Performance Laboratory: 2009

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of the day

by Stella Dimitrakopoulou

“To perform is to do, to execute, to carry out to completion, to discharge the duty, all that governs the production, presentation, and disposal of food and their staging. To perform in this sense is to make food, to serve food. It is about materials, tools, techniques, procedures, actions. It is about getting something done. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that we can speak on the performing kitchen” (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett)

All our meals are very much based on time and movement. We focus on the dance of them, the process of alchemical transformation of the raw materials into one meal. The procedures are simple. The dance is not without challenge, but even a patient novice cook can produce excellent results.

I recorded the preparation of the food by capturing the motion of different body parts of the ‘cooks’ while they were cooking.

The cooks in the film are not specialists. Cooking is probably the last body-related art form which is still widely practiced everywhere. There is one artist within every family the one who does the cooking, the other arts (poetry, painting, singing, dancing, building etc) have already been given to specialists.

STARTER

VEGETABLE SOUP & BREAD

“Although it indicates geography, climate and social circumstances it also expresses the very personal artistic self of practicing cook. Cooking proves itself to be art through the fact that it is an expression of the individual genius just like music, painting, dance, or other art forms.” (Peter Kubelca)

MAIN DISH

BACALADO AL PIL-PIL (Traditional Basque Food)

“Whipping cream is a dancing activity, spoon-feeding a toddler is a dancing activity and more: the spoon-feeding mother proves the need for economy in the art of dance. In order to save time she employs a minimum of gesture, each gesture bearing only essential movement.” (Peter Kubelca)

DESSERT

GLIKO TOU KOUTALIOU (Trad. Greek Dessert)

In cooking we are now at a point where body involvement has been given up in favour of industrial production. The everyday art of cooking appears to have been replaced by the readymade. “In the cultural logic of late capitalism, cooking is conceived in terms of consumption rather than production, product rather than process.” (Adrian Kear)

Special thanks to Kepa Angulo, Paul Diekmann, Maria Tsesmetzi and The Deptford Project.

The sleepers

After my first two meal performances I realized that I was interested in the fact that for most of the people, eating with someone is an action that lays in-between their private and public sphere.

Nowadays, is part of our everyday life to eat out in public places such as restaurants or pubs, sitting next to strangers, and this makes “eating” be part of our public life. On the other hand, at the same time going out for a dinner with someone can be a very intimate experience and usually is a big step in peoples relationships. Moreover, the codes that people follow while eating together change, depending on the familiarity between them, but also depending on the nature of the place where they are. Many people do not feel comfortable to eat with someone they do not know well, because eating for them is a quite private action.

Who carries the intimacy, where it resides, who sustains it and who or what has the ability to destroy it are questions we considered during a lecture on Intimacy in Contemporary Performance by Rachel Zerihan at the Laban. Looking back to that I decided to invite 9 people to come and stay at my home for 3 days. My flat is pretty small, just a room with a separate kitchen and bathroom so we would have to sleep altogether in the same room, some of us will even have to sleep on mattresses on the floor. They are all informed about the situation in advance and they have all agreed to it.

The first 2 persons will come on Tuesday, 10^th of March, a third one the day after, and the next day the rest of them. After that they will altogether live in my house for 3 days and 3 nights, until Sunday, 15^th of March.

Sophie Calle in her piece, ‘The Sleepers’ in 1979, asked people to give her a few hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in her bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. She intended her bedroom to become a constantly occupied space with sleepers for eight days. She took photographs every hour and she watched her guest sleep. (From lecture presentation by Zerihan R., “Intimacy in Contemporary Performance”, Laban)

In connection to this I will do this 5 days performance for me and them to experience the transformation of an intimate place (my home) because of the big amount of the people that occupy it. When does the change come? Does one more person make already difference to the intimate atmosphere? To the actual space?

Furthermore, Katie Phillips in her essay ‘Sleeping, Dancing, Dreaming’ in the Dance Theatre Journal Vol. 21(3), p.27 (pp.28-31) describes her experience from the “Bed Piece” by Angela Praed and she writes “We are told that ‘some choreography will not happen until the audience is asleep’….The setting is a bedroom (well, an adapted studio at Laban), the scenery a bed and some bedroom furniture – lamps and bedside tables. At 9.45pm we site, or sprawl on the studio floor, wrapped in blankets, lounging on sleeping bags, cradling pillows. Someone has brought along a toy kitten for comfort. Already, it is intimate.”

