Devouring Theatre: After Taste

This text is a reduction and distillation (to use cookery terms from the outset) of a much longer presentation that I made at the end of my fellowship (December 2015) at the International Research Centre/Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität, Berlin. I would like to thank Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte and Dr Christel Weiler along with the entire team at the Centre for the opportunity to pursue the fellowship – it was an extraordinary and enriching time.

For the end-of-fellowship presentation, I took as my starting points three formative experiences I had in Berlin: seeing the paintings of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; participating in the performance of Cooking Catastrophes at the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin (HAU) – both of which are described below; and dining at a Zagreus Projekt artist-curated meal (not included in this text). These experiences caused me to rethink and re-evaluate the sense, and place, of taste in food-related art projects, together with a reconsideration of aisthēsis and interwoven, multi-sensorial perception, reflection on radical practices of hospitality and participation and the perplexities surrounding artist-orchestrated meals.