cooking and performance
Movements with my ancestors, 2019, cooking installation
A restlessness developed in me two years after I left theatre school and it’s taken me a long time to really understand how I want my work as an artist to show up in the world. This is with great responsibility and pride that I contribute to the research and interpretation of how we experience the reformation of performance by connecting it to the mundane.
I have always held the title of ‘multi-disciplinary’ as it includes all the many facets of my identity as my work is a compilation of different forms of art. To solely be known as an actor quickly became insufficient when I would imagine the work I not only wanted to see but also perform. The work I would imagine didn’t have a title or wasn’t able to be related to one type of art form, which now defines the journey I am currently on. As a creator, I had to discern how the work I am bringing forth, stems from a long history of labor from those before me, as it tells and retells stories of identity, race, labour and memory.
During my undergrad in 2009, I uncovered the relationship between what I ate and how I performed, which determined my level of achievement as a student and a performer. In 2016, upon moving back to Toronto after studying Devising Theatre and Performance in Berlin, I was once again faced with this complex relationship between what I ate and how I performed, but this time, it propelled me to take more of a step towards investigating the process of cooking than before. In 2016, I decided that I’d start my company, HUE Foods, and by 2017 I decided to move away from acting and began to focus more on cooking. By 2018, HUE Foods was booming! Working with all different clients, all in search of taking hold of their life by committing to whole foods. At this point, HUE Foods was strictly a vegan food brand and being a company of one, I struggled with finding the balance between what I wanted and what I needed. I was missing performing but not in the way that I once did it. I was hungry to create something that embodied food and cooking, so by 2019, I took a leap of faith and created what I call ‘a cooking installation’ which brings together my two passions; cooking and performance. My installation is called Movements with my ancestors. The concept of Movements with my ancestors is designed to take me out of the kitchen and into public space. The initial intention for this concept was that it could act as an additional service for my business, but as the idea developed, I recognized how what I was creating was something that existed beyond just providing a service, it was the early stages of a movement. Often pushed into the category of food and performance, I want to be clear that what I am investigating is cooking and performance. Although food is an important element to this installation, I am highlighting how cooking is inherently performative. Driven by its ability to bring people together, I am fascinated by how that practice could become a revolutionary act that disrupts social construction and re-activates community building.
There is a quality about cooking that suspends time. Cooking is nostalgic and active, as the one who cooks, coexist in multiple spaces at once; past, present and future. Here I am deep diving into the world of cooking as I believe it is inherently performative and can connect many forms of art to tell a story. There are performance artists such as Martha Roster “Semiotics of the kitchen” and Rirkrit Tiravanija “Free” who have brought the concept of cooking forward in a way that challenges our positions to kitchen’s and cooking. I particularly admire the simplicity of Tiravanija as it was designed to allow people to interact with contemporary art in a sociable way. You are not participating in a performance that will be documented in the future as art, you are the art and making the art in real time. You are not looking at something but rather you are experiencing it (Tiravanija). However, Tiravanija focuses on the making of art in real time which is why I believe documentation to be an important component that differentiates my installation from a contemporary art installation designed to be fleeting and present.
Movements with my ancestors is a durational performance-installation that uses food preparation and cooking techniques as participatory and reflective storytelling. Through a non-verbal narrative, I am connecting with movements and gestures that speak of an intricate relationship to time and space. The installation is designed to engage the audience through smell, taste, colour and memory and with questions that motivate a deeper connection to food and self. It will be used as a case study as I define praxis, explore space and place of each installation and define how my current structure defy’s performance and enters the world of visual art.
Movement with my ancestors became the first project that helped to define Cooking and Performance as a body of research that encapsulates a multidisciplinary pedagogy. I wanted to integrate societal structures through the practice of cooking and reimagine a world that centralized the mundane practice of cooking as world building, and re-connecting humanity to a sacred practice reserved only for humans. But I do think it’s important to note that much of the research I gathered was right before and during the pandemic. Here is an excerpt of a paper I wrote during that time called, Re-imagining the futures of public space: Ruminations of how cooking as performance can be a tool for change:
“Everything about my installation titled, Movements with my ancestors, is the formulation of using a practice (cooking) as a tool to define space and place. In the beginning of this research, I believed that kitchens were the portals where the exchange of ancestral knowledge could be exported immediately through the ritual practice of cooking. Looking to test that theory, I created Movements with my ancestors, which is a non-verbal performance-installation that uses food preparation and cooking techniques as participatory and reflective storytelling. I gathered that I could access that transfer of knowledge outside the kitchen, in non-domestic spaces such as buildings, conference rooms, and studios. However, what I learned was that exchange between ancestral knowledge and my practice of cooking was not equally shared, resulting in levels of deficiency, exhaustion and depletion in my body (this conclusion is still to be flushed out). I continued to press forward with this theory and thought about the parts that a kitchen provides that non-domestic space did not. What I discovered was that the biggest difference between the two was that the kitchen operated as a living, breathing and coexisting space, as compared to that of non-domestic spaces; stagnant, transitory and vacant. But like anything at the threshold, there exist the notions of scale which brings me to my current investigation of exploring how this performance-installation translates when brought to the land. Through similar characteristics of domestic spaces, the land becomes the bridge between what is and what could be. Traversing this line, I ponder on how this idea suspends the concept of time. Visions of working on and alongside these landscapes that consist of vast and cosmic qualities is where I envision the unfolding and defining of space. It is through the elevation of performance that creates the opportunity for us to encounter the experience of what utopia could be.”
