FOOD AND PERFORMANCE, FOOD IN PERFORMANCE

Cooking itself is performance, as all serious cooks know instinctively, and anyone knows who has watched, entranced, as the pizza cook tosses the dough, spreads and garnishes it as though he had the six arms of an Indian goddess.

IT IS ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE, given theatre’s somewhat louche origins in the singing, dancing, feasting and carrying-on in the name of Dionysus—and remember, before being honoured with the wine portfolio, this rotund, grape-festooned character was merely in charge of harvests and fertility—that food and cooking and eating should still have a role on the stage. Usually, it’s as an accessory, as in a performance of David Williamson’s play, Travelling North, where the spitting and sizzling of chops and sausages on a portable barbecue, and their utterly unambiguous aroma, greeted the audience returning after interval and told them, before their eyes had even glimpsed the set, that they were in a suburban Australian backyard.

Food and performance should touch at many points. In the ancient festivals of Dionysus, where the visual spectacle of the procession served as a prelude to contests in comedy and tragedy, food and wine fuelled the exuberance of the participants in celebratory song and dance. These festivals themselves were civilised and politically-correct versions of older and more primitive food-centred rituals, where the god of vegetation and fertility was feted and flattered in the hope of ensuring the earth’s abundance for another year.

The tradition of communal feasting has gone out of fashion in most modern western societies, where the emphasis is on the individual, but in trans-Caucasian Georgia—where perhaps there’s more respect for community solidarity—it seems to have kept an important social and celebratory significance. As with most rituals, it is participatory, and music is as important an ingredient as food and wine. Its explicit purpose is to unite the guests around one table, no matter how long the table or how many corners it turns. At this endless table the guests eat, drink and sing in unison traditional table songs, polyphonic chants with origins almost as old as the vine and viti­culture (which probably began in Georgia, too). There is unity of action, under the direction of the toastmaster who announces each toast, and ­specific rules govern the feast, including penalties for those caught eating, drinking or singing at the wrong time. Particular toasts are associated with particular songs, and some must be proposed with a particular food—the obligatory toast to the dead must be offered at the time of the meat course.

The Renaissance banquet may have taken inspiration from the Dionysian festivities, following a different evolutionary path to become a multi-media participatory spectacle based on, and expressed through, food. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the golden age of banqueting, these spectacles brought together the arts of the cook, the carver, the musician, the dancer, the performer—and the eater. Guests at these events were expected to behave in accordance with a certain code; they, too, were acting their parts, following an internalised script.

Like theatre, the banquet often had an ulterior motive beyond mere entertainment. It was used to encourage political solidarity, to impress and honour distinguished guests, to demonstrate wealth, power and status. For any of these purposes, the various arts could be called upon to reinforce the message. Sugar and marzipan sculptures, allegorically costumed dancers, mythology-based mimes: with the hindsight of several centuries such artistic creations appear quite ­blatantly didactic. If these elements were so effective in entertaining and informing the assemblage, why then was it was thought necessary to construct the spectacle around food?

The answer—apart from the fact that these banquets represented the continuance of an ancient tradition—is that it would have been impossible to achieve the same overall effect with a variety night: food is fundamental. Food is absorbed, literally incorporated; it enters via all the senses, taking its symbolic properties with it. Eating and drinking engender a feeling of well-being, both physical and spiritual. Finally, food has a social function; eating together is an expression of conviviality. Regardless of social differences (again, clearly expressed through food, its quality and quantity), banquet guests were united by being participants at the same feast. As participants, they influenced its direction and its unfolding, and were integrated into the performance. While the music, song and dance were complementary ­accessories, without the food the event would have been but a shadow of itself.

In all rituals—and whatever their purpose, rituals are staged events—food and drink have major roles, whether destined for deities or human consumption, or both. Yet in the evolution of the Dionysian festival, drama took a divergent path to focus more on narrative and visual aesthetics, at the same time distancing itself from food and ­separating performers from audience. As a result, the connections between food and theatre are today typically unacknowledged, and rarely exploited—though perhaps this also has something to do with the fact that theatre, in the cultural hierarchy, enjoys a more exalted position than food.

On occasions theatre relies on social and cultural food associations to add layers of meaning to plot and character. I remember a performance by the Georgian Film Actors’ Studio of Bacula’s Pig, which described the head-on confrontations in a small, traditional Georgian community when a Russian official is sent to administer and enforce the (Russian) law. Seemingly defeated by the overwhelming rationality of the bureaucracy, the villagers, in a spirit of generosity and conciliation, invite the official to a Georgian feast honouring some local custom. As Act II opens, the table is set with jugs of wine—but the official, arriving in his Russian fur hat and military greatcoat, initially asks for vodka, thereby betraying his ‘otherness’. Gradually, having consumed the roast chicken, under the spell of the wine and infused by song, he loses his Russian character, and affirms his affinity with Georgia by calling for more wine, swapping coat and hat with one of the locals and joining in a rousing dance. Hardly subtle, in terms of symbolism, but forceful in effect.

In the same way the film Babette’s Feast showed how a whole village, previously suspicious, hostile and divided, could be reunited around the table. Stiffly formal and almost mute at first, the guests sip cautiously of dishes that they have resolved not to eat but, such is the persuasive power of the food and wine, soon start to enjoy. They share dishes, clink glasses and, at the close of the meal, are once more a community of friends, generous, forgiving and understanding of one another. Using food to convey or enhance a message is apparently easier (and more law-abiding) in film than on the stage, for several recent films in recent years have given food a starring role—The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Like Water for Chocolate are notable examples.

