festival FOOD & DRINK FOOD & DRINK FOOD FOOD
Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience
FOOD FOR THOUGHT David Pollock tucks into FeastFest, a new venture which aims to combine the joys of performance with more gastronomic delights
F or those tackling the Edinburgh Festivals in the right spirit – that is, diving headlong into the programme with a checklist of as many shows as can possibly be seen in one day – we advise taking a healthy approach and factoring in a couple of stops where food can be taken onboard. If you need any reminders to take care of yourself in this way, hopefully seeing some shows from the inaugural Edinburgh FeastFest programme will keep you right.
Instigated by London-based performing arts management agency Performance Infi nity, it’s something of an experiment; an exercise in marrying the strangely widespread fascination with food among a number of disparate Fringe shows with a semblance of joined-up programming. The aim is to help guide people who like to think about art and their appetite at the same time to shows they might like. It’s also a widening of the cultural horizons, with the shows presented originating in a host of countries around the world. Having premiered at the Southbank Centre in 2018, Citizens of Nowhere? (Sweet Novotel, 16–25 Aug) is a site-specifi c audio-visual piece in a hotel bar, which allows the audience to eavesdrop on the wedding plans of a bickering British-Chinese family through headphones; light refreshments shall be served.
for many
Recommended reasons, not least the soundtrack by Maximo Park’s Paul Smith, Unfolding Theatre’s Hold On Let Go (Summerhall, 31 Jul–25 Aug) should be a particular treat. It’s about memory – what we choose to remember and what we let our technology take care of for us – but an
integral part of the show is live bread-making. At the same venue, Clout Theatre’s FEAST (Summerhall, 6–18 Aug) – produced between the UK, Turkey and France – is a returning work of dance and physical theatre which looks at our relationship with food and drink, using milk and meat as props.
New Zealand’s Java Dance, meanwhile, present their own dance and physical theatre performance (pictured) which sounds as though it’s cut from the same block of butter as FEAST; except this time the focus is solely upon Chocolate (Assembly Rooms, 1–24 Aug). Finally, for younger audiences, storyteller Daniel Serridge presents Feast of Fools (Scottish Storytelling Centre, 1–18 Aug), a series of stories about food which won’t necessarily leave you feeling hungry by the end (it’s for ages four and older).
‘Our idea is that we want the theatre to be as close as possible to our daily life,’ says Performance Infi nity director and FeastFest founder Joanna Dong. ‘By presenting works from different cultural backgrounds, the festival encourages people to not only respect the differences between each other but also celebrate the similarities we share. ‘Eating is an activity which links everyone in commonality, we all have something to say about food, whether it relates to our memories of childhood, family or friends . . . it can also represent our countries, religions and traditional values. In this spirit, we aim to use food as a tool to promote internationalism in the theatre.’
FeastFest, various venues, Edinburgh, until 25 Aug, feastfest.org
36 THE LIST FESTIVAL 31 Jul–7 Aug 2019