Formations of hospitality in documentary theatre :|reverberations of mass media and human rights violations

Abstract

This dissertation inquires how documentary theatre, which depends mostly on factual material and uses similar techniques as media, can subvert the hierarchies that often emerge in media’s representation of the Other. In contrast to media footages, which often assume the role of a host and decide who belongs to the ‘home’ or ‘the nation’, documentary theatre builds up ‘reciprocal relations of hospitality’ among the agents in theatre to undermine the sovereignty of a specific group. This reciprocal hospitality is enhanced through documentary plays’ disclosure of their mediational limits and of their position as constructs. The dissertation introduces four ways in which the reconfigurations of hospitality are manifested in documentary theatre: corporeal, commemorative, spectatorial and linguistic hospitality. It explores these categories with respect to Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles 1992, Genco Erkal’s Sivas 93, Zoe Lafferty, Paul Wood & Ruth Sherlock’s The Fear of Breathing and Erik Jensen & Jessica Blank’s Aftermath respectively. The dissertation suggests that the concepts of body, memory, gaze and language often include borders through which quiddities of familiarity and unfamiliarity are formed in documentary theatre. Thus, the plays analysed in the chapters all blur the borders of what is perceived and treated as home in their own ways. They delineate the ways individuals and communities are haunted by the unfamiliar or those who are not considered a part of the ‘home’. The dissertation aims to fill a gap in the current scholarship of documentary theatre with regard to the study of power relationships among the agents in theatre.