Reflection on Digestion: A Performance Dinner 2013

Sunday 2nd June 6.30 for 7 until 10pm

Produced by Spork

Part of the Spork Food Monthly

Food by Karen Byrne and Tom Hopkinson

Photography by Aileen Harvey

Participants were Isambard Poulson, Helena Trebar, Jonny Rogerson, Lily Wolff, Veronique Chance, Andrew Hladky, Julien Pike, Jolyon Gardner, Evy Jokhova and Tania Salem.

Reflection on Digestion: A Performance Dinner is a participatory performance in the form of a dinner and lecture, which explores the science, processes and image of digestion through food and language.

The event consists of six chapters, four of which are gastronomic dishes prepared from offal originating in the digestive system, and are served alongside the reading/presentation of a text collaged from a variety of sources on the subject of the specific organs of digestion, the process of digestion itself, and embodied knowledge. The event explores our ‘visceral knowledge’, which as David Hillman describes in Shakespeare’s Entrails, is 'knowledge experienced in as well as knowledge of the interior of the body.’

The event embodies an experiential approach to the transmission of information by placing the participant diners and particularly their senses and their interior body at the centre of the creation of meaning and understanding. By reflecting on the direct experience of eating alongside the aural presentation of historical and contemporary narratives of digestion, participants and host, literally and metaphorically ruminate on the processes of ingestion, digestion, and subjectivity, and on embodied ways of knowing.

Thanks so much to Jackie Vitale, Tom Hopkinson, Karen Bryne, Emily Pavlatou, Helena Trebar, Aileen Harvey and all who attended and supported the event.

Go to vimeo here to view a short extract of video documentation

Go to vimeo here to view video documentation of the Introduction.

Go to vimeo here to view video documentation of Chapter 1: Apéritif

Go to vimeo here to view video documentation of Chapter 2: The Mouth

Go to vimeo here to view video documentation of Chapter 3: The Stomach