Here we see how a public space (A studio at Laban) becomes intimate. I am asking, when does such an intimate place as my home lose its intimacy? Does it ever lose completely its privacy because of the strangers that occupy it?

For this project I invited 6 people that I know and 2 that I have never met before. In the house we will live totally 11 people for 3 days.

For documentation I will write down my personal experience and I will take photos of the space and of my guests sleeping in my home.

Photos of the space before:

Photos of the space during the three days:

Photos od my guests sleeping:

This is the only thing that remains in my house after that performance:

A painting that we found in the street the last night that we all went out. The artist had left it unsigned so that we all sign it(!) and that what we did. Now is placed in the kitchen where it balances in between two cupboards and over the sink.

Food and kitchen things:

Food Performances

My concept is based upon food performances the essay Playing to the senses: Food as a Performance Medium by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

The following are some extracts from this:

“Food and performance converge conceptually at three junctures.

First, to perform is to do, to execute, to carry out to completion, to discharge the duty --in other words, all that governs the production, presentation, and disposal of food and their staging. To perform in this sense is to make food, to serve food. It is about materials, tools, techniques, procedures, actions. It is about getting something done. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that we can speak on the performing kitchen.

Second, to perform is to behave. This is what Ervin Goffman calls the performance of self in everyday life. Whether a matter of habit, custom, or law, the divine etiquette of ritual, codifications of social grace, the laws governing cabarets and liquor licenses, or the health and sanitation codes, performance encompasses the social practices that are part and parcel of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus. To perform in this sense is to behave appropriately in relation to food at any point in its production or consumption or disposal, each of which may be subject to precise protocols or taboos.[…]

Third, to perform is to show. When doing and behaving are displayed, when are shown, when participants are invited to exercise discernment, evaluation and appreciation, food events move towards the theatrical and, more specifically, towards the spectacular.”

“All these senses of performance -- to do, to behave, to show—operate all trough the food system, including production, provisioning, preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal, but vary according to which sense of performance is focal, elaborated, or suppressed.”

(I’m constantly looking at different ways of taking or highlighting everyday aspects of life, which I have privately all the time, small actions, tastes, sights, observations and discoveries. I want to take all those experiences and enlarge and explore them. Eating and cooking are involved in this, but they are only a part of discovery of everyday life.)

“Human Relationships with food extend far beyond moments of consumption. Prior to moments of absorption, food draws attention to its own life, its own presence, and in so doing, high-lights the ‘liveness’ of the theatre by forcing the acknowledgement of its permeability.” Foodie Gaze in Melting Moments: Bodies Upstaged, Performance Research: On cooking (pp.71)

Quotes on the serviette rings

“White blood cells are bits of brain floating around in the body. The nervous system, the immune system- these systems exhibit mental process. So works which engage with more of the senses also engage with more of the minds of artists and audiences.”

Paris, H. and Hill L. eds., (2006), Performance and Place. New York, Palgrave MacMillan. pp.48

Why to proclaim the visual as the essence of dance?

How might senses other than sight be used to experience a performance?

Can one construct meaning out of a performance that happens in total darkness?

“The etymological root of the word “theatre” is the Greek word theatron or “place of seeing”. “Can theatre really be best described as a ‘place of seeing’? And is seeing believing?”

Welton, M., (2007), ‘Seeing Nothing. Now hear this…’ in

Banes, S. & Lepecki, A. eds., (2007), The Senses in Performance. Routledge, New York. pp.146, 148

“To produce the separate and independent arts that we know today, it was necessary to break fused forms like the banquet apart and to disarticulate the sensory modalities associated with them.”

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., ‘Making sense of food in performance’ in

Banes, S. & Lepecki, A., (2007), The senses in Performance. New York, Routledge.

“The beginnings of Western theatre in ancient Greek like the Eleusinian mysteries were suffused with intense aromas of all kinds.”

Banes, S., (2007), ‘Olfactory performances’ in

Banes, S. & Lepecki, A., (2007),The senses in Performance. New York, Routledge.

“While we eat to satisfy hunger and nourish our bodies, some of the most radical effects occur precisely when food is dissociated from eating and eating from nourishment. Such dissociations produce eating disorders, religious experiences, culinary feats, sensory epiphanies and art.”

Gough, R., (1999), ‘On Cooking’ in Performance Research, Volume 4, No. 1, London and New York, Routledge. pp.3

“The paradoxical objectivity of smell is that is more intruding, more immediate than any other sensation, and at the same time essentially fleeting and elusive. Its presence is never permanent.”

