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Show: FEAST
Society: Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Venue: ZOO Sanctuary
Credits: Clout Theatre Company
Type: Sardines
Author: Chris Abbott
Performance Date: 09/08/2015
Feast
Chris Abbott | 10 Aug 2015 17:11pm
Many theatre pieces at the Edinburgh Fringe are necessarily basic in their set and technical requirements, but FEAST was an exception. Using a range of low-tech effects and a large amount of food and other material, this performance must have made considerable demands on stage management staff as well as performers George Ramsay, Sacha Plaige and Jennifer Swingler.
Very much in the tradition of this company’s penchant for absurdity, mess and violence, Mine Cerci’s production was both disturbing and at times puzzling for some in the audience. Structured in three sections, breakfast, lunch and dinner, the piece revolved around our relationship with food.
Sadly, the venue was not ideal for the piece, with sightlines poor due to the guard-rails at the front of the seating, and the entry to the auditorium involved negotiating some uneven steps which caught several people unaware. Once seated, the audience looked down onto the performers, making many of the images they presented less effective than they would have been if viewed from other angles.
The performers, dressed minimally in simple cloth wrappings, were tethered to enamel bowls which became receptacles for food. After being drenched by a watering can full of water and covered in mud, the bowls became receptacles for falling cereal. A table covered in food was destroyed by the performers smearing it on their bodies or each other. Were we meant to see this an analogy of the way we waste food? Possibly, but it also felt uncomfortable to see the waste of food involved in the performance, although perhaps that was the intention.
The only food actually eaten, at least partially, and painfully, was an onion. By the end of the performance, mouths held agape by plastic devices and after miming the various forms of elimination, from vomiting to defecation, a small camera presented the illusion of endoscopy.
Images throughout the performance varied from the powerful, such as the use of the head-bowls to suggest the inter-dependence of the food-chain, to the banal with the use of melon and cucumber to suggest intercourse.
The performance came to an end rather abruptly, and the rather uncertain audience applauded as much in relief as gratitude.
- : admin
- : 09/08/2015