on the records and tell our stories, each story growing out of the last and into the next.  Each time we perform, we play the records in a different order, adding and taking away records from the pile, creating a loose, improvised, but surprisingly effective real­time dramaturgy.

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.

The day after the performance, the public is also invited to a special encounter called Bring Your Own Record Listening Party (Friday April 25, 6-9p, Historic Victory Grill), where anyone can bring a record and tell their story in a casual atmosphere.

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”.