| dc.description.abstract | This thesis investigates how ecological food performance can evoke a sense of resonance in spectators. With growing global concern for the current environmental crisis, food and its production cycle are receiving increased attention, also from performance makers. Whilst food and performance have been combined throughout history, performance events in which food has an artistic relevance of its own are on the rise. Food performance, however, has not received much attention in the field of ecodramaturgy. This thesis puts ecological food performance on the map and defines it as embodied and relational, engaging multiple senses through taste, blurring actor/spectator boundaries, with food as its bioperformative centre, offering new thinking frames about ecology.
I use dramaturgical analysis and concept-based analysis, having developed a performance analysis tool around the concept of resonance as used by Hartmut Rosa. Resonance, for Rosa, is a deep sense of connection, a mode of relating to another entity or the world at large, in which subject and world meet and transform each other. Rosa distinguishes four different qualities of resonance that form the basis for the analytical tool: affect, emotion, transformation and elusiveness. This tool is applied to Zeemaal (2022) by Sien Vanmaele, to identify four key scenes and corresponding dramaturgical strategies in the performance that may evoke a sense of resonance in spectators.
I conclude that ecological food performance has the potential to evoke resonance not only through embodiment, the engagement of the senses and relationality, broader food performance strategies, but also through two dramaturgical strategies that are specific to ecological food performance. Using taste, and more specifically disgust, to alienate the spectator from the food creates a potential for aesthetic resonance through interaction with the performer or fellow spectators. Focalising natural (edible) elements creates a potential for resonance with nature in an aestheticised context. | |
