A recipe : stageplaying with your food

• Main Author: Kaur Pannu, Jasvinder
• Other Authors: Kevin Andrew Riordan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Drama
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67268
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Setting out to explore the relationship between food and theatre led me down many paths, most of which brought me to questions of materiality and investigations of phenomenology. Still throughout my research I held on to the concepts of commensality, communion, and consumption at the table. As Thomas C. Foster writes, in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2009), in literature the act of eating together often says: “I want to be with you, you want to be with me, let us share the experience” (Foster 9). With a goal in mind of wanting to produce “a ready-made community” (Chansky, and White 7), I set out to construct a stageplay that explored ways in which such a community could be created in the span of one performance. This sense of community would be temporary, probably dissolving the moment the audience left the performance space. Yet still I hoped for audience members and performers to share an “almost ritualistic experience” (Foster 11), which at the very least would shift the way food and its contemporary relationship to theatre is viewed.