Acts of Communion

Abstract

An article about the aesthetics, politics and dramaturgy of taste implicit in Reckless Sleepers' The Last Supper (2003). The authors explore notions of gustatory taste and the multi-sensory potential of serving food in performance and the ethics of (mis)representation of real life events; the assassination of the Romanovs and Che Guavara proving to be the most unreliable narratives. The piece sits between fact and fiction, the found and the fabricated, and is punctuated with the arrival of the real last suppers of convicted felons. The work speaks from a primarily western religious perspective, inspired by Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) and the act of communion that takes place in church services. In this way, it leans towards an occidental, spiritual notion of taste, where transubstantiation allows the rice paper script to become both the body of Christ and the symbol of his own last supper.

Nietzsche's notion of intoxication comes into play as performers and audience share wine, or blood, and drink to absent friends. The article proposes that the piece enacts a dramaturgy much like a meal, where conversation ebbs and flows, and a sense of togetherness, or act of communion, is engendered. The authors posit that the tacit contract with the audience is redrawn by food as both an aesthetic and dramaturgical encounter. As such, it becomes an invocation (or intoxication) of taste, mortality and last-ness that continues to resonate thirteen years after its devising. Both Pinchbeck and Westerside wrote about this performance when they first saw it at the same venue in 2006, both conducted interviews with members of the Reckless Sleepers, Mole Wetherell and Tim Ingram, for their ongoing research into dramaturgy, aesthetics and taste in contemporary performance. Now this research is woven together into a tapestry of reflections on the piece, a pentimento of memories.

Notes

1 The title of Michael Pinchbeck’s doctoral thesis exploring the recent dramaturgical turn in contemporary performance. The title is taken from The Process of Dramaturgy: A Handbook (Chemers et al. 2010: ix), which, as the authors describe in their foreword, is aimed at those who commit ‘acts of dramaturgy’.

2 An image or object physically unaltered by the hand of the artist.

3 This is in opposition to an object’s ‘essential’ properties. Essential properties are roughly defined by those things that we cannot perceive such as space and time. Essential properties then include spatial and temporal shape, and structure. The accidental properties of an object may change, but the substance (the thing-in-itself) remains the same. Any essential changes, however, also change the substance of the object (that which it is).

4 Robert ‘Bobby’ Sands (1954–1981) was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and later a Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands died while on hunger strike while serving a fourteen-year sentence in HM Prison Maze for possession of firearms used against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

5 ‘There’s a moment where it goes “Last meal request: none”, and you get this groan from the audience. Then “at the last moment decided to eat hamburger on his mother’s request”. And I run on and present this hamburger. I presented it last week to a woman and there was an immediate sadness. I talked to her afterwards and her daughter was in the audience, but sat opposite, and she thought about her daughter – and that it says “mother” – and it really moved her, that particular moment. But some people don’t have a problem at all. Some people get the food, eat it, and don’t think about the consequences of it, or the fact that you can hear them munching away in the middle of the show. There’s a moment where we point to a big meal which is right before “Elvis” and after “Bobby Sands”, and we point to it – it’s during a made-up sequence of Saddam Hussein being out with his brother eating two hamburgers – and normally I point to the stage-right corner. And in one of the shows it had disappeared, the meal had gone. It had dispersed around the table and people had already begun to share this food. At one show the liver and onions got moved off the table because the smell was too much for some people in the room’ (Wetherell 2013).