Ruin, H., in Gough, R., (1999), ‘On Cooking’ in Performance Research,

Volume 4, No. 1, London and New York, Routledge. pp.7

“The nose must continue to act incessantly, without being able to store the impression. The impression does not become more dense, it is not solidified as when we concentrate on a tone or a colour. It is always evaporating.”

Ruin, H., in Gough, R., (1999), ‘On Cooking’ in Performance Research,

Volume 4, No. 1, London and New York, Routledge. pp.7

“The combination of theatre and eating adds to the involvement of the audience, and as a consequence, the experience of the audience is more intense. It also stimulates interaction, between the audience and the cooks, between the audience and the actors, even between the spectators themselves.”

Gough, R., (1999), ‘On Cooking’ in Performance Research, Volume 4, No. 1, London and New York, Routledge. pp.43

On Cooking:

Concept for the creation of the video “Bacalado al pil-pil”

“Cooking is always an expression of history in which it occurs. Although it indicates geography, climate and social circumstances it also expresses the very personal artistic self of practicing cook. […] Cooking proves itself to be art through the fact that it is an expression of the individual genius just like music, painting, dance, or other art forms.” Kubelka, P., in Gough, R., ed., (1999), Performance Research: On cooking. (vol. 4, no.1) London and New York, Routledge. pp. 91-92)

“Nancy Barber during 1970 and 1980 made videos of 20 or 25 people cooking in their homes. They put them on Channel C Cable TV. What interested Barber was the chance to talk with people in their homes, not for aesthetic reasons but for the bigger experience.”
“More recently, The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991) by Paul and Melissa Eidia is a verité video and book project consisting of short segments documenting many artists cooking in their everyday contexts.” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett B. (1999), Playing to the Senses: Food as a performance medium. in Gough, R., ed., (1999), Performance Research: On cooking. (vol. 4, no.1) London and New York, Routledge.

“Cooking takes time-too much time. At least, this is how our own time appears to understand cooking time. The ubiquitous microwave minute meal expresses postmodernism’s immediate time-sense perfectly” Kear, A., (1999), Cooking Time with Getrude Stein (1999: 44)

“The early preparation of food could involve the killing of an animal. The virtuoso killing gesture had been rehearsed thousands of times. It was dance. The cyclic working gesture should be seen as an element of dance. Take a wooden spoon and turn it so that you unite the yolk of an egg with olive oil in order to prepare the great metaphor called “mayonnaise”: it is a dancing activity. Whipping cream is a dancing activity, spoon-feeding a toddler is a dancing activity and more: the spoon-feeding mother proves the need for economy in the art of dance. In order to save time she employs a minimum of gesture, each gesture bearing only essential movement.” Kubelka P., (1999), The Edible Metaphor in (1999), Performance Research: On cooking. (vol. 4, no.1) London and New York, Routledge. pp.91

In cooking we are now at a point where body involvement has been given up in favor of industrial production. The everyday art of cooking appears to have been replaced by the readymade. “In the cultural logic of late capitalism, cooking is conceived in terms of consumption rather than production, product rather than process.” Kear A. (1999: 45)

In connection to the ideas above, I focus on a meal that is very much based on time and movement. This meal is called “Bacalado al pil-pil” and is typical in Basque County. The ingredients are just cod, oil, salt, pepper and garlic. The procedure is very simple. You prepare the garnish and simmer the cod for several minutes; you make the sauce by engaging the cod in a 'dance' with the olive oil to create an emulsion that looks very much like a mayonnaise. The dance is not without challenge, but even a patient novice cook can produce an excellent result. The production of it requires about 1’15’’. 15 minutes for the preparation and 1 hour for the ‘dance’. As far as I know, this is one of the most demanding foods in terms of body action.

I recorded the preparation of the food by capturing the motion on different body parts of the ‘cook’ while he was cooking. I focused on the dance of it, the procedure of the transformation of the raw materials into one meal. “There is a strong process of alchemical transformation here that for me connects between the process of cooking and the processes of theatre making.” Gough R. in Christie, J./ Gough, R./ Watt, D., eds., (2006), A Performance Cosmology. London and New York, Routledge. pp. 50

The cook in my video is a non specialist man. By this choice I intent to imply questions on virtuosity and on gender. Because cooking is probably the last body-related art form which is still widely practiced everywhere. There is one artist within every family the one who does the cooking and this person is usually a woman. The other arts (poetry, painting, singing, dancing, building etc) have already been given to specialists.