I was able to ask Jess Mackinnon from Kindle Theatre a couple of questions about Eat Your Heart Out as I was writing my Contemporary theatre and performance essay on a phenomenal and semiotic reading of theatrical food. See Mackinnon's response to my inquiry on why they work with food below.
Why Food...
Because we have always been interested in rituals which bring people together... in communion. For us this is the point of theatre, and we do not often have that experience when we go to the theatre ourselves. Religion does it well... though none of us are religious. One of our earlier pieces In My Father's House borrowed directly from the Eucharist.
As friends we have found that food brings us together. We like cooking and eating and drinking too much. Food is a useful and interesting way of bringing people together, and supplies a variety of conventions that we can manipulate to tell a story... for example the toast, the decision not to eat a certain thing, the passing of the salt. In Eat Your Heart Out for example the fact that there is no vegetarian option is extremely important. It is two fingers up to the dinner party convention where all tastes are catered for, and is a provocation for the audience and a source of dinner party discussion... some people were genuinely angry, some understood the narrative significance, some vegetarians thought sod it and ate the meat.
Communion's aim is to bring humans as close together as possible, to challenge our singular, and so ultimately lonely experience. Food is the closest you can get inside another human being other than sex and we can't have sex with our audience. Though we have done another experiment where twenty Athenian youths kissed our audience, feeding them lemon posset- via the lips- in the process.
We are interested in creating peripatetic worlds and wanted to experiment with how we could tell a story through taste and smell.
Why did Kindle put together this event?
This particular event was put together because we were invited to be part of the festival and it is exciting and useful to be part of such festivals if we want to tour, and so survive in an increasingly difficult environment. The show itself has taken a number of forms, from studio show to large scale walk through installation. We put it on because we wanted to tell a story that would be interesting for an audience. We wanted to experiment with direct story-telling and with food and dining. We try to think of every new piece as an opportunity to test something and if it goes horribly wrong then at least we know. As much as possible we want to avoid being formulaic with our work though we have a style because of the consistency of the core team making and performing the work - we have our approach. We wanted to serve food that would challenge the audience. In one version the meat is served directly out of the carcass of the queen. We wanted to ask questions about how people behave at the end of the world. About the luxury of dietry choice (a couple of us are ex-vegetarians so it's not a criticism... only a question). About our capacity to look after number one. When we started making this show two years ago the fear of apocalypse felt extremely relevant... the climate change debate was particularly rampant... less so now. The grotesque campery that we have hopefully reached, means that the politics are an undercurrent rather than a polemic. Perhaps we can be more subversive by creating work which is fundamentally entertaining but sneaks in a definate argument.. or provocation is perhaps a better word.
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