Food and Performance

More than ever before, the recent proliferation of televised cooking programmes has brought to the fore questions about the relationships between performance practices and food issues. Yet the intertwining of these is nothing new: from Ancient Greek Dionysian rites to Enlightenment debates about aesthetic ‘taste’; from Macbeth’s banquet to Didi’s carrots; from the realism of David Belasco’s reproduction of Childs’ Restaurant onstage in The Governor’s Lady and André Antoine’s real sides of beef in Butchers to the avant-garde experimentation of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy or Bobby Baker’s Table Occasions; from the post-WWII rise of dinner theatre to the modernist separation of form and content in the cooking practices of Ferran Adrià, theatre and food have been fundamentally connected. This module will explore historical and contemporary manifestations of this relationship, exploring questions of taste and politics, the role of aesthetics in society, and the ways in which the culinary is conceived in and as performance.