In the traditional trilogy of performance arts, drama shares the stage with music and dance. In the newer offshoot simply described as ‘performance’, the three are often integrated and combined. Performance tends to be characterised by spontaneity and improvisation. It does not depend on stage, set and auditorium but can happen anywhere—in the street, in the middle of a room—with the result that the line between performers and audience blurs, and the audience might even be absorbed into the piece. Unlike theatre, where actors speak words written by someone else under the direction of another in a set designed by yet another member of the team, performance is usually the product of a single individual who devises, produces and performs the piece—or of a collaborative group, which together does the same thing.

The performance genre rejects many of the formalised conventions of theatre and frequently has little interest in telling a story, ­preferring to communicate ideas, experiences and emotions. The ­traditional Georgian feast is itself a kind of performance. More than traditional theatre, performance has affinities with the ritual, a participatory event that necessarily involves the consumption and sharing of food and drink. Performance explores the possibilities associated with food which, because of its powerful symbolic associations and because it touches all the senses, is a persuasive messenger and finds in performance a felicitous medium. Given the personal and often autobiographical nature of performance pieces, the inclusion of food and drink seems a totally natural way of communication, enhancing the meaning and enriching the experience. Significantly, in most ­performances the food is no mere pasteboard prop but solid, real and treated with proper respect.

Just as food can be a means of heightening the theatrical experience, so borrowings from theatre heighten the eating experi­ence. Restaurateurs and caterers often conceive their events as performances, mindful of setting, props and lighting. Food writers and restaurant critics regularly borrow metaphors from theatre when describing dining experiences. Cooking itself is performance, as all serious cooks know instinctively, and anyone knows who has watched, entranced, as the pizza cook tosses the dough, spreads and garnishes it as though he had the six arms of an Indian goddess. We applaud the cook’s performance as she deftly manoeuvres the pans over the flames, turning here and tossing there and swapping this one with that with all the skills of a juggler-cum-puppeteer; we admire the finesse of the maître d over the spirit burner of a silver service restaurant; and we appreciate the graceful movements of sugar-pulling, as the luminously opaque mass is stretched and twisted until it looks for all the world like a fleshier version of one of Giacometti’s anguished figures.

Incorporating aspects of food and cooking and eating into performance is relatively simple. Borrowing from theatre to enhance food and cooking and eating is similarly easy—we even talk of ‘staging’ a banquet. But given the task of making a performance out of food and eating—in other words, a meal—where and how do you start? At a conference at the Cardiff-based Centre for Performance Research, Alicia Rios began by transforming the audience into participants whose role was to harvest lunch inside an imaginary greenhouse. First, we were to enter the greenhouse and walk between the benches that ran along the length of its make-believe walls, observing, wondering and reflecting. On exit, from the opposite end, we were to collect our tools—a minia­ture wooden-handled rake, digging fork and trowel—plus a plate, then repeat the progression through the greenhouse, this time harvesting our needs on the way. Some of the plants, we were directed, would need ‘fertiliser’—and to this end, brightly-coloured watering cans filled with olive oil dressings were left at strategic locations. In case the performers themselves needed fertilising, other, much larger, watering cans held wine.

They were real foods, natural foods, but in the illusory greenhouse they were also performers, acting their allotted roles. As Alicia explained, ‘This is a game in which the product looks like the real thing without actually being it’. The spectacle of Nature imitating Nature produced a curious mental disorientation, like the play within the play, the image within the image. As in a real greenhouse, the ‘plants’ were arranged in families, and for the benefit of the botanically inept among us, large signs behind the pots indicated the groupings. First were the cacti: small black plastic containers in neat rows, each one growing a ‘cactus’—in reality, an assortment of pickled vegetables (onions, gherkins, olives, peppers) impaled on a toothpick. Next were ‘fungi’—mushrooms erupting from a rich brown compost (of coffee dregs); and ‘salads’, small whole lettuces. Beneath the label ‘root ­vegetables’ were large pots containing whole potatoes and carrots, which had to be dug from their ‘soil’ of cooked brown rice (the same soil which sustained the cacti). Further on were ‘aquatics’, represented by pale clumps of celery, and ‘bonsai’, miniature green broccoli shrubs.

The plant kingdom ended abruptly with the Bouquet of Dried Flowers, the most arresting element of the set. It marked a change of direction for the second act: the natural was now represented by the artificial, the ‘flowers’ composed of the kinds of foods furthest removed from Nature, those garishly coloured snack foods typically described as ‘junk’. In this context, however, their base associations vanished before their significance. Flowers they were called, flowers they resembled and, for all intents and purposes, flowers they were. The artificialising of Nature continued with pebbles, mushrooms, miniature snakes which might well have been pretending to be glow-worms, rosy-pink strawberries and lumps of coal, all products of the confectioner’s art.

As we ate our lunch in the imaginary greenhouse, with birds chirping and warbling around us (or rather, symbolic birds, their songs only), and from time to time being ‘sprayed’ with a fine mist of orange-flower water, we were all unconsciously ‘performing’—under Alicia’s direction—‘A Temperate Menu’. As we ate, we had cause to reflect on the chain of events that form the food cycle, and to question our preconceptions concerning the nature of the edible and non-edible. The very acts of harvesting food, preparing it and eating it had been turned into a performance in which there was no audience but only performers—or rather, audience and performers were one and the same.

Food in performance, food as performance: the synergetic potential of the combination is boundless.