The Gift of Cake

Abstract

In this article I introduce a series of durational, participatory baking performances that I made between 2011-2013. Through a process of exchange, the audience were invited to share a memory about a special person, place, time or cake; in return, I baked their memories into unique cakes dedicated to those memories. With reference to these works I consider the potential for cakes in performance to develop articulations of generosity between participants, and map new avenues of exchange and commensality. Drawing on Edward Casey’s work on remembrance, I reflect on the strategies of commemorative exchange used throughout the performances. I problematize the commonplace function of the cake as a symbolic gift from the woman/mother figure, and discuss how the experience of baking together in these performances produced a web of spontaneous, multi-directional exchange between unknown givers and receivers. I argue that this process of exchange unsettled the cultural function of cakes as gendered, asymmetrical gifts, becoming instead the work of the collective that celebrated multifarious human experiences. Finally, I reflect on what was left when the cakes were eaten and the artworks destroyed, proposing that the act of sharing cake produced a feeling of generosity that became the essence of a community that lived on beyond the live events.

Notes

1 All performance can be considered as a gift for the audience, but the notion is especially prevalent in discourse on interactive live art and one-to-one performance; see Rachel Zerihan, who describes the gifts of ‘touch’, ‘explicit responsibility’ and ‘corporeal catharsis’ offered to audiences across a range of performance examples (2009).

2 Baking as a mode of performance is particularly commensurate with the principles of participation, community and generosity that the Compass Live Art Festival and Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (aptly known as GIFT) seek to engender. There is more to be considered about the relationship between cake, generosity and the nature, form and value of participatory (and sensory) live art and the artistic platforms that support its development and public reach in a festival context.

3 The name Nigella alone is synonymous with Nigella Lawson’s media persona, therefore I use her first name in my writing to distinguish her media persona as the concern of my research.

4 For example, Hoffman describes audience members spontaneously dancing with Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters of Lone Twin in their 2011 durational performance Ghost Dance as a ‘collective feat of mutual support’ (2012: 50).

5 See Stanley J. Tambiah, who expounds Lévy-Bruhl’s proposal that the two central states of the human mind include mystical experience and rational-logical mentality. Mystical experience includes ‘contact with a reality other than the reality given by the actual or everyday circumstances’ (1990: 91), which can usefully speak to the multiple ‘realities’ of the performance experience.