| Summary: | ‘This house is full of ghosts!’… Understanding how the quiet and unexamined rituals of hospitality and accommodation foster collaboration in transcultural and regional performance-making Organising hospitality for visiting artists is an intuitively understood but rarely interrogated aspect of any collaboration between artists from different geographic or cultural regions. There is a temptation to frame this ‘pre-work’ of performance as logistical, lacking impact and influence on the relational or aesthetic robustness of the collaboration to come. In both of these case studies of collaboration, the rituals of hospitality and accommodation were defining and liminal pre-cursors, demonstrating the quiet binding and unbinding that occurs as artists of different cultures and geographies encounter one another. Both projects are anchored in regional Australia – the SAND project, hosted by NORPA in Lismore, involved artists and companies from First Nations Australian, non-First Nations Australia, Japan and Pakeha New Zealand; the second is the Queensland Music Festival, where regional communities ‘host’ metro based artists for extended periods to build a shared collaborative community production outcome. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, and his privileging of the small moments of everyday life and consumption, both case studies seek to demonstrate the impact of seemingly minor choices of accommodation, the sharing of food and the organisation of shared ‘social time’ at the beginning of each collaboration to explore deeper notions of authentic and effective transcultural process and community cultural development. The case studies illuminate moments and processes of genuine cultural encounter, but also the ways in which the performed ‘rituals of hospitality’ were ‘misfires’ detrimental to the establishment of mutual trust and effective collaboration.
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