She She Pop & Sandbox Collective: Wait To Be Seated

Lees in het Nederlands

What does it mean to host, and what does it mean to be a guest? In Wait To Be Seated, two feminist collectives meet on stage in an unscripted theatrical encounter. Starting from opposite positions, they challenge the rules of hospitality while searching for ways to meet in the middle.

Wait To Be Seated is a theatrical collaboration between two feminist collectives: Sandbox Collective from Bangalore and She She Pop from Berlin. The performance explores hospitality by playing with the rules of etiquette. The rules are carefully followed, but also deliberately broken. The groups take turns stepping into the roles of host and guest, revealing these roles to be both challenging and charged.

In India, the phrase Atithi Devobhava (“the guest is equal to God”) is widely known. In Karnataka, the poet Kuvempu wrote Teredide Mane O Ba Athithi, which means “the door is open, dear guest, please enter.” There is no equally open and inviting expression in German. Hospitality can therefore be complex and sometimes tense, especially when it comes to cultural codes or international encounters: full of rules, contradictions, and expectations that shift with person, place, time, and context. Yet a “good” host is expected to manage them all.

Wait To Be Seated examines these rules and asks: who do they protect, and from what? What happens when formalities are set aside? And how do power structures such as gender, race, and colonialism come into play? The performance unfolds in spaces that feel both familiar and abstract — a dining table, a red carpet, a dance floor — beginning with the two groups opposite each other, searching for ways to meet and find a middle ground.